Skip to main content

Transcript: Jeffrey Henderson, M.D.

Some traditional people believe diabetes is the result of breaking a certain taboo

[Lindberg:]
How about the basic idea of having gotten diabetes or whatever it is?
[Henderson:]
Today now—it’s 2008—for the last eight years, we’ve had $150,000,000 million plus spent on this special diabetes program for Indians in many American Indian and Alaska Native communities across the United States. My sense is that the role of inactivity, of poor diet, and obesity is increasingly being understood by our people in terms of its cause, as a root cause of diabetes. In more traditional communities there certainly are still traditional beliefs about the development of diabetes. Those may include your or a member of your family having broken a certain taboo.