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How The Inuit People Thrive on Almost No Carbs
Nutrition | April 27, 2015
A few warriorz have mentioned the Inuit people in my recent posts about eating meat and low-carb diets. I did some investigating and was really fascinated by what I discovered!
More commonly known as Eskimos, the Inuit live mainly in Alaska, Canada and Greenland – incredibly cold climates that are commonly known as arctic (that’s really frickin’ cold!). More importantly for us, their diet is almost completely lacking in carbs of any kind. Not even fruits and vegetables aside from some wild berries in the summer! Naturally, I was incredibly curious about what they eat and how it relates to my perspective on diet and nutrition.
Traditionally speaking, the Inuit live by hunting and fishing. Their sources of food include seal, walrus and even whale. They also eat a lot of wild game including moose, elk, duck, geese, etc. Pretty much their diet is made up of protein and fat and lots of it!
Muktuk is very common staple of the Inuit diet as well. What is muktuk? Oh nothing, just chunks of whale blubber! Apparently, muktuk has the consistency of a car tire according to Patricia Cochran, a native Inupiat (a tribe of the Inuit) and director of the Alaska Native Science Commission. Still, such fat must be very important in such a harsh climate where food is hard to come by.
What’s most interesting about the Inuit diet is how they get their essential nutrients. In an interview given to Discover Magazine, Harold Draper, a biochemist and expert on Eskimo nutrition, says that the Inuit get their essential nutrients from unlikely sources. Instead of fruits, vegetables and whatnot, the Inuit get their nutrients from the variety of fish oils that make up their diet as well as – wait for it – an abundance of organ meats. Nothing goes to waste. Liver, kidneys, hearts, brains (BRAINS!), etc., are all eaten. Many of these organ meats contain a lot of vital nutrients. In fact, some organ meats contain, of all things, Vitamin C. This is why the Inuit never developed scurvy – a terrible disease caused by a lack of Vitamin C that was very common in sailors for some time.
Also, for all that whale blubber and organ meat, heart disease is relatively low among the traditional Inuit according to this study. Unfortunately, now that ‘progress and development’ are available to the Inuit in the form of restaurants and grocery stores, illnesses such as diabetes are skyrocketing.
Who’s ready for my new recipe using muktuk? Seriously though, what the Inuit people demonstrate to us is that many conventional ideas about diet and nutrition are not truths set in stone. There are many diverse and different ways for us to thrive.
Private Member |
ohio, united states
I still feel like potato carrots or bananas cannot be bad as they come from the earth. Its what we add to them that’s bad. You would probably lose weight eating these foods every day , but cut out the table sugar, white flour, mayo, salt, high fructose corn syrup, etc.
Private Member |
Interesting topic. However, I think it can be dangerous to conclude that the inuit diet is healthy for the average person. There is so much conflicting information out there – some articles state that the inuits had no coronary heart disease, while other articles conclude that osteoporosis and cancer plagued the inuit people. Truth is, there is a lack of information on the health status of the traditional inuit people because there are very, very few reliable studies that were conducted back then. And as already mentioned in many of the comments, the inuits’ bodies and diets adapted to survive in an extreme environment, completely unlike how the majority of us live today. So I certainly won’t be taking any risks, trying out a diet with so little evidence to back it up.
Another side of this is, that the world is a very different place today than it was back then. The meat industry is already the cause of environmental damage on a massive scale – greenhouse gas emission, water pollution and rain forest destruction… The seas are polluted with toxins and heavy metals that bio accumulate and poison larger sea animals and the humans who consume them. The oceans are so overfished that 80% of the worlds fish stocks are over exploited or in decline. Even if the inuit diet somehow was the answer to becoming lean and healthy, having more people consume more animal products would ruin the planet even faster than we already are.
I don’t mean to bash your post – it really is a fascinating topic – but it is vital that we look at the bigger picture when making lifestyle choices.