Native communities face higher rates of diabetes compared to other groups. To combat this, some Native Americans are moving towards plant-based diets and lifestyles. KUNM spoke with Jenson Yazzie, a Diné college student who is a part of the Native Food for Life program.
JENSON YAZZIE: The Native Food For Life program is about the Native Americans reclaiming their power plate that consists of your fruits, your grains, your beans and your vegetables, the initiative is to have high fiber, low fat, and to be able to reclaim the healthy living lifestyle, the nutrition, the values of food and the influence on our dietary function. The Native power plate is more or less reclaiming the food that was once used in traditional foods that we had before we were colonized.
KUNM: Tell me about your own health journey. When did you know you had to make a change?
YAZZIE: My health journey started 16 years, four months, 29 days ago, my dad came home right before the New Year and he was like, “we're gonna go plant based.” And he learned from the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine (PCRM), that they were trying to reintroduce the power plate back to the Natives, and they were on a mission to just revolutionize Indian Country. My dad was like, “we're gonna try this plant based diet for a month, we're just going to see how it works. We're going to see how it changes and what it does for us.” Our third weekend, we noticed that we were less tired, we were less lazy, we didn't have heartburn, that the dishes were easier to cook and clean with and then we started losing weight super quick. And so this journey helped us all benefit as a family, and we just never went back.
KUNM: When we're talking about tribal communities, does the geographical location of these communities impact how they can get fresh food?
YAZZIE: Yes. Where I come from on the Navajo Nation, there are only eight grocery stores on the entire Navajo Nation, and it's a food desert. It's so hard to get fresh fruit and vegetables. Yeah, you have your main grocery stores that are chain linked, but their fruit and vegetables are already on their end stages of their life. We go off the reservation, we go to the border towns, we go to the big cities, and we do our grocery shopping in bulk, and then we plan our meals two weeks in advance, we freeze them. So it creates a cycle that we've just learned to accustomed to, but a lot of people don't have that time, the resources to do the shop.
KUNM: And when we're talking about Native Americans, how much of a threat do they face when it comes to health conditions like diabetes?
YAZZIE: So Native Americans have health issues like diabetes because it's a multi generation dysfunction of what the governments gave us in rations during the Long Walk, during the colonization era. When the government came, and when we were signing treaties to get our land back to be on the reservations, they sanctioned us certain amounts of food, certain types of food–flour, lard, cheese, eggs and milk. And we didn't know what to do, people were dying just eating dry flour. And so when we moved back to the reservation, people took that as a staple, as a traditional food, when it has nothing to do with our tradition, they just took this food and made fry bread a staple, and it was like fry bread has nothing to do with us as a people. Fry bread has no nutritional value. It came from the colonizers, and we just took it. And now, you see on Indian Country that it’s a pandemic, it’s something that people don’t want to change and it’s sad. We have so much to live for as a people.
KUNM: So for folks that are interested in a plant based diet, but have nowhere to start, what do you recommend?
YAZZIE: So I recommend for the people who want to go plant based, is to start small. By planning your breakfast, your lunch and your dinner. Plan to get more fiber in more fruits and more vegetables. You don't necessarily have to give up meat, but yes, you can have more nutrition and more fiber in your diet. And of course, get your Vitamin B 12 and get your electrolytes and make sure you're staying balanced and on top of these things, but I just recommend starting small. Get your favorite vegetable, get your favorite fruit, and just start there and just implementing that a little bit more in your diet, instead of going full blown shopping for like, plant-based everything and you're going to accumulate things that you don't want.
Support for this coverage comes from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
