The Inuit Paradox - How can people who gorge on fat and rarely see a vegetable be healthier than we are?
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From: TC on 19 Dec 2006 12:43 http://www.discover.com/issues/oct-04/features/inuit-paradox/ The Inuit Paradox How can people who gorge on fat and rarely see a vegetable be healthier than we are? By Patricia Gadsby Photography by Leon Steele DISCOVER Vol. 25 No. 10 | October 2004 | Medicine Patricia Cochran, an Inupiat from Northwestern Alaska, is talking about the native foods of her childhood: "We pretty much had a subsistence way of life. Our food supply was right outside our front door. We did our hunting and foraging on the Seward Peninsula and along the Bering Sea. GRAY SEAL "Our meat was seal and walrus, marine mammals that live in cold water and have lots of fat. We used seal oil for our cooking and as a dipping sauce for food. We had moose, caribou, and reindeer. We hunted ducks, geese, and little land birds like quail, called ptarmigan. We caught crab and lots of fish-salmon, whitefish, tomcod, pike, and char. Our fish were cooked, dried, smoked, or frozen. We ate frozen raw whitefish, sliced thin. The elders liked stinkfish, fish buried in seal bags or cans in the tundra and left to ferment. And fermented seal flipper, they liked that too." Cochran's family also received shipments of whale meat from kin living farther north, near Barrow. Beluga was one she liked; raw muktuk, which is whale skin with its underlying blubber, she definitely did not. "To me it has a chew-on-a-tire consistency," she says, "but to many people it's a mainstay." In the short subarctic summers, the family searched for roots and greens and, best of all from a child's point of view, wild blueberries, crowberries, or salmonberries, which her aunts would mix with whipped fat to make a special treat called akutuq-in colloquial English, Eskimo ice cream. Now Cochran directs the Alaska Native Science Commission, which promotes research on native cultures and the health and environmental issues that affect them. She sits at her keyboard in Anchorage, a bustling city offering fare from Taco Bell to French cuisine. But at home Cochran keeps a freezer filled with fish, seal, walrus, reindeer, and whale meat, sent by her family up north, and she and her husband fish and go berry picking-"sometimes a challenge in Anchorage," she adds, laughing. "I eat fifty-fifty," she explains, half traditional, half regular American. No one, not even residents of the northernmost villages on Earth, eats an entirely traditional northern diet anymore. Even the groups we came to know as Eskimo-which include the Inupiat and the Yupiks of Alaska, the Canadian Inuit and Inuvialuit, Inuit Greenlanders, and the Siberian Yupiks-have probably seen more changes in their diet in a lifetime than their ancestors did over thousands of years. The closer people live to towns and the more access they have to stores and cash-paying jobs, the more likely they are to have westernized their eating. And with westernization, at least on the North American continent, comes processed foods and cheap carbohydrates-Crisco, Tang, soda, cookies, chips, pizza, fries. "The young and urbanized," says Harriet Kuhnlein, director of the Centre for Indigenous Peoples' Nutrition and Environment at McGill University in Montreal, "are increasingly into fast food." So much so that type 2 diabetes, obesity, and other diseases of Western civilization are becoming causes for concern there too. Today, when diet books top the best-seller list and nobody seems sure of what to eat to stay healthy, it's surprising to learn how well the Eskimo did on a high-protein, high-fat diet. Shaped by glacial temperatures, stark landscapes, and protracted winters, the traditional Eskimo diet had little in the way of plant food, no agricultural or dairy products, and was unusually low in carbohydrates. Mostly people subsisted on what they hunted and fished. Inland dwellers took advantage of caribou feeding on tundra mosses, lichens, and plants too tough for humans to stomach (though predigested vegetation in the animals' paunches became dinner as well). Coastal people exploited the sea. The main nutritional challenge was avoiding starvation in late winter if primary meat sources became too scarce or lean. These foods hardly make up the "balanced" diet most of us grew up with, and they look nothing like the mix of grains, fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, and dairy we're accustomed to seeing in conventional food pyramid diagrams. How could such a diet possibly be adequate? How did people get along on little else but fat and animal protein? What the diet of the Far North illustrates, says Harold Draper, a biochemist and expert in Eskimo nutrition, is that there are no essential foods-only essential nutrients. And humans can get those nutrients from diverse and eye-opening sources. One might, for instance, imagine gross vitamin deficiencies arising from a diet with scarcely any fruits and vegetables. What furnishes vitamin A, vital for eyes and bones? We derive much of ours from colorful plant foods, constructing it from pigmented plant precursors called carotenoids (as in carrots). But vitamin A, which is oil soluble, is also plentiful in the oils of cold-water fishes and sea mammals, as well as in the animals' livers, where fat is processed. These dietary staples also provide vitamin D, another oil-soluble vitamin needed for bones. Those of us living in temperate and tropical climates, on the other hand, usually make vitamin D indirectly by exposing skin to strong sun-hardly an option in the Arctic winter-and by consuming fortified cow's milk, to which the indigenous northern groups had little access until recent decades and often don't tolerate all that well. article continues.... ***** TC
From: coonskin.amestwp.com on 19 Dec 2006 13:27 "The Inuit Paradox How can people who gorge on fat and rarely see a vegetable be healthier than we are?" The answer is the same for the traditional chinese diet which was 70 percent refined starch sources from grain, the rest from veggies and some little meat on some occasions. The major source of culturally based health problems today in contrast to these two populations is we are chroniclly overweight from consuming too many calories and have a small fraction of the physical activity those traditional lifestyles had. Fat is in the main stored sugars glucose/fructose, which can in turn be turned back into sugars for the body to use as its primary fuel and nutrition energy source. The inuit ate the fat, stored carbs, of animals who ultimately sourced it from glucose producing plants in the aquadic ecosystem even in artic areas. That fat was turned into sugars their body could use. As the inuit article said, the biggest problem with diet was starvation when animals were scarce or their flesh too lean. Lean meat protein can be a problem, there was in the times of the western explorers a health disorder called the "deer" disease. Deer in general have little body fat and the flesh is quite lean anddid not provide from fat the amount of sugars for the body to use and those who ate it most of the time had health problems. That is why bison hunters made sure to get the hump where most fat was stored as most of the animal is also lean. Vitamins and minerals were taken from animal flesh for the inuit. Humans are only one of a very few species of animals which don't produce their own vitamin c. As with glucose, the animals they ate it either got them from up the ecosystem or by eating what few plants grew. They mentioned also eating the contents of reindeer stomachs, predigested plant material, they did not mention that the contents of other land and sea creatures were also eaten including some which feed on kelp and other aquatic plant sources. So in general the inuit did eat plant sourced nutrition all the time, it was just a few ecosystem steps removed from them.
From: TC on 19 Dec 2006 14:37 coonskin.amestwp.com wrote: > "The Inuit Paradox > > How can people who gorge on fat and rarely see a vegetable be healthier > than we are?" > > The answer is the same for the traditional chinese diet which was 70 > percent refined starch sources from grain, the rest from veggies and > some little meat on some occasions. The major source of culturally > based health problems today in contrast to these two populations is we > are chroniclly overweight from consuming too many calories and have a > small fraction of the physical activity those traditional lifestyles > had. > > Fat is in the main stored sugars glucose/fructose, which can in turn be > turned back into sugars for the body to use as its primary fuel and > nutrition energy source. > > The inuit ate the fat, stored carbs, of animals who ultimately sourced > it from glucose producing plants in the aquadic ecosystem even in artic > areas. That fat was turned into sugars their body could use. > > > As the inuit article said, the biggest problem with diet was starvation > when animals were scarce or their flesh too lean. Lean meat protein can > be a problem, there was in the times of the western explorers a health > disorder called the "deer" disease. Deer in general have little body > fat and the flesh is quite lean anddid not provide from fat the amount > of sugars for the body to use and those who ate it most of the time had > health problems. > > That is why bison hunters made sure to get the hump where most fat was > stored as most of the animal is also lean. > > Vitamins and minerals were taken from animal flesh for the inuit. > Humans are only one of a very few species of animals which don't produce > their own vitamin c. As with glucose, the animals they ate it either > got them from up the ecosystem or by eating what few plants grew. They > mentioned also eating the contents of reindeer stomachs, predigested > plant material, they did not mention that the contents of other land and > sea creatures were also eaten including some which feed on kelp and > other aquatic plant sources. > > So in general the inuit did eat plant sourced nutrition all the time, it > was just a few ecosystem steps removed from them. And you still haven't explained what you mean by "Lifestyle Food Cult". TC
From: monty1945 on 19 Dec 2006 14:41 The traditional Inuit diet was a "natural born killer" if there ever was one. These people were lucky to live into their early 40s. You can go to my free web site for ciations from the literature: http://groups.msn.com/TheScientificDebateForum-/ I do agree that vegetables are not necessary for a long life. My great grandparents lived to extreme old age - in good shape too - without eating much in the way of vegetables. What they did do, not consciously, was avoid all major sources of polyunsaturated fatty acids. The Inuit did not, and they died at young ages because of it. What you find in many claims is that this or that group of people have "low cholesterol" or other supposed markers of good health and longevity, yet then when you look at what actually happened to the people, the reality can be very different indeed.
From: TC on 19 Dec 2006 15:02
monty1945(a)lycos.com wrote: > The traditional Inuit diet was a "natural born killer" if there ever > was one. These people were lucky to live into their early 40s. You Can you back this up with specific references? > can go to my free web site for ciations from the literature: > > http://groups.msn.com/TheScientificDebateForum-/ > > I do agree that vegetables are not necessary for a long life. My great > grandparents lived to extreme old age - in good shape too - without > eating much in the way of vegetables. What they did do, not > consciously, was avoid all major sources of polyunsaturated fatty > acids. The Inuit did not, and they died at young ages because of it. > What you find in many claims is that this or that group of people have > "low cholesterol" or other supposed markers of good health and > longevity, yet then when you look at what actually happened to the > people, the reality can be very different indeed. |