Deadly Diet

 Since the days of the first “westerns,” Hollywood has portrayed Native Americans as lean muscular hunters who lived on a diet of meat and berries with an occasional root threw in for variety.  Today’s reality is very different, spend some time at a Native American clinic and you will see patient after overweight patient with cancer, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and high blood pressure. 

The journal Cardiology in 1991 reported, "with the adoption of Western lifestyles and diet...heart disease has become relatively common among a number of Native American tribes." Heart disease ranks as the leading killer of Native Americans, causing more than one-fifth of all Native American deaths, according to U.S. Indian Health Service (IHS) figures.  Diabetes kills Native Americans at more than triple the overall U.S. rate, according to the IHS. 

One possible reason for these epidemics and overweight Native Americans may be a "thrifty" gene.  This gene, that helps the body store fat, was a survival trait in the past.  It helped Native American survive leaner times when fatty meat was a rarity in their diets.

Contrary to Hollywood’s visions, for thousands of years Native Americans survived and thrived in the Americas on a diet of small mounts of lean meat with vegetables, legumes, and whole grains as the staples.  One of the earliest books written about the Carolinas, “A New Voyage to Carolina,” by John Lawson in 1709 details page after page of plant foods important to Native Americans.  It also describes a wide variety of fish, game, and shellfish – all of which contain very little fat.

The Iroquoian tribes, including the Cherokee and Tuscarora of the Carolinas, grew 17 varieties of corn, seven types of squashes, and 60 types of beans.   They called this trio of major foods the "three sisters."

Other Native Americans gathered a cornucopia of 34 wild fruits, 11 nut species, 12 kinds of edible roots, 38 types of bark, 6 fungi, and maple syrup, the main confection of the Northwestern tribes, according to The Native Americans published in 1995.  In the western Great Lakes area, Native Americans harvested wild rice, and maple sugar, blueberries, cranberries, raspberries, grapes, cherries, nuts, wild onions, and potatoes.  Other crops included peas, watermelons, sweet potatoes, and fruit trees.  They also foraged persimmons, plums, hickory nuts, walnuts, pecans, cherries, grapes, and mulberries.

Current federal Dietary Guidelines promote a meaty, cheesy diet.  The Journal of the American Cancer Society in 1996 noted that, "Nutrition-related cancers are likely to increase in the future among Native Americans [because] of changes in diet." A more traditional diet could reverse that trend as shown in studies by Dr. Dean Ornish, M.D.

The 1994 study published in Diabetes Care reported that diabetes and obesity are less prevalent among Mexican Pima Indians living a "traditional" lifestyle than among Arizonan Pimas in an "affluent" environment.  Switching to a plant-food diet, and consuming much less fat than current Guidelines suggest, can greatly reduce obesity and diabetes rates.