I am Diana Mirkin and I would like to explain to you why you are not eating any refined carbohydrates or any meat or chicken or high fat dairy products when you are trying to lower your cholesterol or lower your blood pressure or control diabetes. Let's start with refined carbohydrates that means anything that has been ground up into a flour, whether it's white rice, white flour from wheat or any of the other milled corn any of the other flour products. You are going to avoid those when you are trying to control these conditions that are caused by taking in more calories and raising your blood sugar too high. When you eat refined grains it's just like taking sugar out of a sugar bowl. They go into your stomach and practically directly into your blood stream and it is those high rises in blood sugar that cause a lot of the problems that lead to high blood pressure and cholesterol. We have started out talking about these symptoms, but what we are really trying to do is prevent heart attacks, prevents strokes, prevent the horrible side effects of diabetes that are caused by the damage that's done when your blood pressure is too high, when your blood sugar rises too high or when plagues are forming on you arteries from high cholesterol. So, we avoid the refined carbohydrates that cause the highest rise in blood pressure. We also will avoid the foods that have the highest amount of saturated fat. Saturated fat is not a problem when you are burning up all of the calories you take in, that's why football players have butter and steak on their training tables because they are burning 9,000 calories a day, but if you are sitting at your desk and burning 1500 or 2000 calories a day, any saturated fat you take in goes directly into the formation of cholesterol and that's what we want you to avoid, that's why any foods that are sources of saturated fat, we simply avoid. We the keep foods that are interesting for you that taste good, but that don't have these problem causers, the saturated fats and the refined carbohydrates.

Next, we will talk about how important it is to exercise when you are trying to control diabetes, blood pressure or cholesterol.