IT'S THE SUGAR BABY! wonder how many of you have fallen victim, at one time or another, to this unfounded theory of balancing calories. I’m telling you, what may be the biggest, most important change you make in your life isn’t that hard. It’s easy to take the sugar and the grain with a high "GI" count out of your diet! If you do that and consume fresh fruits, vegetables and protein (if possible from vegetables), your blood sugar level will go down as will your hip and sit fat, you won’t run the risk of diabetes, and you won’t get heart disease! Now is that too much to ask for such a high reward? I don’t think so! When you reach the point where you are obviously overweight or sickly, solving the problem correctly would mean choosing a simple, enjoyable lifestyle of long-term good management of your eating. Crash dieting doesn’t work over the long run.  Food is the part of life we should enjoy six to eight times a day. We had the fun of eating on the first day of our life; I believe we should continue to enjoy it! I, Chef Peter, believe people can’t be permanently restricted. They need choice, and a gastronomic approach to sensible eating. Plants get minerals from the ground and pass them on to us for consumption. A study of these minerals (more precisely called elements) shown on The National Academies' web site at www.nap.edu, will help your education. That web site lists each element, its function in the body, its recommended daily allowance if applicable, and adverse effects if taken to excess. The most funny, or not so funny, part is all these minerals are found in ocean water, ocean Mana Kai, or, as is called in Hawaiian, "Pa’a Kai" (concentrated ocean water). In addition to the National Academies' table, nitrogen and sulfur are tracked on the USDA nutrient component table (go to www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/cgi-bin). Thus, we can at least begin to get a handle on regulating their intake. Nitrogen is prominent in many B vitamins and is an active substance that binds readily with oxygen to act as an anti-oxidant. It is excreted from the body as an inorganic sulfate in urine. Potassium and sodium are sister elements. Potassium exists inside the cell and sodium exists outside the cell. The balance of the two regulates the flow in and out of the cell through the membrane. Nutrients and oxygen go in, and carbon dioxide and waste go out. However, processed foods have high sodium contents, so potassium is out of balance. In the early days of humanity, everyone ate an exclusively natural foods diet; people were consuming much more potassium than sodium. This was perfect, because our bodies are designed to eliminate excess potassium and hold onto sodium. But modern processing and preserving techniques have produced the reverse ratio, so most diets are usually quite low in potassium and extremely high in sodium.