Re: DUMB was Re: Study says 'Glycemic Index' diet may work

From: Ignoramus6488 (ignoramus6488_at_NOSPAM.6488.invalid)
Date: 11/26/04 

Date: 26 Nov 2004 16:19:51 GMT

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 16:00:10 +0000 (UTC), W. Baker <wbaker@panix.com> wrote:
> I can't give article cites, but the diet of the Innuit, or Eskimo people,
> who had to survive in extreme cold, and with litlle agriculture in the
> frozen North, consisted of animal fat and protein. The fat was an

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Article from Discovery

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.
 
"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.

As for vitamin C, the source in the Eskimo diet was long a mystery. Most
animals can synthesize their own vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, in their
livers, but humans are among the exceptions, along with other primates and
oddballs like guinea pigs and bats. If we don't ingest enough of it, we fall
apart from scurvy, a gruesome connective-tissue disease. In the United
States today we can get ample supplies from orange juice, citrus fruits, and
fresh vegetables. But vitamin C oxidizes with time; getting enough from a
ship's provisions was tricky for early 18th- and 19th-century voyagers to
the polar regions. Scurvy-joint pain, rotting gums, leaky blood vessels,
physical and mental degeneration-plagued European and U.S. expeditions even
in the 20th century. However, Arctic peoples living on fresh fish and meat
were free of the disease.
 
Impressed, the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson adopted an Eskimo-style diet
for five years during the two Arctic expeditions he led between 1908 and
1918. "The thing to do is to find your antiscorbutics where you are," he
wrote. "Pick them up as you go." In 1928, to convince skeptics, he and a
young colleague spent a year on an Americanized version of the diet under
medical supervision at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. The pair ate
steaks, chops, organ meats like brain and liver, poultry, fish, and fat with
gusto. "If you have some fresh meat in your diet every day and don't
overcook it," Stefansson declared triumphantly, "there will be enough C from
that source alone to prevent scurvy."

In fact, all it takes to ward off scurvy is a daily dose of 10 milligrams,
says Karen Fediuk, a consulting dietitian and former graduate student of
Harriet Kuhnlein's who did her master's thesis on vitamin C. (That's far
less than the U.S. recommended daily allowance of 75 to 90 milligrams-75 for
women, 90 for men.) Native foods easily supply those 10 milligrams of scurvy
prevention, especially when organ meats-preferably raw-are on the menu. For
a study published with Kuhnlein in 2002, Fediuk compared the vitamin C
content of 100-gram (3.55-ounce) samples of foods eaten by Inuit women
living in the Canadian Arctic: Raw caribou liver supplied almost 24
milligrams, seal brain close to 15 milligrams, and raw kelp more than 28
milligrams. Still higher levels were found in whale skin and muktuk.

As you might guess from its antiscorbutic role, vitamin C is crucial for the
synthesis of connective tissue, including the matrix of skin. "Wherever
collagen's made, you can expect vitamin C," says Kuhnlein. Thick skinned,
chewy, and collagen rich, raw muktuk can serve up an impressive 36
milligrams in a 100-gram piece, according to Fediuk's analyses. "Weight for
weight, it's as good as orange juice," she says. Traditional Inuit practices
like freezing meat and fish and frequently eating them raw, she notes,
conserve vitamin C, which is easily cooked off and lost in food processing.

Hunter-gatherer diets like those eaten by these northern groups and other
traditional diets based on nomadic herding or subsistence farming are among
the older approaches to human eating. Some of these eating plans might seem
strange to us-diets centered around milk, meat, and blood among the East
African pastoralists, enthusiastic tuber eating by the Quechua living in the
High Andes, the staple use of the mongongo nut in the southern African
!Kung-but all proved resourceful adaptations to particular eco-niches. No
people, though, may have been forced to push the nutritional envelope
further than those living at Earth's frozen extremes. The unusual makeup of
the far-northern diet led Loren Cordain, a professor of evolutionary
nutrition at Colorado State University at Fort Collins, to make an
intriguing observation.

Four years ago, Cordain reviewed the macronutrient content (protein,
carbohydrates, fat) in the diets of 229 hunter-gatherer groups listed in a
series of journal articles collectively known as the Ethnographic Atlas.
These are some of the oldest surviving human diets. In general,
hunter-gatherers tend to eat more animal protein than we do in our standard
Western diet, with its reliance on agriculture and carbohydrates derived
from grains and starchy plants. Lowest of all in carbohydrate, and highest
in combined fat and protein, are the diets of peoples living in the Far
North, where they make up for fewer plant foods with extra fish. What's
equally striking, though, says Cordain, is that these meat-and-fish diets
also exhibit a natural "protein ceiling." Protein accounts for no more than
35 to 40 percent of their total calories, which suggests to him that's all
the protein humans can comfortably handle.

This ceiling, Cordain thinks, could be imposed by the way we process protein
for energy. The simplest, fastest way to make energy is to convert
carbohydrates into glucose, our body's primary fuel. But if the body is out
of carbs, it can burn fat, or if necessary, break down protein. The name
given to the convoluted business of making glucose from protein is
gluconeogenesis. It takes place in the liver, uses a dizzying slew of
enzymes, and creates nitrogen waste that has to be converted into urea and
disposed of through the kidneys. On a truly traditional diet, says Draper,
recalling his studies in the 1970s, Arctic people had plenty of protein but
little carbohydrate, so they often relied on gluconeogenesis. Not only did
they have bigger livers to handle the additional work but their urine
volumes were also typically larger to get rid of the extra urea.
Nonetheless, there appears to be a limit on how much protein the human liver
can safely cope with: Too much overwhelms the liver's waste-disposal system,
leading to protein poisoning-nausea, diarrhea, wasting, and death.

Whatever the metabolic reason for this syndrome, says John Speth, an
archaeologist at the University of Michigan's Museum of Anthropology, plenty
of evidence shows that hunters through the ages avoided protein excesses,
discarding fat-depleted animals even when food was scarce. Early pioneers
and trappers in North America encountered what looks like a similar
affliction, sometimes referred to as rabbit starvation because rabbit meat
is notoriously lean. Forced to subsist on fat-deficient meat, the men would
gorge themselves, yet wither away. Protein can't be the sole source of
energy for humans, concludes Cordain. Anyone eating a meaty diet that is low
in carbohydrates must have fat as well.
 
Stefansson had arrived at this conclusion, too, while living among the
Copper Eskimo. He recalled how he and his Eskimo companions had become quite
ill after weeks of eating "caribou so skinny that there was no appreciable
fat behind the eyes or in the marrow." Later he agreed to repeat the
miserable experience at Bellevue Hospital, for science's sake, and for a
while ate nothing but defatted meat. "The symptoms brought on at Bellevue by
an incomplete meat diet [lean without fat] were exactly the same as in the
Arctic . . . diarrhea and a feeling of general baffling discomfort," he
wrote. He was restored with a fat fix but "had lost considerable weight."
For the remainder of his year on meat, Stefansson tucked into his rations of
chops and steaks with fat intact. "A normal meat diet is not a high-protein
diet," he pronounced. "We were really getting three-quarters of our calories
from fat." (Fat is more than twice as calorie dense as protein or
carbohydrate, but even so, that's a lot of lard. A typical U.S diet provides
about 35 percent of its calories from fat.)

Stefansson dropped 10 pounds on his meat-and-fat regimen and remarked on its
"slenderizing" aspect, so perhaps it's no surprise he's been co-opted as a
posthumous poster boy for Atkins-type diets. No discussion about diet these
days can avoid Atkins. Even some researchers interviewed for this article
couldn't resist referring to the Inuit way of eating as the "original
Atkins." "Superficially, at a macronutrient level, the two diets certainly
look similar," allows Samuel Klein, a nutrition researcher at Washington
University in St. Louis, who's attempting to study how Atkins stacks up
against conventional weight-loss diets. Like the Inuit diet, Atkins is low
in carbohydrates and very high in fat. But numerous researchers, including
Klein, point out that there are profound differences between the two diets,
beginning with the type of meat and fat eaten.

Fats have been demonized in the United States, says Eric Dewailly, a
professor of preventive medicine at Laval University in Quebec. But all fats
are not created equal. This lies at the heart of a paradox-the Inuit
paradox, if you will. In the Nunavik villages in northern Quebec, adults
over 40 get almost half their calories from native foods, says Dewailly, and
they don't die of heart attacks at nearly the same rates as other Canadians
or Americans. Their cardiac death rate is about half of ours, he says. As
someone who looks for links between diet and cardiovascular health, he's
intrigued by that reduced risk. Because the traditional Inuit diet is "so
restricted," he says, it's easier to study than the famously heart-healthy
Mediterranean diet, with its cornucopia of vegetables, fruits, grains,
herbs, spices, olive oil, and red wine.

A key difference in the typical Nunavik Inuit's diet is that more than 50
percent of the calories in Inuit native foods come from fats. Much more
important, the fats come from wild animals.

Wild-animal fats are different from both farm-animal fats and processed
fats, says Dewailly. Farm animals, cooped up and stuffed with agricultural
grains (carbohydrates) typically have lots of solid, highly saturated fat.
Much of our processed food is also riddled with solid fats, or so-called
trans fats, such as the reengineered vegetable oils and shortenings cached
in baked goods and snacks. "A lot of the packaged food on supermarket
shelves contains them. So do commercial french fries," Dewailly adds.

Trans fats are polyunsaturated vegetable oils tricked up to make them more
solid at room temperature. Manufacturers do this by hydrogenating the
oils-adding extra hydrogen atoms to their molecular structures-which
"twists" their shapes. Dewailly makes twisting sound less like a chemical
transformation than a perversion, an act of public-health sabotage: "These
man-made fats are dangerous, even worse for the heart than saturated fats."
They not only lower high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL, the "good"
cholesterol) but they also raise low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL,
the "bad" cholesterol) and triglycerides, he says. In the process, trans
fats set the stage for heart attacks because they lead to the increase of
fatty buildup in artery walls.

Wild animals that range freely and eat what nature intended, says Dewailly,
have fat that is far more healthful. Less of their fat is saturated, and
more of it is in the monounsaturated form (like olive oil). What's more,
cold-water fishes and sea mammals are particularly rich in polyunsaturated
fats called n-3 fatty acids or omega-3 fatty acids. These fats appear to
benefit the heart and vascular system. But the polyunsaturated fats in most
Americans' diets are the omega-6 fatty acids supplied by vegetable oils. By
contrast, whale blubber consists of 70 percent monounsaturated fat and close
to 30 percent omega-3s, says Dewailly.

Omega-3s evidently help raise HDL cholesterol, lower triglycerides, and are
known for anticlotting effects. (Ethnographers have remarked on an Eskimo
propensity for nosebleeds.) These fatty acids are believed to protect the
heart from life-threatening arrhythmias that can lead to sudden cardiac
death. And like a "natural aspirin," adds Dewailly, omega-3 polyunsaturated
fats help put a damper on runaway inflammatory processes, which play a part
in atherosclerosis, arthritis, diabetes, and other so-called diseases of
civilization.
 
You can be sure, however, that Atkins devotees aren't routinely eating seal
and whale blubber. Besides the acquired taste problem, their commerce is
extremely restricted in the United States by the Marine Mammal Protection
Act, says Bruce Holub, a nutritional biochemist in the department of human
biology and nutritional sciences at the University of Guelph in Ontario.

 "In heartland America it's probable they're not eating in an Eskimo-like
way," says Gary Foster, clinical director of the Weight and Eating Disorders
Program at the Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Foster, who describes
himself as open-minded about Atkins, says he'd nonetheless worry if people
saw the diet as a green light to eat all the butter and bacon-saturated
fats-they want. Just before rumors surfaced that Robert Atkins had heart and
weight problems when he died, Atkins officials themselves were stressing
saturated fat should account for no more than 20 percent of dieters'
calories. This seems to be a clear retreat from the diet's original
don't-count-the-calories approach to bacon and butter and its happy
exhortations to "plow into those prime ribs." Furthermore, 20 percent of
calories from saturated fats is double what most nutritionists advise.
Before plowing into those prime ribs, readers of a recent edition of the Dr.
Atkins' New Diet Revolution are urged to take omega-3 pills to help protect
their hearts. "If you watch carefully," says Holub wryly, "you'll see many
popular U.S. diets have quietly added omega-3 pills, in the form of fish oil
or flaxseed capsules, as supplements."

Needless to say, the subsistence diets of the Far North are not "dieting."
Dieting is the price we pay for too little exercise and too much
mass-produced food. Northern diets were a way of life in places too cold for
agriculture, where food, whether hunted, fished, or foraged, could not be
taken for granted. They were about keeping weight on.

This is not to say that people in the Far North were fat: Subsistence living
requires exercise-hard physical work. Indeed, among the good reasons for
native people to maintain their old way of eating, as far as it's possible
today, is that it provides a hedge against obesity, type 2 diabetes, and
heart disease. Unfortunately, no place on Earth is immune to the spreading
taint of growth and development. The very well-being of the northern food
chain is coming under threat from global warming, land development, and
industrial pollutants in the marine environment. "I'm a pragmatist," says
Cochran, whose organization is involved in pollution monitoring and
disseminating food-safety information to native villages. "Global warming we
don't have control over. But we can, for example, do cleanups of military
sites in Alaska or of communication cables leaching lead into fish-spawning
areas. We can help communities make informed food choices. A young woman of
childbearing age may choose not to eat certain organ meats that concentrate
contaminants. As individuals, we do have options. And eating our salmon and
our seal is still a heck of a better option than pulling something processed
that's full of additives off a store shelf."

Not often in our industrial society do we hear someone speak so familiarly
about "our" food animals. We don't talk of "our pig" and "our beef." We've
lost that creature feeling, that sense of kinship with food sources. "You're
taught to think in boxes," says Cochran. "In our culture the connectivity
between humans, animals, plants, the land they live on, and the air they
share is ingrained in us from birth.

 "You truthfully can't separate the way we get our food from the way we
live," she says. "How we get our food is intrinsic to our culture. It's how
we pass on our values and knowledge to the young. When you go out with your
aunts and uncles to hunt or to gather, you learn to smell the air, watch the
wind, understand the way the ice moves, know the land. You get to know where
to pick which plant and what animal to take.

"It's part, too, of your development as a person. You share food with your
community. You show respect to your elders by offering them the first catch.
You give thanks to the animal that gave up its life for your sustenance. So
you get all the physical activity of harvesting your own food, all the
social activity of sharing and preparing it, and all the spiritual aspects
as well," says Cochran. "You certainly don't get all that, do you, when you
buy prepackaged food from a store.

"That's why some of us here in Anchorage are working to protect what's ours,
so that others can continue to live back home in the villages," she adds.
"Because if we don't take care of our food, it won't be there for us in the
future. And if we lose our foods, we lose who we are." The word Inupiat
means "the real people." "That's who we are," says Cochran.
 
 
  Intrepid explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson detailed his one-year all-meat
diet experiment in a series of articles called "Adventures in Diet" in
Harper's (November 1935, December 1935, and January 1936). You can read a
reprint of the articles at www.biblelife.org/stefansson1.htm.

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