--- Judy Genova <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>My friend just returned from Hawaii, after living there for 5 years. She
>informs me that all the native islanders are fat. Those eating their
>traditional diet of poi (fermented taro root), fruit, fish, young coconuts
>are fat. The old ones are fat. The young ones are fat.
Yeah, the chances that they are eating ONLY those foods are pretty slim. (Har.)
I think that outsiders are infected with a little dreamyness when coming in contact with native people. And perhaps you friend was just tired of the questions and made some generalizations. Did she just see native people on the street, or did she actually talk to them about their diet? Maybe her broad generalizations were due to the fact that she had no idea what she was talking about?
I think the generalizations YOU gave were right on the money, as I have seen much of the same thing. There is a joke on one reservation that was told like it was the funniest thing in the world: when someone would compare a fat person to a thin person, the thin person would say "Yeah, good thing I'm lactose intolerant, eh?" After hearing this joke a few times, I asked about lactose intolerance and I (VERY UNSCIENTIFICALLY) noticed that the worse they said their intolerance was to dairy, the thinner they were.
Some native people in the United States and Canada have returned, in significant ways, to hunting and gathering as a way to reclaim what was stolen from them and the ways of life that made them who they were. On tribe in the American midwest has reduced their wheat harvest in order to keep more buffalo, and have stopped spraying the nearby lake so that more of the wild rice that grows there like a weed will come up. It is excellent to see, yet they do it more to reclaim what made them one people in the first place, than to combat dietary problems having strayed from a more traditional diet. I've talked with a few people there who will not eat wheat or milk or cheese or peanut butter because the U.S. government has been feeding them that garbage for years and years, and they say it has made them sick.
But they have not adopted a dietary regimen that totally excludes wheat or dairy or anything else you all talk about here. They still eat quite a bit of these foods, if only because you need to feed a family. And it's habit. Their slow move to paleo is coming from a different direction than you all, but you may be able to meet up somewhere in the middle.
So if you ask, do you eat buffalo and wild rice and prairie turnips like your ancestors? They will tell you yes, but have to live on PB&J for two weeks a month in order to pay the rent. I presume that's what your friend encountered. Natives with a habit for frozen pizzas.
Knowing REAL hunters and gatherers over the years I can tell you that none I have ever seen fatten up much. In South America where I have spent most of my time, the less a tribe hunted and gathered and relied on non-traditional food, the fatter they were. Off subject, dental health was a pretty sharp indicator, too. The worse the teeth, the more contact a tribe had, mostly because THE TORTILLA had come into their lives, and sodas, too.
I noticed that in tribes where old people were expected to slow down their activity, there still weren't any old, fat people around. Old women, sitting around for long stretches of the day, eating LARGE quantities of a traditional diet, and usually they were quite skinny.
--- Hans Kylberg <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>What is actually a "native"? As far as I understand it means an inhabitant
>of an country or district or area that was also born there.
In English, when we speak of native peoples, we aren't talking about single-generation people. We're talking about peoples who have lived somewhere for thousands of generations. When Judy referred to native people in her post, she was referring to the indigenous people of Hawaii.
Michael!
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