Native Americans Return to Dietary Roots
With diabetes and heart disease afflicting Native Americans in enormous numbers, a big push is on to return the community to its traditional diet, built around the ‘three sisters’ of corn, beans and squash. Much can be learned from American Indians, among the original practitioners of holistic health. Their diet is deeply entwined with the environment and spirituality.

By Allan Richter

    Kermit Smith of the Assiniboine tribe in Montana fondly recalls the meals of his childhood. His grandmother always had dried venison on hand, and the family would navigate the hills all spring looking for turnips. “I still have a couple of long braids of turnips that my grandmother dug up in the late 40s and 50s,” Smith says. “You just dry them and as you need them you cut them off and put them in your soups. Primarily they were used in soup, which was a staple. That was all you had, and it was all you needed for a good well-rounded diet: turnips and your dry meat, or you’d throw in a fresh rabbit and other animals.”
    Fast-forward a few decades and Smith, a doctor of osteopathy, is stunned to encounter an obese five-year-old Native American girl with type 2 diabetes. Encounters like that one might have continued to shock Smith, a former chief medical officer for the federal Indian Health Service, had they not become so commonplace among American Indians. “By 1990 we had probably 200 kids under age 16 who had adult onset diabetes,” recounts Smith. “This was in the Pima tribe, but it’s everywhere now and it’s all related to nutrition and diet.” ...

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