Healthful Tamales No Longer an Oxymoron

George Avila went home to Fresno this week with a gift for the whole family--a healthy new recipe for tamales.

During childhood Christmases, the student at UC Irvine learned from his mother and grandmother to make the traditional meal used by Aztecs for ancient festivities. These weren’t those uptown tamales you can order nowadays from the catalogs of Neiman Marcus and Williams-Sonoma, the latter for $42 per dozen plus $8.50 shipping. Nor the nouvelle chef assortment with pretentious stuffings like escargot in garlic butter, duck liver mousse and cherries jubilee.

No, the Avilas made the down-home kind with the common corn husk and spicy meat fillings. His mother’s recipe called for lard bought by the can. But she found it too bland for her taste. So she’d fry up some pork rinds (chicharrones) in the processed lard, and blend it with the fresh animal fats released by the pork skins. Only then was the resulting high-grade grasa deemed sufficiently sabrosa for Mrs. Avila’s pork tamales.

The Avilas never realized their merry custom was actually a recipe that can lead to obesity, blindness and early death from diabetes. And neither do millions of other Mexicans and Mexican Americans who treasure their annual tamaladas, the tamal-making parties that bring families together over a ritual of food and gossip.

I don’t mean to be El Grincho who took the fiesta out of tamal-making. But each one of those savory wraps could be a time bomb packed with as many as 1,000 calories? Maybe more, depending on the ingredients.

“Stop!” warns George, 23. “They’re bad for you. They’re going to kill you!”

George learned about the nutritional dangers hidden inside some tamales through his work at Latino Health Access, a Santa Ana nonprofit founded in 1993 to offer health education for the poor and uninsured. A patient enrolled in a diabetes education class went blind. In a roundabout way, that tragedy led the group to create a recipe for healthier tamales.

Community health workers, or promotoras, discovered that some doctors were not giving vision screenings as recommended for sufferers of diabetes, a chronic disease that can lead to kidney failure and blindness. Why test for loss of sight, doctors told Latino Health Access, if a poor patient can’t pay to prevent it? The operation to prevent blindness runs $5,000.

America Bracho, the agency’s president, posed the same question to her patients. Would they like to know if they needed surgery even if they couldn’t afford it?

Of course, they agreed. One woman said she’d sell her furniture to raise the money. Another said she’d go back to Mexico for the operation. And a man in the back declared, “I will have this operation even if I have to sell tamales!”

The gentleman unwittingly hit on the agency’s fund-raising concept and its slogan--”A healthier community even if we have to sell tamales.” Ever since, Latino Health Access has organized an annual Tamalada for Health, with proceeds going to subsidize eye screenings and surgeries.

Of course, an agency devoted to good nutrition could hardly sell tamales loaded with fat. So patients and promotoras came up with a reduced fat recipe that would pass strict Mexican muster. Corn oil replaced lard and ground rice was added for texture, George said. This year, the recipe and ingredients are being offered as a gift package by Orange County-based Special Occasion Service. (For information, call Vince Canori at 714-918-6039. Tamalada 2000 Gift Baskets start at $85, with 10% of the proceeds going to Latino Health Access.)

Ironically, the reduced fat tamales are closer to the kind made by Aztec chefs before the Spaniards came. The Mexica liked their frog tamales fat-free.

Back in Fresno, the healthy tamales sampled by Lucia Avila and her family were a hit.

“Everybody liked them,” George’s mother told me Monday, speaking in her folksy Spanish. “And they liked the idea of losing weight even more.”

This year, she has agreed to let her son take charge of the tamalada at home.

“This will be the first time he tries his hand at it,” said Mrs. Avila, with the caution of a woman who knows just how hard tamal-making can be.

George has confidence in the new recipe. It’s out with the fat, not the flavor. His nieces, ages 3 years and 1 month, will learn a new recipe for an old ritual.

“Just like you’d teach your daughter to crochet or your son to hunt,” he said, “this is a family tradition you don’t want to lose touch with.”

Or lose your health over.

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com