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Daniel C. Benyshek, Associate
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Interests: Medical anthropology, developmental origins of health and disease, diabetes/metabolic syndrome, maternal nutrition, placentophagy, political ecology, applied anthropology, ethnomedicine, Native North America.
Community-based diabetes intervention programs
must recognize the impact of fetal life on the risk of
developing diabetes. This recognition shifts the
emphasis away from the ideas that Indians are
existentially flawed, with deleterious genes and bad
lifeways. These notions, which have been subtly
transmitted to Indian people for forty years, must
contribute to the feelings of powerlessness and
fatalism expressed in many Indian communities having
high rates of diabetes. Instead, the latest research
implicating the fetal origins of diabetes provides
Indian communities with powerful new information
suggesting that diabetes is not necessarily inevitable
or uncontrollable for future generations.
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Selected Publications
2008 (with Carol S. Johnston, John F. Martin and William D. Ross). Insulin sensitivity is normalized in the third generation (F3) offspring of developmentally programmed insulin resistant (F2) rats fed an energy-restricted diet.
Nutrition and Metabolism 5:26
2007. The developmental
origins of obesity and related health disorders: prenatal
and perinatal factors. Collegium Antropologicum
31/1:11-17.
2006. (with James T.
Watson). Exploring the thrifty genotype's food
shortage assumptions: a cross-cultural comparison
of ethnographic accounts of food security among
foraging and agricultural societies. American
Journal of Physical Anthropology 131/1:120-126.
2006. (with Carol S.
Johnston and John F. Martin). Glucose metabolism
is altered in the adequately-nourished
grand-offspring (F3 generation) of rats
malnourished during gestation and perinatal life.
Diabetologia 49/5:1117-1119.
2005. Type 2
diabetes and fetal origins: The promise of
prevention programs focusing on prenatal health in
high prevalence Native American communities. Human
Organization 64/2:192-200.
2004. (with Carol S.
Johnston and John F. Martin). Post-natal diet
determines insulin resistance in fetally
malnourished, low birthweight rats (F1) but diet
does not modify the insulin resistance of their
offspring (F2). Life Sciences
74/24:3033-3041.
2003. The
nutritional history of the Havasupai Indians of
Northern Arizona: Dietary change and inadequacy in
the reservation era and their implications for
current health. Nutritional Anthropology
26/1-2:1-10.
2001. (with John F.
Martin and Carol S. Johnston). A reconsideration
of the origins of the Type 2 diabetes epidemic
among Native Americans and the implications for
intervention policy. Medical Anthropology
20/1:25-63.
2000. (with John F.
Martin, Carol S. Johnston, and Chung-Ting Han).
Nutritional origins of insulin resistance: A rat
model for diabetes-prone human populations. Journal
of Nutrition 130:741-44.
1997. (with L.A.
Vaughan, and J.F. Martin). Food acquisition
habits, nutrient intakes, and anthropometric data
of Havasupai adults. The Journal of the
American Dietetic Association 97/11: 1275-82.
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