165CHAPTERDiabetes
M
ore than 90 percent of adult Pima Indians living in the Sonora
desert in Arizona today are morbidly obese and diabetic by the
time they are in their thirties. This wasn’t always the case. Before the
arrival of the European settlers, these indigenous peoples didn’t have a
weight problem and diabetes was rare. Their good health was based on
a healthy diet and the fact that their digestive metabolism had adapted
to the weather pattern in the Sonora desert—six months of rain fol-
lowed by a six-month period of drought. During the rainy season they
cultivated crops and gorged on tepary beans, melons, squash, and corn.
Because for the next six months there would be no rain and food would
be scarce, their bodies converted the food they ate during the wet sea-
son into fat and stored it in the body’s fat cells. When the rain stopped
and the landscape reverted to desert, they lived off their body fat. The
hunger for food during this period of dryness almost disappeared.
Constantly craving food when it was available and losing the craving
for food when it was scarce meant that once food was accessible all year
long, the craving aspect of the appestat mechanism would become per-
manent. So when corner grocer y stores opened in the Sonora desert, the
cycle of feast and famine ended and was replaced by nonstop gluttony.^1How Diabetes Develops
If gorging on excessive quantities of food and a diet of processed foods
and refi ned sugar and fl our causes diabetes (high blood sugar), those12