What We Miss: Sugar, Stress, and Aboriginal Deaths

In the wake of another Aboriginal death at the hand of those charged to protect us, we are left not only with grief, but with questions that are rarely asked.We hear commentary about poor health choices — about sugar, Coke, diabetes — and assumptions pile on:“They eat badly.”“They don’t take care of themselves.”But what if we’ve misunderstood the root?What if what looks like ‘bad choices’ is actually the physiological signature of long-term survival in stress?

When a human body is under chronic threat — physical, emotional, systemic — the nervous system shifts into a mode that prioritizes quick energy, immediate action, survival now. In this mode, sugar becomes the fuel of choice.This is not addiction. It is biochemistry.Stress depletes cellular oxygenation. It tightens the diaphragm. It narrows the airway. And so we over-breathe. We lose carbon dioxide. And with that loss, we lose regulation.Under these conditions, the body cannot perform slow digestion or metabolic precision. It wants fast-burning fuel — Coke. Sweet tea. White bread. Instant relief.And so we say: they eat too much sugar.But what we miss is the stress physiology driving it — the breathless state of vigilance, the cellular panic that won’t settle because the world doesn’t.

We blame the symptom. We miss the system.Breathing is not separate from this. It is central.Until we create safety — true, embodied, culturally sovereign safety — the breath won’t slow. And until the breath slows, the blood sugar won’t either.What we need is not more commentary. What we need is breath, presence, dignity, space — and truth.Let’s stop missing it.

Inherited Breath, Inherited Stress

The way we breathe does not begin with us.Breath patterns are shaped early — in infancy, and even in utero. If the mother is under chronic stress, her breathing becomes fast, shallow, and tight. This sets the tone for the developing baby’s autonomic system. The breath rate of a newborn can reflect the nervous system state of the mother.

Now imagine this: If a mother is carrying the stress of her mother, and her grandmother — stress rooted in invasion, land theft, cultural erasure, the Stolen Generations, systemic exclusion, poverty, violence — how can her breath be free?How can the baby she carries inherit anything but a nervous system tuned to survival?This is not about blame. This is about biology. About how unresolved trauma moves through generations — not just as memory, but as breath, as tension, as baseline dysregulation. To say that Aboriginal communities suffer from ill health without acknowledging this inherited stress physiology is to miss the root.

These are not individual problems. These are intergenerational survival adaptations in a society that continues to marginalize, ignore, and punish.Until we address the breathing pattern itself — until we restore safety, restore community, restore sovereignty — we will continue to see the symptoms misnamed as choices.The breath tells the story. And the breath carries the healing, too.

More Than a Moral Lens: Rethinking Sugar, Stress, and Systemic Response

It is far too easy to look at an Aboriginal person drinking Coke or eating sugar and see only the surface.From a moral standpoint, some might say: 'It’s wrong. It’s self-destructive.' But this is a simplistic reading of a profoundly complex physiological and historical story.And far be it from me to judge a police officer who feels under threat — but we must ask: are they trained to understand what they’re seeing?

We need much more education within our public service ranks, particularly in police and healthcare systems, about the effects of chronic stress on the body:- Stress tightens the muscles and fascia.- It reduces blood flow to the core organs.- It shifts energy away from digestion and toward immediate, fast-burning fuel.- It increases sugar cravings and reduces the body’s ability to use oxygen efficiently.Chronic stress makes you slow. It makes your body feel heavy. It makes regulation harder. It makes sugar feel like relief.These are not just personal issues — they are public health issues, cultural health issues, and they are physiological truths.We need to understand this at every level — not just in trauma-informed therapy rooms, but in policing, education, and policy.Because the illnesses of modern society — obesity, diabetes, fatigue, addiction, anxiety — are not random. They are stress-related, and they are telling us something about the world we’ve created.

A Final Truth

No one in this country lives with more accumulated, embodied stress than our Indigenous population.

Generations of dispossession, surveillance, removal, exclusion, violence, and erasure have left physiological imprints — not just historical ones. This is not just trauma in the mind. It’s trauma in the breath, in the blood vessels, in the gut, in the nervous system.

And it continues.

Until we honour this reality — in policy, in policing, in healthcare, in education — we will keep mistaking survival for dysfunction.