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Nurse Deanna Carlson
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VIDEO: Deanna Carlson, RN, BSN Explains Triglycerides

Learn about triglycerides.

Deanna Carlson:
Let’s talk about triglycerides for a moment. I talk about triglycerides a lot during my screenings because most people don’t understand what triglycerides are.

There the break down of certain sugars or certain fats in your body that you don’t use up for energy. So if you are not exercising and you’re eating lots of high saturated fats or lots of carbohydrates, lots of sugar foods, if you’re not using them for energy then they’re going to get stored in your fat cells as triglycerides.

I hope that’s a better understanding of what triglycerides are. So that’s why its very important to have a low-saturated diet, a low-sugar diet. So watch your dairy products that you eat. Eat non-fat, low fat dairy products and minimize the amount of animal fat in your diet and if you are going to choose a fat make sure its olive oil or canola oil in your diet and use it sparingly.

If you are choosing to eat red meat make sure it’s extra lean. I know it’s a bit more expensive but it’s a better quality and there’s less fat in it. Triglycerides are also, you know in the skin of a chicken or the fat on the steak, you’re looking at triglycerides. So I ask you, why would we want to put that into our body system?

We need to make better choices about what we are eating. So gravitate to fish or poultry without the skin or turkey without the skin on it, those you can change.

Many women do not realize that heart disease is the single greatest threat to their health. Every year, more than 500,000 American women lose their lives to heart disease — that's nearly twice as many women from all forms of cancer combined. In response to these facts, St. Joseph Hospital opened the Women's Heart Center in December 2002, the first facility in Orange County dedicated solely to the prevention, early detection and treatment of heart disease in women.

Visit Deanna Carlson, R.N., BSN, on the web at St. Joseph Hospital Women’s Heart Center in Orange, CA