Ancient Native Americans of the desert Southwest lived on a fiber-filled diet of prickly pear, yucca, and flour ground from plant seeds. A new analysis of fossilized feces hopes to explain why modern Native Americans are so susceptible to Type 2 diabetes.
With a high fibrous diet for thousands of years, 20 to 30 times more fibrous than today's typical diet, the low impact on blood sugar likely left this group vulnerable to the illness when richer European foods made their way over in the 1400 and 1500's.
Study researcher Karl Reinhard, professor of forensic science at the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln told
LiveScience, "When we look at Native American dietary change within the 20th century, the more ancient traditions disappeared. They were introduced to a whole new spectrum of foods like fry-bread, which had a super-high
glycemic index." Native people who lived in the deserts of Arizona would have eaten stews with a glycemic index around 23, Reinhard found. This is considered to be "low-GI" food.
Scientists have long hypothesized that a "thrifty gene" acquired through feast and famine makes Native Americans more susceptible than Caucasians to diabetes. The thought behind this was that those who could adapt to both lean times and times of plenty would have lived longer in ancient times. Today, this idea is rare in developed nations, but the body continues to respond to times of plenty as if starvation is around the corner.
Reinhard disagrees with this hypothesis, stating that an extremely low calorie, high-fiber diet made the ancient Native American stomach extremely efficient. With the arrival of Europeans, their diet changed faster than physiology could keep up. Their digestive system, in other words, didn't evolve for high-GI foods.
"The change we have undergone over generations has been towards less appreciation of really resistant foods and more toward what is called a 'Pablum' diet. It's kind of like going from chewing on pumpkin seeds to chewing on oatmeal," Reinhard said.
The invention of agriculture was the beginning of processed foods as we know them, and began our love-affair with high calorie carbohydrates. "These plants, as they were cultivated, replaced the really, really ancient foods that everybody ate thousands of years ago with calorie-dense foods, or grains that could be turning into caloric-dense foods such as grains, rice cakes, and of course, alcoholic beverages," Reinhard added.
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