Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat
Local Food is Healthy Food
By Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, 7-31-07
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| Beau LeBeau | |
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Local food advocates often contend that local food is fresher, tastier and healthier. While the first two claims are rather easy to prove with a warm tomato from the garden, the human health aspects of local food tend to remain obscured.
Few studies have been done on the effects of local, fresh food on human health, but the idea that such food is better for us than the marathon grub that travels 1300 miles has become a reality for one Lakota man from Pine Ridge, South Dakota, who ate local food and got healthy.
The Argus Leader recently reported that Beau LeBeau has lost 60 pounds by eating buffalo, wild game, soy and flax seed and fresh fish found close to his home.
As a 35 year old man, weighing 333 pounds, LeBeau decided to change his life in order to keep it. Carrying all of that added weight increased LeBeau’s risk for diseases that most folks don’t worry about until they become octogenarians. When the body is obese, the human heart struggles to pump blood. As the pounds pack on, diabetes can set in and cause sugar to float aimlessly through the veins, causing stroke, blindness, kidney disease and even death. The joints degrade under so much stress and pressure.
But rather than use the latest fad diet, the Lakota Sioux decided to return to his roots. To break his addiction to French fries and fast food that has become the preferred choice of many Lakota, LeBeau decided to eat traditional, local foods. He would follow the Dakota Diet as envisioned by Dr. Kevin Weiland, a doctor from Rapid City, South Dakota. The diet is patterned after foods traditionally eaten by the Lakota. These foods include grass-fed animals such as buffalo, which actually produce a meat that is high in iron and low in saturated fat. Other foods are rich in Omega-3 fatty acids. These “good fats” help reduce cholesterol. The food in the diet is also full of nutrients and low in calories. Because it is founded on traditional eating habits it is also based on locality.
For LeBeau, eating this way is not a diet. Eating traditionally and locally is a way of living. By eating culturally important, local food he has already improved his diabetes and liver function. In the process he has renewed a relationship with the land and his culture. According to LeBeau, this is just the beginning of a new, old way of eating.
This fall, LeBeau’s story will be released in full detail in the documentary film, Good Meat: How the Lakota Got Fat and Beau LeBeau Changed His Life.
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Comments
If we all worked at returning to our local, natural roots, there would be less hunger and sickness in the world.
I look forward to the documentary and wish LeBeua and the entire tribe good luck.
By de way how many Rib Bones does a bison have?
And what do you supose the average life expectancy was for a Lakota man was in 1800?
By the way its the same ( Bison) as a human, I was told 28 rib bones..But seems dat some female made off with one of mine! :)
"The white man kept killin off the Sioux in de 1800 so their figures were quite low..."
And I asked about average life expectancy, not population numbers.
My point follows the NewYorker cartoon. One caveman asks the other, "Something's just not right—our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past thirty."
Nonsense. Live expectancy was (and is still) highly correlated with both income and race.
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/haines.demography
well when de White men soldiers were chasing de Native Indians or viva versa a horseback at de end someone life expectancy an possessions were greatly diminished!
Yeppers they'sa few times a scalp or two were tak'n. Anyone know what a Scalp weighed? It was a weight loss fur sure..
Giddup...
But, FYI, Sitting Bull -- who didn't have an easy life, what with sun dances and warfare and fleeing the benevolence of our fine government -- almost made 60 before he was murdered by idiots carrying out US policy. Crazy Horse made it into his late 30s before meeting a similar fate.
Maybe there are things at play here that free-market ideologues can't or won't see.
Maybe lack of connection with anything meaningful and beautiful starves our souls and leads to pathologies like overeating.
It's hard to make healthy food choices. Our beloved "free" market bombards us with cheap, convenient, nasty stuff. You really have to make a concerted effort to eat healthy. So, for some of us, maybe we have to totally re-imagine our relationship to food, and make it a more central element of our lives, in order to justify the effort required to make healthy choices.
Call it what you will -- perhaps we are "making food into an adventure" and that makes it easier to make healthy choices. Maybe it's the grown-up equivalent of inventing games to get a toddler to eat his carrots.
We all have to eat, every day. There is ample precedent for treating that daily need as a sacrament, as a way of connecting with the world and acknowledging our place.
I know that the so-called "consumer choice" advocates think that's a lot of new-agey stuff, that we "food Nazis" want to take away their Ho-Hos and Wonder Bread. Whatever you factory-farm corporate shills want to believe is fine with me -- but I think you're ANTI-consumer choice, what with your USDA henchmen, mega-stores, and TV-delivered brainwashing.
All I want is to encourage local food production and give folks the option of developing that connection. Are there direct health benefits of eating locally? Maybe -- fresh, organically grown food that didn't require a lot of pollution to grow and deliver? Well, seems like there's some benefit there. But the it's the spiritual connection to place that I'm really interested in.
I imagine that ideologues like to believe that our current system of food production is the best of all possible worlds -- that it delivers safe, plentiful, convenient food; that we are freed from the drudgery of picking out and preparing locally and regionally available foods.
Yes, some of those points are true. But let's look at E. coli outbreaks, let's look at obesity, and ask ourselves what kind of bargain we've made.
And, let's ask ourselves how much we miss that "drudgery," that effort we had to put out to eat locally and with the seasons. Let's hit "PAUSE" on the DVD player or look away from espn and ask ourselves what we're doing with all that extra time we have now that food is so convenient.
"Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possessions is a disease in them."
--- Sitting Bull
Git along
GP in whitehall
http://www.fishcreekhouse.com
Pete, your cynicism is stinking up this otherwise hopeful story. But to answer your question, yes. Because, for him and many others, the choice IS between local vs. healthy. The crap that our so-called food system provides, especially in poor and/or rural locales, is distinctly unhealthy. Studies have shown this to be true. Google it your own self.
And by the way, CHOOSING to eat locally produced foods IS compatible with a FREE market economy. As opposed to the polluting, government subsidized, oligopolistic "food system" that so many farmers and "consumers" are addicted to.
I too applaud Beau for making the transition. He and his community will be healthier for it.
>And what do you supose the average life expectancy was for a Lakota man was in 1800?
I'll repeat what someone else has asked. How is this relevant to the discussion?
Factory farming has turned a healthy product -- beef -- into something unhealthy. We eat too much of it, and what is readily available is full of bad fat. Plus, the way we produce it requires huge inputs of petroleum (transportation, cultivation, fertilizers), as well as putting tons of antibiotics and hormones into our water supply.
Grassfed red meat, in stark contrast, has nutritional benefits. Why wouldn't we choose that product if we knew about it and could find it easily?
And, if you don't trust what ConAgra or Tyson-IBP tells you (imagine that!) and want to know for sure that you're getting the good stuff, the sensible thing to do is to buy locally raised beef. Or, help someone pack out an elk in the fall if that's an option.
Ever since Willie Wonka tried to put a 3-course meal into a chunk of chewing gum, some folks have had the dream of "liberating" people from eating as the way to get nutrition.
I suppose, Mr. Geddes, that it's possible that ADM and RJR-N could one day put all the nutrients Mr. LeBeau is getting into a capsule (or a cigarette!).
Until that day, whole food is the best delivery device.
And as a matter of trustworthiness (that we're getting what we want), freshness, connection (to land and community), minimal environmental costs, and local economic benefit, close to home is the best place to get whole food.