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"Spam" meat tied to diabetes risk in Native Americans: study

Reuters Health News, 2012

Cans of Hormel Foods Corp's Spam are pictured at a news conference in Tokyo December 11, 2008.
n">(Reuters) - Native Americans who often ate processed meat in a can, generically known as "spam" and a common food on reservations, one subsidized by the government -- had a two-fold increased risk of developing diabetes over those who ate little or none, according to a U.S.
Native Americans are at especially high risk of developing diabetes, with nearly half having the condition by age 55.
Researchers writing in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition surveyed 2,000 Native Americans from Arizona, Oklahoma and North and South Dakota to look into potential reasons for the high rate.
"A lot of communities in this study are in very rural areas with limited access to grocery stores...
and they want to eat foods that have a long shelf life," said Amanda Fretts, the lead author and a researcher at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
None of the survey participants, whose average age was 35, had diabetes at the start of the study when they answered questions about diet and other health and lifestyle factors.
Among the 500 people in the original study group who ate the most canned processed meat, 85 developed diabetes.
Though Spam is a brand-name pork product, the lower-case term is also used to describe any kind of processed, canned meat, Fretts said.
Fretts and her colleagues found that unprocessed meat did not have the same relationship with diabetes, with people equally likely to develop diabetes regardless of how much hamburger or cuts of pork or beef they ate.
"I think what this study indicates is processed meats should be a priority for reduction (in the diet), especially among American Indians where they can go to food assistance programs and they can get discounted spam," said Dariush Mozaffarian, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health who was not involved in the study.