Historical trauma and resilience as a biological state and its association with the effects of the traditional Indigenous food chokeberry

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Project Abstract Achieving health equity and eliminating disparities has been especially slow in American Indian populations even though reducing health disparities continues to be a major goal of public health institutions. American Indian populations continue to suffer disproportionately from health problems including such nutrition-related chronic diseases as diabetes and heart disease. This research project will therefore investigate how a traditional Indigenous food called chokeberry (Aronia melanocarpa) impacts epigenetic and metabolic health in relation to resiliency markers in fifty Great Plains Indian participants. Chokeberry is an Indigenous traditional food and medicine used on its own or in mixtures of pemmican (a mixture of buffalo, fat and chokeberry) common before Western contact in certain areas of the United States and Canada. Due to chokeberry’s positive effects on human lipid and glucose measures, in addition to inflammation markers demonstrated in prior studies in non-Indigenous settings, it is worthy of further exploration in this population with very different gene and metabolic profiles. Also, the process of research with American Indian communities is significant in that it can inform best practices in community engagement orientations, approaches, and models in future research settings. Our specific aims are to explore gene expression changes that are mediated by the consumption of traditional Indigenous chokeberry in Great Plains Indians and to examine the associations between metabolic end points, epigenetics, adverse childhood experiences, and mental health with and without the consumption of chokeberry in Great Plains Indians. Our long-term aim is to increase the knowledge base on the relationships between American Indian traditional food consumption, gene expression changes and metabolic markers in relation to trauma and resilience. Our study is a mix of a cross-sectional and longitudinal study design. Baseline epigenetic, metabolic and mental health data will be collected from study participants for cross sectional analysis, with the epigenetic screen specifically repeated after the post prandial consumption of chokeberry juice to assess its effects from baseline. The epigenetic, metabolic and mental health data collection process will then be repeated after 6 weeks of the daily consumption of chokeberry juice to compare the collection variables to the previous time collections.