Dakota Diet -- Pass the Buffalo and Berries!

Speaking of buying and eating locally, MDL publicizes a new book by an MHS graduate, Dr. Kevin Weiland, that says South Dakotans (and everyone else) could improve their health by eating food from South Dakota [Chuck Clement, "Doctor Promotes Diet Based on Foods of Great Plains," MDL, 2007.07.23]. The Dakota Diet: Health Secrets from the Great Plains recommends a diet based on the Mediterranean model. "I based this diet on meat from grass-fed animals, whole fruits and vegetables," Clement quotes Weiland as saying. "I called it The Dakota Diet because it offered everything the Mediterranean diet offered, but the foods are all local."

Weiland, a doctor at the Rapid City Medical Center and associate professor at USD's med school, combines two really good ideas. First, eat fewer processed foods. The more times food goes through machinery, the more nutrients get crushed or burned or dried out, and the more preservatives, additives, and fake flavors (everything in the vast category my dad would succinctly label "crapola") get in. Even meat from feedlot livestock suffers the same problem, as livestock in the feedlot is processing processed feed, while their pasture-grazing counterparts give us meat one step closer to nature.

Second, eat where you live. The more you enjoy the bounty of your local environment, the more connection to and pride in that place you will feel. Plus eating locally, just like decreasing reliance on processed foods, means decreasing dependence on energy inputs in the food chain. When you eat non-local processed food, you incur the environmental cost of the factories processing the food and the big trucks hauling that food cross-country. When you eat grass-fed beef from a ranch just a county away and fresh veggies from your local farmers' market, you're eating direct solar power, with just a little oil for transportation mixed in.

So, doctor's orders: Eat more buffalo burgers, hunt that ditch asparagus, and pass me some bullhead. Yum!