Friday, March 09, 2007

The Inuit Paradox

This is an article from Discover magazine entitled The Inuit Paradox, and asks how people on an almost all animal diet could be so healthy. It's subtitled, "How can people who gorge on fat and rarely see a vegetable be healthier than we are?" Indeed, how can they?

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...No people, though, may have been forced to push the nutritional envelope further than those living at Earth’s frozen extremes.

[...]

...(A)ll 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.


Want to find out how these people were so healthy? Read the whole interesting article here!

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