Icon or hazard? The great debate over fry bread

In Phoenix, there is the popular Fry Bread House restaurant, where you can get fry bread pretty much anyway you want. The most sinful? Fry bread topped with gooey chocolate syrup and oozing with butter.

Sure, folks there talked about the fry bread flap, but it didn’t seem to make much difference.

“They’re still in line,” said restaurant owner Cecelia Miller.

Fry bread is so embedded in the culture many Indians can’t imagine going without. T-shirts declare “Fry Bread Power Forever!” or “FBI — Fry Bread Inspector.” There’s an entire Web site dedicated to warm, fuzzy memories about fry bread.

So Harjo’s column was the equivalent of taking spray paint to sacred petroglyphs.

Harjo, who heads the Morning Star Institute, an Indian rights group, compared fry bread to a “lead Frisbee” and even likened it to “hard-core porn. No redeeming qualities.”

“It’s the connecting dot between healthy children and obesity, hypertension, diabetes, dialysis, blindness, amputations and slow death,” Harjo wrote, deeming it, quite simply, “Rotten stuff.”

Hot topic
On the national radio show Native America Calling, the fry bread furor was one of the most popular topics this year. One man boasted that he downed 12 pieces in one sitting. Another man said he was desperate for fry bread and couldn’t find any.

“Anytime you say fry bread, people smile. Except Suzan Harjo,” Weigle said. “It’s almost sacred. It just makes you happy.”

Weigle originally started her Web site www.frybreadlove.org to talk about a benefit concert for the homeless children she worked with in Minneapolis. Why that name? To her, fry bread means comfort. Soon, she was posting fry bread recipes, pictures and heartwarming stories. She’s thinking now of a recipe book.

High rate of diabetes
Not every case of obesity and diabetes among Indians can be blamed solely on fry bread, of course. But Harjo has a point.

Among Indians, the prevalence of Type 2 diabetes — the most common form — is more than double what it is in the general population. Fueled by obesity, poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle, Type 2 diabetes is occurring a full decade sooner in Indians, when people are between 20 and 29 years old.

Many believe the diabetes rate began to skyrocket when Indians stopped living off the land and began using government rations. For decades, researchers with the National Institutes of Health have been studying the Pima Indians in Arizona, who have the highest incidence of diabetes in the world, to determine if there is a genetic reason they are more susceptible to the disease.

Here on the Tohono O’odham reservation near Tucson, more than half the 14,000 residents have diabetes. A $4 million dialysis center is under construction, necessary to serve all the people who have developed kidney disease from diabetes.

At the Sells hospital, it’s unusual for doctors to see a tribal member who doesn’t have diabetes. It is so prevalent, doctors and nutritionists struggle to convince Indians they can help prevent it.

The attitude is, “I’m going to get it anyway,” Dr. Paul Weintraub said. “And to some extent, it’s true. They will get it.”

Gloria Maldonado has lived with diabetes for 22 years. Her mother had it, so does her brother and her 24-year-old daughter.

“I figured sooner or later I would get it,” she said as Weintraub examined her.

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