INDEPTH: FOOD
Food Stories
CBC News Online | January 16, 2004
Diabetes and diet
Reporter: Eve Savory
When your fishing buddies are from the Haida Nation, a great catch is as good as guaranteed, but for Dr. Jay Wortman, there's more than pride in the 15 kilos of fine spring salmon he's landed. To him, it holds the answer to the rising tide of diabetes in aboriginal communities.
"The aboriginal diabetes epidemic is the biggest, most serious health issue that confronts aboriginal communities across the whole country," Wortman says.
Wortman is a physician whose work includes speaking to First Nations people, including those on the Musqueam Reserve in Vancouver, about health, but it's much more personal.
"I'm Métis from northern Alberta, and both my grandparents, my mother's parents had diabetes. My mother has diabetes. Some of her siblings have diabetes, and about 14 months ago, I realized that I had diabetes," he says.
Until then, he and his wife loved chocolate and candy and other sugary, starchy foods. He worked long hours at a stressful job and rarely exercised. Now with his vision blurring, his blood pressure and blood sugar soaring, Wortman faced a crisis.
"Because I have a knowledge of diabetes – diabetes is a disorder of blood sugar, your blood sugar is too high
my immediate instinctive response was to stop eating any food that causes your blood sugar to rise. So I basically right away eliminated carbohydrates from my diet….In four weeks, I lost 18 pounds. My blood sugars normalized, my blood pressure became normal, and I felt much better," Wortman says. "I don't know if you're ever not diabetic, but I think for me, I've been able to reverse the effects of diabetes through diet."
Before 1945, diabetes was almost unknown among natives in Canada, but as people switched from a low-carbohydrate diet of caribou and seal, from fish and shell fish and berries to refined carbohydrates, obesity and type 2 diabetes followed as surely as it has among all Canadians. But why do First Nations people have three to five times the rate of the general population and why are native children developing a disease that normally hits adults?
Wortman fingers evolution.
"In evolutionary terms, it's a blink of an eye. Aboriginal people have been transformed over a hundred years or 200 years, very few numbers of generations, from a completely different way of life to what we experience today, and diet has dramatically changed for that population," he says. "And that very small period of time, there's no possible way their physiology could evolve to cope with such a big change in something like diet."
So Wortman has become an advocate of a return to the traditional, very low carbohydrate diet. His family dines on salad and green vegetables, on cheese and berries and cream, on chicken and fish and meat.
So when he dines with aboriginal people, the meal becomes a prop, part of the lesson about returning to their traditional diet.
"The potatoes, good food, right? No. Not a good food. Believe it or not, if you eat potato, your blood sugar shoots up faster than if you eat pure white table sugar," he says.
Wortman says nutritionists don't like his advocacy of what is very close to the Atkins Diet. So he and some colleagues are designing a study. They want to put a First Nations community on a traditional diet and check the results. But personally, he has no doubts: aboriginal people are designed to eat the way their ancestors did.
Diet in China
Reporter: Patrick Brown
Eight-year-old Chi Tian Wai steers a shopping cart around a Beijing supermarket, keeping a close eye on the groceries his mother's choosing. "What's really good to eat?" he says. "Candy."
Back home, Li Ling cooks a meal of noodles and vegetables. She says she tries to make sure her son eats a balanced diet, but it's an uphill struggle. "Even at home, it's hard to control what he eats," she says. "The older he gets, the harder it is. He eats too much."
In China today, there's an abundance and variety of food unimaginable only a few years ago. The meat ration used to be 250 grams per person per month. "Two hundred fifty grams per person," she says, "now you can buy whatever you like."
For much of its long history, China had difficulty in feeding its huge population. The worst famines of all came after the Communist party took power.
Tens of millions of people died during Mao Zedong's political campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, the Great Leap Forward and in the Cultural Revolution. Two decades of economic reform have changed all that.
Today in China, no one's dying of hunger. Instead, people are starting to die of heart disease and diabetes, just as they do in rich countries.
Nutritionist Liang Li Jing has returned to China after 16 years in the United States. The problems she sees here are very familiar ones.
"China, they opened up," Jing says. "There are a lot of good things happening, but the food consumption pattern of the eating definitely is also changing towards the western type of style, and that's definitely associated with a lot of health related issues."
People eat out a lot more and eat a lot more when they're out. Eating too much of the wrong kinds of food at a Chinese restaurant is just as unhealthy as it is in a western one. But many Chinese are convinced that western fast food chains bear the heaviest responsibility for obesity. Acupuncture needles are helping Du Wong Shunag control her appetite. She wants to lose 10 more kilograms. "It's your foreign food that made me fat," she says. "It's so good to eat."
As family and friends sit down to dinner at the local Pizza Hut, the father worries about his son's diet. "Yes, I do worry," he says, "and I worry about fizzy drinks, too. Some schools are banning them. I think they may be worse than this fast food." The boys say they do get some lessons on nutrition at school. In China, the teachers' advice is increasingly falling on deaf ears.
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Guidelines for Healthy Eating
1. Enjoy a variety of foods.
2. Emphasize cereals, breads, other grain products, vegetables and fruit.
3. Choose lower-fat dairy products, leaner meats and food prepared with little or no fat.
4. Achieve and maintain a healthy body weight by enjoying regular physical activity and healthy eating.
5. Limit salt, alcohol and caffeine.
Source: Health Canada
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