Filed under: Aboriginal issues, Environment, First Nations, First Nations issues, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous rights, Indigenous wisdom, Native American culture, Native American issues, Native Peoples, coaching, communication, culture, diabetes, emotional health, family, health, leisure, life, love, protest, residential school, residential school syndrome, self-help, women | Tags: First Nations, Aboriginal, Indigenous, health, self-help, self-improvement, family, protest, self-esteem, culture, Canada, Aboriginal dating, First Nations dating, relationships, Indigenous health, Aboriginal health, Indigenous wisdom, First Nations health, Native American issues, Aboriginal issues, love, Native self-esteem, Aboriginal self-esteem, First Nations self-esteem, Native American self-esteem, residential school syndrome, Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Issues, self-love, holistic health, Native American culture, Native American wisdom, Aboriginal health workshops, wellness workshops, post-colonial theory, First Nations issues, Turtle Island, healthy diet, bannock, bannock power, bannock recipes, tasty and delicious, post-colonial diet, addiction, food addiction
Bannock: we love it because it tastes good.
Baked or fried, with raisins or without, it’s the one food that bonds us together here on Turtle Island.
We love it because it anchors us to our childhood. I can think back to many meals of fried moose-meat (sauteed with onions and mushrooms), mashed potatoes, baked beans, hot tea and bannock. Especially on cold days, those were always the best meals. Meals like that symbolize my Mom’s love.
When we eat bannock, we can’t help but feel a connection with our Indigenous heritage. Bannock is what got many of our grandparents and great-grandparents through cold winters and trying times. Bannock served them well.
For those of you not in the know, bannock is a popular bread made by Native Peoples throughout Canada and the United States. It consists of flour, lard, baking powder and water. There are some variations on the ingredients, but that’s generally what goes into it.
You’ll find bannock being served at most pow-wows. It’s also known as fry-bread or Indian bread. Native women are very competitive when it comes to making the best bannock. Reputation quickly spreads. Just as everyone knows a community’s toughest guy, they also know the woman who makes the best bannock.
Now the bad news about bannock: it’s probably the worst food in terms of nutrition.
For a People who struggle with heart disease and diabetes, bannock unleashes a slow and lethal combination of clogging our arteries and shooting up our blood sugar levels.
Some people think they’re being healthy by making it with whole wheat flour, but it doesn’t really make it healthy. It’s like cooking up crystal meth without the drano and adding vitamin C instead.
This is an example of the many lies we tell ourselves and others about what we eat and our levels of exercise being more than healthy even when it’s the furthest thing from the truth. Talk with any obese person and most of them will try to convince you that they’re eating a healthy diet, even as they’re holding deep-fried food up to their mouths.
As Native People, we really don’t need any additional help in getting diabetes. And we can’t continue the perpetual lies about our diet at the expense of our health.
Let’s get real!
Looking at our history, bannock is not even Native in origin. It originated in Scotland over a thousand years ago. It only became popular when our ancestors grew to depend on government rations for survival.
In many ways, bannock symbolizes our colonization. We enjoy eating bannock in the same way we enjoy watching TV: we know it’s bad for us but we do it anyways.
Eating bannock encouraged us to break from generations of hunting and gathering to eek out alien, sedentary and largely dependent lives.
Government dependence didn’t happen overnight.
It’s okay to acknowledge bannock’s place in our history, but now is the time to embrace a new diet and a stronger concept of who we are–independent of the Crown.
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Why is it that a western medical doctor gets paid well over $200,000 a year while a traditional healer lives on social assistance and is paid most times with cigarettes?
This says a lot about what we, as First Nations people, value and what truths we accept.
As we discard our own healing ceremonies, a lot of us are quick to embrace new ones.
Going to the doctor is largely ceremonial, but we just don’t see it that way.
Think about it.
We get sick. We call the doctor’s office, speak to a receptionist and an appointment is set. When we arrive for our appointment, we are asked by the receptionist to have a seat in a clean and quiet waiting room and read an appropriate magazine, like People, National Geographic or Time.
When the doctor is ready to see us, we are told to wait in a smaller room equipped with many strange instruments. At some point, the doctor appears, wearing a white coat and a stethoscope, holding a chart that documents our history with that office, and begins a series of rapid fire questions. Usually, after less than five minutes a prescription is issued and we are told to go to a pharmacist for the medication, that we must strictly self-administer until it’s gone. After those steps, we are told we will be healed.
For the most part, when people believe in a healing mechanism, it usually works. The indoctrination into this healing modality begins when we’re young and our parents say things like, “Jimmy, you’re sick. We better take you to a doctor so he can make it all better”.
Because we believe a medical doctor can heal us, that’s what our mind tells our body.
However, if anything was out of place in the common scenario I just laid out, then I believe the healing process would be compromised.
What if food was served in the waiting room? What if the waiting room played loud heavy metal music and had strobe lighting? What if the doctor insisted you call her by her first name? What if the doctor wore a red coat instead of a white one? What if the doctor admitted to you that she doesn’t know anything about where or how the medicine was made that she’s prescribing you?
What would happen to your belief in that doctor? At the very least, it would come into question.
Our perspective on medicine is largely influenced by the ads we hear, the TV we watch, and the society we live in. It is the programming we experience, especially the messages we receive at a young age, that determines our belief in anything.
Because we are colonized to accept everything white and ridicule everything brown, this attitude pervades the quick judgements of our communities’ traditional healers.
Just because we don’t understand how a song can heal, we dismiss it as quackery. If only a doctor could explain exactly what was put into that pill he just prescribed to you.
Just because one healer is guilty of inappropriate conduct, we label all healers as guilty of that same offense. If only we applied that same flawed logic to all doctors, based on the inappropriate conduct of just a few.
Just because one traditional healing fails to take effect, we dismiss it all as useless. If only we forgot about western medicine based on the faulty diagnosis of one doctor.
Just because it’s brown doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
With the rising costs of sending our sick to nurses and doctors, we, as First Nations people, need to support our own medicine people.
This action will do many positive things for our communities.
By paying our traditional healers a living wage, we are telling the world that we value our ancient medical practices. This will get our youth interested and engaged in pursuing this knowledge.
As it stands now, there is no incentive for our young to embrace this knowledge.
As it stands now, this knowledge is quickly becoming a memory of just the elderly few.
What can we do this year to ensure our traditional healing continues into the next century, if not the next millennium?
For one thing, we can stop paying our healers with cigarettes. If tobacco costs money, then why should giving money to a healer be against everything we stand for. This attitude has more to do with the Christian notion that money is the root of all evil, than with a strict adherance to tradition.
Get real! Let’s pay them what they deserve.
Part of the change must focus on re-educating our traditional healers that asking for money in return for services rendered is not necessarily a bad thing. If it was, then how do we justify the pay-cheques we receive every two weeks?
I believe the roots of this attitude are two-fold. For starters, capitalism is still new to us. And secondly, Christianity plays a bigger role in our lives than we care to admit.
What do you think?
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Filed under: First Nations, culture, diabetes, health, self-help | Tags: Aboriginal, education, First Nations, health, self-help
Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of diabetes, affecting over 15 million Americans who are walking down a seemingly inevitable road to disability and a premature death. Ahead of them lie blindness, painful neuropathy, and frequent infections. One hundred and fifty diabetic legs are amputated every day in the USA and another 70 diabetics start on dialysis for the first time every day. And at any turn in the road a stroke or heart attack may strike them with paralysis or death.
But diabetes can be reversed. One can do an about face and literally walk away from all of these terrible complications. And we are not just talking about delaying the onset of these problems. Everyday now more and more diabetics are finding that they can reverse this disease.The burning pain of neuropathy that has been described by some as “standing in boiling oil” disappears. Blood sugars return to normal and medications and insulin must be discontinued.
Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle disease. That means it is caused by the way we live. The typical American lifestyle of inactivity and too much to eat is the major factor in bringing on this disease. True, some have inherited a genetic predisposition to develop diabetes. But genetics is like a loaded gun, it doesn’t hurt anyone unless you pull the trigger. And it is our couch potato lifestyle together with our high fat, junk food diet that pulls this trigger bringing on diabetes.
Understanding how lifestyle causes diabetes explains how it is being reversed. And it will be the basis of hope for more people with diabetes every day.
We all use carbohydrates (sugar) for energy to live. The potato as well as the candy bar are all converted into glucose (blood sugar) circulating in our blood stream. This sugar will be taken into the cells and “burned” to supply the energy to move a muscle or to think a thought or whatever it was that the cell is designed to do.
But to get into a cell sugar must pass through a special sugar door in the cell’s wall. These doors are how a cell tells the body it is hungry. A hungry cell will have thousands of these sugar doors all over its surface.
But sugar by itself has no way to open these doors to get into the cell. Here is where insulin has its job. Imagine insulin as a little guy with two hands. With one hand he grabs the doorknob and opens one of these sugar doors and with the other hand he shoves a sugar through the door into the cell. That is what insulin does, it opens the sugar doors.
Where does insulin come from? It comes from special cells in the pancreas called beta cells. These beta cells constantly taste your blood to see just how sweet it is. And when they taste your sugar level rising after a meal they release more insulin into your blood. This insulin can then open more doors and put the extra sugar into the cells. And thus, the amount of sugar left in the blood is brought back down to normal. This is how your body normally controls its blood sugar level.
Imagine sitting on a couch following a heavy meal. All of the calories you just ate are being absorbed into your blood. As your blood sugar level rises insulin is released. And this insulin goes around from cell to cell trying to open doors to get all of this sugar out of your blood and into your cells. But your leg muscle cells are still full of sugar from lunch. So they say to the insulin, “We are full and we aren’t going for any exercise tonight so we don’t need anymore sugar. Maybe you could take some to the finger muscle. He will be busy working the TV clicker.” But how much sugar can a finger muscle use? And so eventually all the muscle cells are stuffed and don’t want anymore sugar.
But how does a cell tell the body that it doesn’t want any more sugar? It removes the doors from its surface! Now we have a problem. Where will the insulin take all of its extra sugar? Some cells can store extra sugar in the form of glycogen or fat. But day after day of no exercise while continuing to eat a high calorie diet eventually overloads these cells also. Not only do you get fat but even the fat cells are feeling stretched to their limit and don’t want anymore calories. And now the problem gets worse.
How does a fat cell tell you he is full and doesn’t want anymore? He removes the doors from his surface too. Now you have a serious problem. Where will the insulin take all of that extra sugar that you are eating? The answer is it has nowhere to go. It just backs up in your blood and your sugar level gets higher and higher. You go to your doctor and he does some tests and then he tells you that now you have diabetes.
Your doctor probably did something else for you that first visit. He got out his prescription pad and wrote you a prescription for some pills to lower your blood sugar. Pills like DiaBeta or Micronase. Do you know how these pills work? They go to the beta cells in your pancreas and say, “Make more insulin!”
So the beta cells, whipped on by the medications, start to put out more insulin. And all this extra insulin rushes around your body looking for a few last doors somewhere that they can force more sugar through.
But after a time even these last few doors are removed. And your sugar levels continue to rise in spite of increasing doses of medications. Finally one day your doctor says to you, “I guess you’ve become resistant to your medications so we are going to have to start you on insulin.” In other words, we can’t whip enough insulin out of your exhausted pancreas so we are just going to start injecting more insulin into you.
But day after day there are less and less doors for the ever-increasing amounts of insulin to find. And so with your diabetes still out of control you rush down the road towards blindness, amputations and death.
If you will think carefully about how this disease has progressed to this point you will begin to see what all the excitement is about. What is the real problem here? Is it a lack of insulin or is it a lack of these sugar doors? There are not enough doors! The cells have removed all the doors because they aren’t hungry anymore.
So can you see that what we really need is not more insulin but more doors.
But your doctor can’t prescribe a pill or injection of new doors for your cells. So how can we get more doors back on our cells. It is really quite simple. We have to make the cells hungry! A hungry cell will make thousands of doors all over its surface.
How do we make a cell hungry? Exercise! Walk, walk, walk, walk.
And this is the simple secret that is allowing people with diabetes to walk away from heart attacks, dialysis, and daily insulin injections.
The rest of the story
The other half of the secret is that you have to learn to eat right so your body is not overloaded with calories. And the lifestyle treatment centers that are specializing in reversing diabetes have found that a simple unrefined vegetarian diet is the answer. In real life situations this is the diet that actually works. It allows people with diabetes to eat three meals a day and never go hungry and never count calories or exchanges again. This may seem surprising to some but the proof is seen in these patients’ success.
If you or someone you love has diabetes the good news is that with an about-face in lifestyle diabetes can be reversed. Heart attacks, strokes, neuropathy, blindness, dialysis, infections and amputations are not an inevitable part of your future. You can literally walk away from all of these.
