Flour, sugar, and smallpox: The fatal combination behind Native American epidemics
I’ve been reading a bunch of books about Aztecs and Native Americans. Mostly because these indigenous peoples remind me of my Venezuelan wife, but also because I’m interested in the health of humans who lived as nature intended. The stories all end the same though, with smallpox or some other European disease wiping out the native population. What really happened here?
The Comanche and the buffalo
The Comanche Indians were one of several Great Plains tribes whose lives revolved around the buffalo. The buffalo provided Comanches with clothing, shelter, tools, weapons — and their primary source of food.
The way Comanches ate “nose to tail” (actually brains to guts) should spark envy in every keto adherent and carnivore enthusiast. After killing a beast, hungry Comanches would “squirt the salty bile from the gallbladder onto the liver and eat it on the spot, warm and dripping blood. If a slain female was giving milk, Comanches would cut into the udder bag and drink the milk mixed with warm blood.”[1]
The Comanches didn’t get their cholesterol checked annually. Nevertheless, researchers have observed surviving hunter-gatherer tribes, and analyzed skeletal remains, to draw conclusions about the overall health of Native Americans. For example, Weston A. Price’s groundbreaking research in the 1930s revealed that although tuberculosis was ravaging modernized Indians and Eskimos, TB was nonexistent among the Indians who continued to eat an ancestral diet. Likewise, skeletal remains of traditional tribes showed a virtual absence of tooth decay, arthritis, and any other kind of bone deformity.
Why didn’t Native Americans’ immune systems protect them against smallpox?
Indian tribes in the Americas endured mass death starting with the Aztecs in the sixteenth century. Europeans introduced epidemics of: smallpox, measles, malaria, whooping cough, influenza, and cholera. I believe indigenous peoples would have prevailed over these new pathogens if they were not also exposed to the new European diet.
Epidemics among Indian tribes can be tied to specific events. For example, the Comanche bandits who raided northern Mexico in 1816 returned with the smallpox virus, igniting an outbreak among their own people. The cholera outbreak among the Comanches in 1849 followed contact with Forty-niner wagon trains heading to the gold fields of California.
Encounters with foreigners exposed the natives to more than just germs, however. Another consequence of these interactions was, in the words of one historian, “deep cultural contamination.” When the Comanches raided settlers and alien communities, the spoils they brought back to their villages included sacks of flour and bags of sugar. When engaging in trade, the Comanches exchanged (stolen) livestock, buffalo hides, and captives for goods such as beads, knives, cotton fabric — and flour and sugar.
More than three centuries earlier, Hernán Cortés and his expedition arrived in Mexico. Soon after first contact between the Spanish and Aztecs, the two peoples engaged in exchanges of gifts and goods, which from the Spanish included sugar. The Aztecs were not familiar with this refined carbohydrate. They had been using honey as a sweetener, as well as syrup derived from the agave plant.
Smallpox outbreaks began in the Aztec Empire about a year after Cortés’ arrival. Spanish colonization in the following years led to significant cultural contamination of the Aztec way of life, including profound changes to the natives’ diet. The epidemic intensified, with smallpox eventually killing 90% of the Aztecs.
Ways that sugar destroys the immune system
What happens to an indigenous person — or any person — when he or she consumes flour or sugar? The body quickly converts flour and sugar into glucose, smothering its immune system.
- Consuming high amounts of sugar inhibits the activity of white blood cells, which are responsible for detecting and destroying pathogens.
- Excessive sugar intake can lead to chronic inflammation, which can weaken the immune system and make it less effective at fighting off infections and diseases.
- Sugar consumption disrupts the gut biome, which weakens the immune system’s ability to respond to pathogens.
The sequence of sugar to sickness among indigenous peoples also prompts a question for the present. If these plant-based poisons — sugar and wheat — can destroy entrenched warrior civilizations and empires, what do you think they are doing to our own?
[1] Gwynne, S. C.. Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (p. 62). Scribner. Kindle Edition.