Transcript: Bryce Mendez

Hawai‘i is one of the largest consumers of Spam

[Mendez:]: One in particular is the Native Hawaiian health diet, and you see it in a lot of Native cultures. Because of our foods nowadays, Hawai’i is the largest consumer of Spam, which is very strange, but Spam is high in sodium, high in fat, high in everything that’s not healthy, but we continue to eat it in mass doses, which contributes to our high blood pressure, our diabetes, our large obesity rates, but we continue to eat it. And what we’ve actually found is through the Native Hawaiian health diet—reverting back to traditional foods like “kalua” pork, a lot of the sweet potatoes, poi, chicken, long rice, those types of things—we’ve been able to reduce a lot of those types of diseases when you revert to traditional foods. So those are some of the examples, or an example of how traditional medicine would work in addition to Western medicine.