Qahatika Indian Women Resting in a Harvest Field, courtesy www.firstpeople.us
Traditional Native American diets depended upon the foods available regionally, with some tribes depending primarily on hunting and others on agriculture. Most foods were minimally processed and fresh, though dried foods certainly played a part in winter provisions. Besides game and fish, Native Americans ate maize (an early type of corn), beans, squash of all kinds, wild rice, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes, cacti, and chilies among other richly nutritious items. Eggs, honey, and many nut varieties rounded out this ancient diet.
Native American diets were extremely low-glycemic (the glycemic index of a food is a measure of how fast its energy is absorbed into the bloodstream) and high fiber. Karl Reinhard, a professor of forensic sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, says that ancient foods may have been 20-30 times more fibrous than today’s. Native Americans may have actually consumed 200 to 400 grams of fiber a day–an extreme deviation from today’s recommendation of 25 grams of fiber for women and 38 for men and just about impossible to replicate using today’s modified food. Once Native Americans lost their ability to eat traditional foods, they quickly became susceptible to disease and ill health, particularly from diabetes.
Native American Woman Preparing Food on a Stone Slab, circa 1923, Edward S. Curtis
Smoking Fish for Preservation
Thank you so much for your interest in my blog. As my article states, different tribes ate different foods. It’s true that Plains tribes primarily hunted for food and consumed the entire animal (and very little produce), but other tribes (especially in the East) farmed and did consume produce. With more than 300 tribes spread throughout the coast-to-coast land mass, no one diet applied to all and I simply tried to give a broad overview of interesting points. When native Americans were forced to adopt a different, Westernized diet, it was nutritionally worse than what even Europeans consumed. Rations supplied by the U.S. federal government were of the worst kind in terms of quality, and certainly did not supply the fiber and nutrients necessary for a healthy diet–consequently diabetes and other diseases appeared. You may want to search on some other food-related posts I have made, to learn more about the very detrimental changes in native diets.
This article is inaccurate. The native Americans primarily consumed wild game. Every part of the animal was used and they ate all the organs. Their diet was high in protein, saturated, and poly-saturated fats. They did not start consuming high fiber foods until the Europeans invaded their land.