Health epidemics on tribal lands.

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for Native Americans. For several decades, the American population has fallen victim to poor nutritional habits, where healthy, natural foods have been replaced with unwholesome foods prepared with too much sugar, saturated fat and artificial additives. American Indian and Alaska Native populations have fared no better. Being forced onto reservations caused most tribes to deviate from their customary way of life. This, coupled with poor farming conditions and the desolate locations of many reservations, caused many tribes to become dependent upon substandard food and government rations. Tribes have witnessed the replacement of their traditional Native foods—root vegetables, beans, fish and venison—with prepackaged, processed foods laden with fat and sugar and devoid of real nutritional value. As a result, this population is afflicted with increasingly high occurrences of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease at double the rates other populations experience.