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As you dig into your Thanksgiving leftovers, take a lesson from our
neighbors to the far north?not all fat is created equal. This
ScienCentral News video has more.

Good Fat

Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the Season of Eating, a time when
many of us go off our diets. But the Inuit people of the Far North did
not have a choice of diets. They led a subsistence way of life.

Patricia Cochran, an Inupiat who grew up in Nome, Alaska and is now the
executive director of the Alaska Native Science Commission, grew up
living off the land. "As I say in our areas in Alaska, our Safeway
store is when you open up your door," she says. "That's where we go
shopping, that's where we find our food. We really did grow up in a
very traditional way, living off the land, learning how to hunt, how to
fish?we had everything from marine mammals to small birds to roots and
berries, and herbs, a lot of fish, and in my particular area, reindeer
was an important part of our subsistence foods as well."

"The Inuit people are numerous groups of hunter-gatherers," says Loren
Cordain, a professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science
at Colorado State University and author of the book The Paleo Diet.
"It's not a single group. There are many, many cultures and they lived
in many many parts of the Arctic. There was no single Inuit diet, other
than the fact that none of them had a whole lot of carbohydrate or
fresh fruits and vegetables."

image: ABC News
Scientists studying the Inuit in the 1970s found that as a group, they
suffered much less than their European counterparts from certain
diseases, such as coronary heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and
diabetes mellitus. Yet their diet was very high in fat from eating
foods like whale, seal, and salmon. Discover Magazine called this the
"Inuit Paradox."

The solution to the paradox may lie in the fact that not all fat is
created equal. "[The Inuit] ate a lot of marine animals, like walruses
and seals, whales and so forth, and the blubber of these animals is a
very high source of monounsaturated fat,"says Cordain. "So if you
contrast the Inuit diet to the Western diet, it actually turns out to
be lower in saturated fat?very high in fat, but high in healthful fat,
monounsaturates and polyunsaturates, high in a specific type of
polyunsaturates called omega-3 fatty acids that come from the marine
food chain."

Cordain says that while the Inuit diet is not optimal, there are a few
things we can learn from it. "Let's take the good of the Inuit, the
lean protein, the good fats?minimize refined cereal, the refined
sugars, and increase the fruit and vegetables in our diet," he says,
adding that the single most important thing we can do in our diets is
increase the omega-3 fatty acids, which are found in many oily fish.

For Cochran, food is as much cultural as it is nutritional. "The food
is an important part of who we are, and our relationship to the land
and the Creator is an important part of who we are," says Cochran. "Our
foods, our traditional foods, the wild foods that come from Mother
Earth, are the things that nourish us, not only our minds but also our
bodies and our souls. They are really all connected. I think a lot of
people could learn from the fact that our communities have been around
for centuries and there's a reason that our communities have been
around for centuries. We are a very healthy, resilient, adaptable
community and we have been able to live in the harshest environments
anywhere on the planet and to not only survive, but really to thrive in
those conditions. There's no question to me that that is an important
lesson for the rest of the world to experience."

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Yet another "paradox". How can so many peoples around the world eat so
poorly, according to the USDA pyramid, and still be healthy and the US
people who follow the USDA be so obese?

TC