Native American Tribe Turning to Traditional Indigenous Food Groups to fight Diabetes

Arizona's Tohono Nation hopes return to indigenous foods can help stop skyrocketing diabetes disease rate .

'These foods have meaning'
That's something Terrol Dew Johnson can understand.

He founded Tohono O'odham Community Action, ( http://www.tocaonline.org/www.tocaonline.org/Home.html ) a group dedicated to bringing back the tribe's traditions. "These foods have meaning," Johnson told Bazell. "These foods are medicine to our bodies. These foods will keep us healthy."

Perhaps just as important are the lifestyle changes that have led to more sedentary habits among the Tohono Nation. "We've gotten to the point where we don't have to work hard to get our food," he said. "In my parents' and even in my grand parents' time, they had to work literally every day and night to actually get food to eat. They were moving. They were exercising. Nowadays you can just drive up to a window and get food, medicine, anything."

Even with scientific evidence in hand, those pushing for a change will still have obstacles to overcome -- the biggest of which may be that many on the reservation seem to have lost a taste for the traditional foods.


"I'm 55 and in my whole lifetime, have not eaten much traditional food," Norris told NBC. "And so, when I start eating it, I haven't really acquired a taste for it. It's not the regular pinto beans that you buy off the shelf or the baloney you buy in the grocery store. It's going to take some time for people to re-acquire a taste for those traditional foods."

One way to change people's tastes is to put a new spin on the old foods. That's what's happening at the Desert Rain Café in Sells, Ariz., where chefs have found ways to make the traditional foods more interesting and appealing

Another way to combat the problem is to teach young people about the traditions that go with the foods, said Michael Enis, food and fitness coordinator for Tohono O'odham Community Action. Enis is in charge of a program that brings traditional foods into the local school once a week.

That approach has worked for Zade Arnold, a teen who has started a farm of his own.

"I like working with traditional farming foods and culture," Arnold said. "You get to touch the same seeds that people got to touch thousands of years ago. We get to work with the same prayers and songs that people got to do hundreds and thousands of years ago."

Story Courtesy of Robert Bazell NBC chief science correspondent & Linda Carroll who is a health and science contributor to this story;

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