What We Missed: Sugar, Stress, and Aboriginal Deaths
We keep blaming lifestyle and bad choices — but the nervous system remembers history -- and sugar will put off crashing.
In the wake of another Aboriginal death at the hands of those charged to protect, 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 the 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?
Stress depletes oygen at cellular level. It tightens the diaphragm, narrows the airway, and drives faster breathing — which means that more CO2, our natural relexant, is lost.
CO2 isn’t just waste gas — its a weak but predominant acid in the body. Overbreathing at rest changes blood pH and triggers the central nervous system further into fight/flight — hypervigilance.
But the loss doesn’t stop there — it builds.
As CO2 drops further, sending sympathetic signals to our central nervous system, the diaphragm & smooth muscle walls of the airway tighten more. This makes the breath more shallow and faster again. The smooth muscle walls of the big central blood vessels start to also constrict, further preparing the body for action. Blood is redirected away from the core, the brain, the heart, gut, kidneys, liver and out to the skeletal muscles.
The system is doing exactly what it is designed to do — getting us ready to run or defend… to fight or flight. Instead we’re standing still.
Running, fighting or any strong physical action balances the breath’s stress response. Movement increases the metabolic rate which produces acid at cell level - a natural but essential byproduct of oxygen use and ATP production. This acid helps balance the loss of carbon dioxide via the breath.
Action keeps the system in check. We use the oxygen. We make the acid. The system self-corrects.
But without movement - with an ever accelerating breath - the body just tightens.
The breath of stressed out people lives in the upper chest, it’s always too fast and too shallow. Even minor disturbance make it faster. A real-life threat tips us over the threshold.
The breath rate rises — the metabolic rate does not.
Stress is now sedentary. Bullets and modern convieniences like cars have made this so.
Stand up. Come with me. The breath will rise with this police command — backed by a gun. Flight or fight is no longer an option. The stress remains undischarged. Now it harms the prey who cannot flee or defend themselves.
This physiological mismatch, deeply associated with modern life, is coming for us all. For indigenous people stressed breathing has become a way of life. And so their physiology prioritises survival over homeostasis.
The body cannot perform slow digestion with any metabolic precision. It wants fast burning fuel — Coke, sweat tea, white bread — anything that offers instant releif.
This isn’t sugar addition, it’s biochemistry.
And so we say: they eat too much sugar.
We’ve missed the stress physiology driving it — the breathless state of vigilance, the cellular panic that never settles.
We blame the symptom but we’ve miss the system. Breathing is not separate from this. It is central.
Until the breath slows, the blood sugar cannot regulate.
What is missing is safety, dignity, space truth and real physiological insight.
Inherited Breath, Inherited Stress
The way we breathe does not begin with us. Breath patterns are shaped early — in infancy, 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 reflects the nervous system state of the mother.
So: 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 slow or regulated? 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 be marginalized, ignored, and punished. Until we address the breathing pattern itself — until we restore safety, and sovereignty, we will continue to see the symptoms misnamed as choices.
The breath tells the story. The breath carries the healing, too.
More Than a Moral Lens: Rethinking Sugar, Stress, and Systemic Response
What began as concern about health has spilled over into moral judgement — Aboriginal people drinking Coke or eating sugar are now viewed, not just by the public, but often by institutions like police and health workers, through a lens of blame.
However, this is a simplistic reading of a profoundly complex physiological and historical story.
This isn’t about judging a police officer who feels under threat — but we must ask: are they understanding what they’re seeing? Are we understanding what we are seeing?
The highs and lows of sugar dependence are the same as any other substance dependence: a physiological manipulation: the system gets wound up and crashes on the comedown.
We “reoffend” to avoid the crash.
That’s how it goes. No one wants to feel the collapse. So just before the low hits — while sliding downward — we reach for another high. That’s what people are doing.
Years of living in hypervigilance creates chronic tension inside a body with a ever- decreasing muscle mass. Fascia continues to plays its supportive role — until it shrinks to fit and then begins to restrict.
Movement becomes slow and effortful. The body feels heavy. Regulation becomes harder. Sugar feels 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 everything 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 that continues in the breath, in the blood vessels, in the gut, in the nervous system.
When we misunderstand this reality - in policy, in policing, in healthcare, in education - we risk judging stressed out people without empathy or insight.
We risk blaming symptoms and missing systems.
And we risk losing lives to ignorance we still dare to call care.
1. Chronic stress, trauma, and disease
McEwen, B. S. (2008). Central effects of stress hormones in health and disease: Understanding the protective and damaging effects of stress and stress mediators. European Journal of Pharmacology, 583(2-3), 174–185.
2. Sugar metabolism and stress
Ulrich-Lai, Y. M., & Herman, J. P. (2009). Neural regulation of endocrine and autonomic stress responses. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 397–409.
Lustig, R. H. (2013). Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease. Hudson Street Press.
3. Aboriginal health & embodied historical trauma
Atkinson, J. (2002). Trauma Trails: Recreating Songlines – The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia. Spinifex Press.
Paradies, Y. (2006). A systematic review of empirical research on self-reported racism and health. International Journal of Epidemiology, 35(4), 888–901.
About the Author:
Catherine Broué is a systems physiologist. After two decades in ICU and dialysis, she turned to the deeper question of real health, guided by mentors and the insights of Bohr and Buteyko. Her work centres on the body’s true regulators — breath and the central nervous system — and the return to parasympathetic dominance.