With Native Americans 23 times more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than non-Hispanic whites, U.S. Rep. Dianna DeGette, D-Denver, chose Denver Indian Health and Family Services as the location to announce new legislation on diabetes research focused on minority populations.

“Colorado has a reputation for being a very fit state, but we’re not immune to diseases like diabetes,” DeGette said during the press event. “In fact, in the last 20 years, the rate at which Coloradans have been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes has doubled. And minority communities are especially bearing the brunt of this burden.”

The legislation, known as the Eliminating Disparities in Diabetes Prevention, Access and Care Act of 2015, was introduced in Congress last week. It calls for the National Institutes of Health to “expand, intensify and support ongoing research and other activities with respect to prediabetes and diabetes, particularly type 2, in minority populations.”

The bill is sponsored by the Diabetes Caucus – the largest caucus in Congress, which DeGette co-chairs – along with the members of the African American, Hispanic and Asian American caucuses.

Diabetes rates vary substantially among racial and ethnic groups, DeGette said, with 16.1 percent of American Indians, 12.6 percent of African Americans and 11.8 percent of Latinos having a diabetes diagnosis.

DeGette held the press conference in the gym at DIHFS, where the clinic treats members of 150 different federally recognized tribes.

Tyler Alicks, an adult nurse practitioner at the clinic, said Native Americans are 23 times more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than non-Hispanic whites, 1.6 times high death rate due to diabetes compared to the general U.S. population and are nearly twice as likely to suffer kidney failure related to diabetes.

“Our clinic is proud to support Congresswoman DeGette’s proposed legislations, the Eliminating Disparities in Diabetes Prevention, Access and Care Act of 2015, as our native population is disproportionately affected by diabetes and as the health status of Native Americans in general tends to be lower than the larger U.S. population,” he said.

Theresa Halsey, a patient diagnosed with diabetes in 2001, spoke about classes the clinic offers for those with the disease.

“What they do is they teach you how to eat, portion control,” she said. “One of the things that we’re learning is how to return to our traditional food. What I really like is that we’re learning to eat fresh fruit and vegetables.”

Halsey told The Colorado Statesman she’d weighed as much as 200 pounds prior to her diagnosis.

“But when I was initially diagnosed, people were wondering what was wrong with me because I went from 200 to 160,” she said. “And they’re going, ‘There’s something wrong with you, ’cause you’re losing a lot of weight.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m working out, I’m trying.’ I started getting infections, my eyes were really blurry, my skin was really dry.”

Since then she has changed her diet from mostly fast food to one incorporating more fruit and vegetables, cooking her own meals and increased her exercise.

“We are going back to our traditional foods, the protein base especially, and that is buffalo,” she said. “I’m Lakota, and our people were buffalo people. So I know that people in the northwest, they eat salmon, and they’re salmon people. So all across the country, we’re going back to what we traditionally ate. We’re going back to our roots.”

The clinic offers a cooking class that teaches how to purchase and cook fresh vegetables.

“A lot of people don’t know how to eat vegetables, they don’t even know what it looks like,” Halsey said.

Roy Willis, a patient at Center for African American Health, also spoke during the press conference.

“Last year in June, I weighed like 300 pounds, and I couldn’t breathe, so I decided to go to the doctors to find out what was the deal,” Willis said.

He was diagnosed with diabetes and has been through two programs in an effort to manage his condition, at Kaiser and through the African American Diabetes Program.

“They were helping me manage my weight,” he said. “Now I weigh 159 pounds, not even been a year.”

“Type 2 diabetes is an epidemic in this country,” DeGette said. “And if we don’t act in a systematic national way to deal with this epidemic, it’s going to have tremendous personal cost, and it’s going to have tremendous financial costs.”

Catherine Benavidez-Clayton, a nurse practitioner at Clinica Tepeyac, said she supports DeGette’s bill wholeheartedly. Having the NIH conduct research into the contributing factors for diabetes within minority communities will help clinic like hers better serve their patients, she said.

“For us, it’s really heard to capture any outcome data of our programs,” she said. “We can’t change anything unless we know what we’re getting already.”

“It is the diet and exercise,” Halsey said. “People have to get up, even our kids. It’s our society. I think all of our kids are getting fat.”

– rachel@coloradostatesman.com