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This podcast is presented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC – safer, healthier people.

Welcome to this podcast series on diabetes brought to you by the National Diabetes Education Program or NDEP. NDEP is a joint initiative of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. This podcast is taken from the NDEP video, Five Communities Reach Out.

What do you think of this stuff, Lina?

Nice, the calabazos are nice.

Is this, is this the, is this the shape and color that you grew up with?

Yes.

My name is Migna Alecon. I’m a nutrition educator. It’s very exciting to me to see Latino food in the farmer’s market.

How much a pound, please?

50 cents a pound.

Ok, I’ll take that one.

You want that one? Alright, I’ll weigh it up for you.

This calabasa is something that they know from their childhood, but have had a very difficult time buying here.

Whoa, about 13 pounds.

One of the challenges when I started teaching the nutrition to my Hispanic people – it was, “What are you gonna show me? I know everything about nutrition.” I care about diabetes because, in my family, it’s a high risk. My grandmother died of complications of diabetes. I want to educate my Hispanic community because I realize that it’s for lack of education that some people don’t take care of themselves.

The Lawrence community, it’s a community with a lot of heart. It’s a community with a lot of new people coming in and a lot of old traditions still here. But everybody is trying to work together -- specifically to try to help Latino people with diabetes learn how to take care of their diabetes in a better way.

Wow, todos deliciosos. Mariza, I see that you took out the skin out of the chicken. How much are you serving about the stool beans with the calabasa?

We serve half a cup.

Half a cup? OK. And the salad of the vegetables, are you serving one cup?

One cup.

Fantastic. This is a meal that a diabetic can eat.

Do you guys like the food? The beans with the calabasa and the rice? Very good! It’s delicious? You can see that you don’t have to stop eating the food that you like.

Here we’ve taken a lot of classes, talking about diabetes, and that has taught us a lot to be more aware of the problem that we’ve had. So we keep up a more or less balanced diet and we feel better.

I don’t want no gift; I don’t want no nothing. What I want is knowing that somebody went to their home and having the knowledge how to take control of diabetes.

To order your copy of the Five Communities Reach Out video, visit www.ndep.nih.gov or call the National Diabetes Education Program at 1-800-438-5383.

To access the most accurate and relevant health information that affects you, your family and your community, please visit www.cdc.gov.