Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It (4 page)

What makes this observation so remarkable is that the Pima, at the time, had just gone from being among the most affluent Native American tribes to among the poorest. Whatever made the Pima fat, prosperity and rising incomes had nothing to do with it; rather, the opposite seemed to be the case.

Through the 1850s, the Pima had been extraordinarily successful hunters and farmers. Game was abundant in the region, and the Pima were particularly adept at trapping it or killing it with bow and arrow. They also ate fish and clams from the Gila River, which ran through their territory. They raised corn, beans, wheat, melons, and figs on fields irrigated with Gila River water and raised cattle and chickens as well.

In 1846, when a U.S. Army battalion passed through Pima lands, John Griffin, the battalion’s surgeon, described the Pima as “sprightly” and in “fine health” and noted that they also had “the greatest abundance of food”—storehouses full of it.
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So much that when the California gold rush began three years later, the U.S government asked the Pima to provide food, and they did, to the tens of thousands of travelers who passed through their territory in the next decade, heading to California on the Sante Fe Trail.

With the California gold rush, the relative paradise of the Pima came to an end and, with it, their affluence. Anglo-Americans and Mexicans began settling in large numbers in the region. These newcomers—“some of the vilest specimens of humanity that the white race has produced,” wrote Russell—hunted the local game near to extinction, and diverted the Gila River water to irrigate their own fields at the expense of the Pimas’.

By the 1870s, the Pima were living through what they called the “years of famine.” “The marvel is that the starvation, despair, and dissipation that resulted did not overwhelm the tribe,” wrote Russell. When Russell and Hrdli
ka appeared, in the first years of the twentieth century, the tribe was still raising what crops it could but was now relying on government rations for day-to-day sustenance.

So why were they fat? Years of starvation are supposed to take weight off, not put it on or leave it on, as the case may be. And if the government rations were simply excessive, making the famines a thing of the past, then why would the Pima get fat on the abundant rations and not on the abundant food they’d had prior to the famines? Perhaps the answer lies in the type of food being consumed, a question of quality rather than quantity. This is what Russell was suggesting when he wrote that “certain articles of their food appear to be markedly flesh producing.”

Hrdli
ka also thought that the Pima should be thin, considering the precarious state of their existence, and so he said, “The role played by food in the production of obesity among the Indians is apparently indirect.” This left him leaning toward physical inactivity as the cause, or at least
relative
physical inactivity. In other words, the Pima might have been more active than we are today, considering the rigors of preindustrial agriculture, but they were sedentary in comparison with what they used to be. This is what Hrdli
ka called “the change from their past active life to the present state of not a little indolence.” But then he couldn’t explain why the women were typically the fat ones, even though these women did virtually all the hard labor in the villages—harvesting
the crops, grinding the grain, even carrying the heavy burdens when the pack animals were unavailable. Hrdli
ka was also troubled by another local tribe, the Pueblo, who had “been of sedentary habits since ancient times” but weren’t fat.

So maybe the culprit
was
the type of food. The Pima were already eating everything “that enters into the dietary of the white man,” as Hrdli
ka said. This might have been key. The Pima diet in 1900 had characteristics very similar to the diets many of us are eating a century later, but not in quantity, in quality.

As it turns out, half a dozen trading posts had opened on the Pima reservation after 1850. From these, as the anthropologist Henry Dobyns has noted, the Pima bought “sugar, coffee and canned goods to replace traditional foodstuffs lost ever since whites had settled in their territory.” Moreover, the great bulk of the government rations distributed to the reservations was white flour, as well as a significant amount of sugar, at least significant for the Pima of a century ago. These were quite likely the critical factors, as I will be arguing throughout this book.

If the Pima were the sole example of a population that was both very poor and beset by obesity, we could write them off as an exception to the rule—the single eyewitness whose testimony disagrees with copious others. But there were, as I said, numerous such populations, numerous witnesses to the presence of high levels of obesity in extremely poor populations. The Pima were the flag bearers in a parade of witnesses whose testimony never gets heard and who demonstrate that it’s possible to become fat when you’re poor, hardworking, and even underfed. Let’s examine what they have to say, and then we’ll move on.

A quarter-century after Russell and Hrdli
ka visited the Pima, two researchers from the University of Chicago studied another Native American tribe, the Sioux living on the South Dakota Crow Creek Reservation. These Sioux lived in shacks “unfit for occupancy,” often four to eight family members per room. Many had no plumbing and no running water. Forty percent of the children lived in homes without any kind of toilets. Fifteen families,
with thirty-two children among them, lived “chiefly on bread and coffee.” This was poverty almost beyond our imagination today.

Yet their obesity rates were not much different from what we have today in the midst of our epidemic: 40 percent of the adult women on the reservation, more than a quarter of the men, and 10 percent of the children, according to the University of Chicago report, “would be termed distinctly fat.” It could be argued that maybe their reservation life of what Hrdli
ka had called “not a little indolence” was causing their obesity, but the researchers noted another pertinent fact about these Sioux: one-fifth of the adult women, a quarter of the men, and a quarter of the children were “extremely thin.”

The diets on the reservation, much of which, once again, came from government rations, were deficient in calories, as well as protein and essential vitamins and minerals. The impact of these dietary deficiencies was hard to miss: “Although no counts were taken, even a casual observer could not fail to note the great prevalence of decayed teeth, of bow legs, and of sore eyes and blindness among these families.”

This combination of obesity and malnutrition or undernutrition (not enough calories) existing in the same populations is something that authorities today talk about as though it were a new phenomenon, but it’s not. Here we have malnutrition or undernutrition coexisting with obesity in the same population eighty years ago. It’s an important observation, and we’ll see it again before we’re done.

Let’s look at several more examples:

Ancel Keys, the University of Minnesota nutritionist almost singularly responsible for convincing us that the fat we eat and the cholesterol in our blood are causes of heart disease, visits Naples to study the diet and health of the Neapolitans.