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.

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TC