Amerindians, Hypertension and Obesity

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Updated November 19:

I recall when I worked for an Indian tribe a decade or so ago. Some silly White liberal health workers came in one day and I went in to talk to them. What was I doing at the Indian tribal headquarters? Why, I was employed on a government grant as an anthropologist and linguist. Wow, how fascinating! And what did these silly PC health workers do? Why, they went around wherever doing health work with Indians.

Why did so many of these Indians have high blood pressure? I was dying to know. First came denial. Whites have HTN too, you know. The angry, suspicious and uncomfortable looks were already starting. Ok, but Indians have more. Way more. What’s it all about? The entire conversation was soon veiled in hostility, suspicion and out and out bad vibes.

I finally got out of these idiots that the diabetes epidemic among these Indians was giving them HTN. Diabetes causes hypertension. How? It destroys your blood vessels by narrowing them. Narrow blood vessels gives you HTN. Why the diabetes? Abandoning the native diet and the taking up (with gusto) of absolutely the very worst (And I do mean the worst!) aspects of the White man’s diet.

I suggested that the high Indian rate of diabetes was due to genetics and an inability to adapt to a White diet they had not evolved to eat. By this time my conversation with the idiotic White health workers had deteriorated, and I kept trying to rescue it. Did you know that genetics and genes do not exist, or, if they do, that they are irrelevant in humans? That there is no such thing as race?

I had wandered into race-denier Hell and, as in a Sartre play, there was "No Exit." Accusations of racism, veiled and otherwise, were hurled in my direction. I was an evil racist and I deserved to die.

Turns out Indians, like indigenous peoples all over, have adopted a thrifty metabolism due to surviving many famines. You have a horrible famine, and the only folks that survive are the ones who can eat hardly any food and somehow manage to not die. Their genes get passed on, and you end up with a race that doesn't need much food to get by.

They live well on a native diet, but on a modern diet (which they invariably adopt the very worst aspects of) they become obese and develop epidemic diabetes and all of the resulting problems. This is also true among Oceanians, Aborigines and Hispanics, who have lots of Indian blood.

The Indians’ idiotic response to this was to blame Whitey for creating an evil diet and I guess force-feeding it to poor helpless Indians, probably by feeding tubes while they were strapped helplessly to their hospital beds. My response, muttered under my breath many times, was, "So quit eating it already!"

Actually I said it out loud a few times. Yep, they admitted doggedly, we gotta quit eating this crappy White man's food. Next time you see them at the supermarket, it's a whole shopping basket loaded up with the very worst foods in the store, and the Indian pushing it can barely squeeze through the aisle.

Some people never learn.

Indians are addicted to the Blame Whitey Game. It’s their favorite pastime.

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