thomasjasengardner Wednesday, November 25, 2009
2148 words
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Diabetes enslaves blacks
A frightful hobgoblin stalks African-Americans. Diabetes is to blacks, is like concentration camps were to Jews, the potato blight to Irish and like slavery was to Africans. The number of African-Americans who die from obesity and diabetes are being exterminated by what Michael Pollen, author of In Defense of Food, calls ‘fake food.” The lack of vitamins, nutrients and anti-oxidants from a food diet is responsible for high blood pressure, heart attacks, and diabetes in black Americans. Is malnutrition in blacks, a conspirator death keel by government, food processors and healthcare workers?
Since affordable health care is out of reach for 30-40 million Americans, let us not aggravate death by diabetes. Obesity and diabetes is a direct result from consuming starchy, sugary, salty processed food of the western American diet. Pollen writes that Dr. Denis Burkitt believes the answer to good health is straightforward. “The only way we’re going to reduce disease is to go backwards to the diet and lifestyle of our ancestors,” he said (Pollen, p. 142). Diabetes disease drastically increases the risk of heart attack, stroke, blindness, kidney failure and amputation.
Non-food disguised as food, is contributing to the early death of minorities. When non-food products as Kellogg’s Fruit Loops get the governments seal of good health, this is done in conjunction with food scientists, government nutritionists, and corporate sponsors, Pollen said at UW Kohl Center in a lecture to attendees. The epidemic of obesity and diabetes, according to Pollen, is because of the dramatic consumption of polyunsaturated fats, profitable processed foods, and junk food designed as health food. “The nutritionist enlists the medical establishment and the government in the promotion of fake food,” he said.
The consequences of the western food diet has given African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Mexican-Americans with a higher then average rate of chronic heart disease, kidney failure, high blood pressure, and obesity. Wisconsin has the 25th highest percent of obese adults and the 12th of obese children according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Trust for America’s Health. Two-thirds of of Wisconsin’s African-Americans are obese. CDC reported in 2007 that diabetes from obesity was the fifth main killer of blacks. It lays between unintentional deaths and homicides on the list of genocide methods attributed to black deaths.
National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse reports that diabetes was the seventh leading cause of black deaths listed on U.S. death certificates in 2006. Their ranking is based on 20 percent or 72,507 death certificates in 2006. The disease contributed to 233,619 deaths in 2005, the latest year for which all data on causes of death are available.
In 2005, 23.3 out of every adult 100,000 deaths in Wisconsin was due to diabetes. In 2005, 256,000 Wisconsin adults were diagnosed with diabetes and by 2007, 7% of the total adult population had been diagnosed with diabetes.
Overweight and Obesity Rates for Adults by Race/Ethnicity, 2008
WI
% US
%
White 61.3% 59.6%
Black 62.1% 69.9%
Hispanic NSD 62.1%
Asian/Pacific Islander NSD 38.7%
American Indian/Alaska Native 70.2% 67.1%
Other 56.0% 59.5%
Graft courtesy of statehealthfacts.org
Diabetes Care, a Diabetes Association journal, reports that the number of Americans with diabetes will double in 25 years. The November issue says that the 23 million Americans with diabetes today will increase to 44 million by 2035. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the number of blacks with diabetes increased fourfold in two decades. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call this “chronic disease a deadly epidemic among African-Americans.”
Number of Diabetes Deaths per 100,000 Population by Race/Ethnicity, 2006
WI US
White 18.7 % 21.2 %
Black 46.5 % 45.2 %
Other 28.7 % 19.6 %
Graft courtesy of statehealthfacts.org
Why the higher death rates for blacks compared to whites, Asians, and Hispanics? Nutritionists blame the diabetic victim for being ignorant of evil food choices, according to Pollen (p. 71). Others blame blacks for not adopting the same hereditary metabolism as European whites. However, skeptics believe King’s theory, that “blacks are treated as second class citizens by the healthcare community,” said Dr. Vanessa Gamble, director of the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care. Still, do we want the same genetic trait that enables our bodies to assimilate highly refined sugar, corn syrup, glucose, artificial flavors, and other processed foods?
Research suggests that first and second generation Americans regress back to the herbal remedies and food diets of their culture when confronted by health obstacles. However, subsequent generations identified with the hierarchy of Americans who associated the smell of allyl methyl sulfide from garlic eating Italians or Eastern European’s allyl iso-thiocyanate smell from cabbage with lower class foreigners. The social stigma encouraged diet changes towards the western diet. Today, many Americans are returning to the ethnic foods that contributes to a retraction of diabetic symptoms.
Pollen writes about a group of diabetic Australian Aborigines reduced symptoms or eliminated diabetes when they returned to the lifestyle of their ancestors. Goldman explained that the “French Paradox” of French people eating more fat but having lower rates of heart disease then Americans, can be attributed to the combination of quality foods and how food is consumed. Pollen believes that the French dinner table is surrounded by a culture that values communal meals. “Food marketing encourages us to eat in front of the TV or in the car. Then we eat mindlessly and alone,” he said (p.192).
The food choices of African-American ancestors was also served in a group setting. The shaman of African became the Couco herb woman of southern U.S. and cured illnesses with herbs and vegetables. The diet did not give chronic diseases but did give family traditions. The slave diet of discarded meat byproducts and plants was healthier then today’s diet of enriched white flour and processed sugars. Research suggests that diabetes did not infiltrate African-American diets until the 20th century. The diet of underpaid and overworked blacks was partially limited to home vegetable gardens. The trend of today’s non-food diet may enslave cognitive thinking and physical agility that restricts economic and educational opportunities, according to the Food and Nutrition Service of the United States Department of Agriculture.
The vegetable diet of working class blacks consisted of pokeweed, collard greens, onions, and beets. These plants had the same nutrients, antioxidants, and cooking traits of food staples from the African continent. When the first African slaves landed on America’s east coast in 1619, their experience with wild foliage helped to identify squash, onions, and carrots. Africans also brought that same cuisine to the Southern United States where vegetables that were indigenous to Africa, were found in Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and the Carolinas. All of these plants were an excellent source of vitamin A, B6, and C, manganese, iron, calcium, folic acid, fiber and small amounts of omega 3 fatty acids. Vitamins those are essential for ensuring a quality mind and body.
While our slave ancestors could not harvest the cocoyam vegetable of West Africa and the transplanted Botswana Bushman could not follow a honey bird to an African beehive, the sweetness of the African sunset can still be found in the American sweet potato and watermelon.
Even today, the traditional Swahili dish of fried onions and sautéed tomatoes reproduced by slaves can also be adapted to today’s diet. It is true that we did not have the meat of the elephant and the hippopotamus to help sustain us under grinding physical labor. Nevertheless, the free-range meat of salmon, possums, squirrels, and rabbits replaced the protein of wild boar and rhinoceros of the jungle. And unlike the animals we consume from the market, these animals dined on the natural grains and grasses of the plains and forests without the help of today’s chemical hormone enhancers. “Is a steak from a feedlot steer that consumed a diet of corn, various industrial waste products, antibiotics, and hormones still natural?” Pollen asks (p. 143).
The inexpensive and free sources of onions, peppers, peas, rice, and legumes were natural resources of protein that also contained vitamins, minerals, and fiber according to The Book of World Vegetables. Vegetables, herbs, and spices replaced or enhanced meat at the dinner table. The inconsistent presence of meat on the dinner plate meant the slave relayed more on the cultural foods of our ancestors. The website Vegetarians in Paradise, believe that growing and consuming kale, broccoli, and brussels sprouts appealed to the cultural diet of enslaved blacks. According to Goldman, our ancestors used many of these same plants as herbal medication. “The chemical reaction in vegetables is responsible for everything good in your diet,” he said.
The same medical establishment that prescribes the prescription drugs is the same proscriber of fast food franchises as sources of nutrition, according to Pollen (p.142). Avandia, a diabetic medication, reports on its website that it’s diabetic medication may reduce blood flow and may cause weight gain. “The magnitude is stunning,” said Dr. Wayne Goodman of the American Medical Association. Thiazolidinediones in these drugs can cause fluid retention, which increases body weight. Besides legal drugs that influence weight gain, what is also of concern is what Pollen calls the cyanide pill of the Western diet.
Almost every native culture that adopts the salt and sugar of Western food diets has a large chance of becoming a diabetic, according to Pollen. No human is destined to staying healthy when consuming a daily diet of 40 percent sugar hidden as high-fructose corn syrup, or food additives of ethoxylated diglycerides or partially hydrogenated soy oil. Gary Taubes writes in Good Calories, Bad Calories that increased heart disease, obesity, cancer, and diabetes in the past half century can be blamed on refined carbohydrates. Pollen writes that Americans shifted their cultural and ethnic sensibilities about food to the marketing gurus of McDonald Hamburgers and Kellogg’s Fruit Loops. “We have to take back control of our food from food processors and scientists,” he said.
Bruce Ames, a UC Berkeley biochemist, believes that a diet replacing fruits and vegetables with high calorie foods keeps the body starving for nutrients that it can’t get from processed foods. The result is a body on a relentless pursuit to satisfy a never-ending hunger to find nutrition in processed foods. Ames believes a daily diet of fruits and vegetables protects against certain types of cancers (p.123). A Nov. 24th 2009 New York Times article cites that the bodies of overweight and obese people cannot properly defend against infections and some forms of cancer. The government’s nutritional pyramid recommends five servings of fruits and vegetables a day. A Center for Disease Control study shows that subjects who averaged eight or more servings of fruit and vegetables a day were 30% less likely to have a heart attack or stroke.
Irwin Goldman, Dean of UW-Madison School of Agriculture, said that vitamins, minerals and other vegetable nutrients play a key role in the body’s immune system by acting as antioxidants. “Thirty-percent of the vitamin A in the U.S. diet comes from carrots,” he said about beta-carotene. The World Health Organization reports that African-Americans should include vegetable nutrients like vitamin A in their diet. It will directly improve established, diet-related cardiovascular disease risk factors, such as blood pressure, hyperlipidemia, and diabetes, said the report. Processed foods contain 75 percent of the salt responsible for high blood pressure and blood clots in the African-American diet. Great sources of potassium that reduce high blood pressure from salt intake are spinach, cantaloupe, brussels sprouts, mushrooms, bananas, oranges, grapefruit, and potatoes. Most are found in the African continent as well as the Northern hemisphere.
Including vegetables in the diet of an urban dwelling African-American is difficult to say the least. Access to supermarkets with a variety of fresh vegetables is restricted by travel and affordability. James Baldwin writes in his autobiography about redefining the black struggle to include affordable and fresh vegetables. “Prices were ten cents higher in the neighborhood store then what you would pay at white supermarkets. And the vegetables in the neighborhood markets were brown around the edges and the fruits were overripe and bruised,” he wrote about urban grocery stores.
California’s African-American Five a Day research with low-income residents concluded that blacks buy more fruits and vegetables from farmers markets then they do from the neighborhood grocery stores. “Twenty-four percent of those who bought produce weekly from farmers’ markets were also more likely to meet the daily recommendation of fruits and vegetables,” concluded the 2005 report. “These farmers grow in healthier soils, for healthier plants and animals. This in turn means healthier people,” said Pollen (pg. 169).
In conclusion, the African tribes of American ancestry like the Ugali should still include rice as a major part of their diet; Ugali rice-farmer slaves showed slave-owners how to grow and harvest rice in the Carolinas. Baton de Manioc descendants would get fiber in their diet by baking the gluten free bread of their ancestors. Fiber slows down the absorption of food in the gut resulting in better blood sugar control for diabetics. Allium loving ancestors of the Maziwa tribe no longer find onions an expensive delicacy in America. The taste for methyl propyl disulphide will help break up blood platelets leading to high blood pressure, according to Goldman. The natural foods of our ethnic and cultural history will help prevent illness.
Choose wisely! Choose vegetables! Choose Life! Choose vegetables.
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