Good Meat

For reference, I’m feeling much better now than I was a few days ago. My depression seems to have broken. I think the opportunity to have an actual conversation with Alan instead of a 2-minute check-in helped. I managed to get up to the gym without too much pain yesterday morning so I could walk on the treadmill. I have to go much slower these days than I used to, but at least with the treadmill I can go a bit faster than on pavement because of the lower impact. I didn’t even have to use my support belt on my hips.

I also had another check-up yesterday. She read the results of the anatomy scan and everything looks 100% normal with no little anomalies anywhere. According to that ultrasound, my due date is closer to February 29th, so my fingers are crossed that I actually deliver then. I just think it’s a really cool date. I’d love to have a Leap Day birthday. But I’m weird like that. Maybe it’ll frustrate the hell out of a kid. Mostly I’m hoping she’s a bit early because it means the odds of Alan actually being there are higher. At my next check-up I have to do a bunch of labs again, including another glucose test. I’m hoping I pass that one like I did the first. At least this time I won’t be drinking the glucola on an upset, morning sickness stomach. After 28 weeks, I’ll be able to start taking classes at Evans to get ready for the actual labor and delivery. My midwife also reassured me that most babies here don’t need more than a couple minutes of oxygen right after birth and that although statistically, babies here are smaller, there are plenty of big ones too. Not that that’s particularly reassuring. LOL… I just want average-sized, thanks! Where she is now is about the 58th percentile for development, still within the average.

Anyway, to my title. It’s not dirty, I swear.

Last night I stumbled upon an interesting documentary about a Lakota man. He’s overweight and had just been diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes. His mother had died of cancer at only 52, but she was also diabetic and she had been adamant before her death that he should have the chance to see his children grow up. So he chose to adopt a traditional Lakota diet. One of the last herds of truly wild buffalo lives on the reservation and the parks department there sold him one. So for a total of $750 ($400 for the buffalo, $350 for butchering) he had bison meat for months. He also began exercising on a regular basis. And his blood sugar, cholesterol, and weight seriously dropped.

What intrigued me wasn’t the healthy lifestyle. He was eating more lean meat and more vegetables and less processed food and he was exercising daily. Of course his health improved. What caught my attention was the fact that obesity and obesity-related illnesses like diabetes are endemic to modern native populations. As bad as the situation is in the population in general, it’s actually worse on reservations. Think about it for a moment. Picture a native Hawaiian in your head. I’m guessing the image of someone like Israel Kamakawiwo’ole came up first. Not a skinny guy.

What’s interesting to me is that these are groups of people whose way of life and diets have changed very recently in history and who have in many ways lost touch with their traditional ways of eating. European Americans have lived agrarian lifestyles for a much longer period. I’m not saying that it’s superior, but perhaps our bodies are better adapted to our current way of eating. We’ve been dining on cultivated wheat and farm-raised beef for centuries, whereas the Lakota haven’t. Has this given our bodies more time to adapt so that processed foods have less effect on us?

And that got me thinking about what is an appropriate diet. For this man, it was native foods. The lean, grass-fed buffalo. Corn, squash, etc. But is that appropriate for everyone? It’s certainly healthy. But would a man native to Hawaii have the same success with that same diet? Or would he thrive better on a diet rich in fish, wild boar, and the plants native to that area? And while a European American would certainly experience health benefits by eating a traditional Lakota diet, I wonder if the benefits would be even greater if they ate in a way that was traditional for their people.

Of course, the problem that then arises is that most Americans (black and white) are so mixed that there is no single traditional food source that would provide a reliable plan for this way of eating. Maybe we should just start listening to what our bodies are telling us. For example, I know that I don’t like pork (unless it comes in bacon or sausage form and that only since I’ve been pregnant). I don’t like the flavor or the texture. Neither do I like a lot of chicken, particularly white meat. I have a hard time eating those proteins. I also occasionally struggle with beef. But I love fish and I love lamb. I also love eggs. So I wonder if genetically I come from people who raised sheep or who fished for their meals. And maybe they kept chickens for their eggs and only ate their meat on rare occasions. I also like venison and game birds like goose and duck. So in listening to my own preferences, would I be better served health-wise by eating those proteins instead? It seems logical.

It could be that those cultures we associate with living long, healthy lives do so not because of their particular diets, but because those diets have changed very little over the centuries and those people are now ideally suited to consume them and draw particular benefit from those foods.

Anyway, just some thoughts I had.

~Liz