Blood Sugar Rising

It gives me great pleasure to introduce our speaker this afternoon, Dr. Valerie Blue Bird Jernigan. She's a member, citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, so please join me in welcoming her. (audience claps) Dr. Jernigan. I'm Valerie Jernigan, and I'm an intervention scientist, so the interventions that I do are focused on improving the food environments of tribal communities and thereby improve diabetes. Diabetes is a story that's about access to food. It's a story that's about opportunities, and a story that's about getting out of poverty and reducing all the risk factors that combine to create that storm of diabetes. You don't really have to look very far to see the relationship between cultural genocide and diabetes. The boarding schools took Native children away from their families, and, in my grandma's case, they took her, cut her hair, reprimanded her for speaking Choctaw. They were intended to take Native people and to erase the nativeness from them, and to make them white. The trauma that occurs as a result of that is well-documented in terms of producing all kinds of negative health outcomes. Diabetes is the tip of the iceberg Growing up, I did not have access to healthy foods. I was a kid who grew up eating what's called commodity foods. Commodity foods look different than other foods. It's just surplus foods. So, some months we would have a lot of canned milk. We would have mashed potato flakes, so nothing is fresh. Everything is packaged. So, back in the 1980s the Commodity Program was a way to fill your family's tummies and that's pretty much how a lot of people did it, not by choice, but rather out of necessity. If you didn't have enough dollars to make it through the month, you had to participate in that program just in order to get through the month. At the time we were eating the commodity foods, we really had no idea that they were going to impact health. There was no sense at all that this is going to hurt us. My dad has Type Two diabetes, and he's had Type Two diabetes for 20 years. Just give me a couple eggs scrambled with some sausage patties and hash browns. Scramble that sausage and hash browns? Mm hm, remember our aunt passed away because of diabetes. Course she lived a long, happy life. But still the diabetes, you know she went blind Yeah -

Donald

because of diabetes. And that's what worries me is that sometimes I feel great and sometimes I don't. And, I'm sure it's all because, and my heart attack was because of diabetes. Half the Indians in Oklahoma are getting commodities. And, if you look at the commodities, it's all so much carbohydrates. It's gotta affect your diabetes. So, this would be what a typical convenience store would look like. In this town at least one of the only places that you can actually shop for food. And our own research shows that people eat here multiple times a week for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It's not healthy. I mean, if you can just think about it for a minute, eating the majority of your foods from a gas station then you can kind of imagine how you might start to feel after doing that for long periods of time. How close is the closest grocery store to here, do you know? 10 miles. -

Valerie

To see a salad on a menu seems like a small thing, but it's actually a pretty big deal, and I think it's a step in the direction toward changing social norms. We objectively improved the overall quality of these stores, which was something really important to us, because we could take that back to leadership and show them that not only did you not lose any revenue but, in some months, you actually gained revenue and your stores got objectively healthier. We can't think about diabetes without taking that broader approach. That's what I wanna see in my lifetime. That's what I hope I can see in my work.