Health Benefits Center

Diabetes symptoms relieved for Native American Indians

Visit www.davidlynchfoundation.org for more info about the programs of the foundation. We have a statistic from 2008 from an in health services that shows we (Native American Indians) have about 19.5% of our people have been diagnosed with diabetes. The problem is tremendous. Anybody you talked to, if you came to our nation, either has diabetes, knows someone with diabetes and probably knows someone who has some very serious complications with diabetes. We as Native American Indians have a lot of issues with obesity where people are overweight and as you know that complicates or prerequisite that causes the onset of diabetes much faster. We also have, as I mentioned a poor diet. We eat more processed food. Us Native American Indians don't go out and hunt. We don't go out and pick the plants that we've normally used in years past. Another area that causes a lot of problems is stress. I wanted to explain a little bit about how stress really does influence the physiology and lead to diabetes and to the complications of diabetes and eventually mortality if we don't do something about it. These risk factors lead to increased morbidity and more signs of heart disease, heat attacks, stroke etc and greater health care utilization and greater health care cost and eventually if they are not treated in some early or useful way then they lead to early death. I don't know how many people realize that cardiovascular disease in most cases a complication of diabetes.