In a sense, nutrition science gives us the closest thing we have to an accurate view of the role diet has played during our evolution. We can observe how different foods affect the health of modern humans. Then we can try to reverse engineer the evolutionary processes that might explain those effects. If we miss the mark piecing that history together, at least it won't hurt anyone's health. The Paleo diet idea doesn't work like this. Instead, it puts the cart before the horse by starting with its premise, this seductive idea of a lost state of physical perfection we can regain today through diet, and then tries to twist and pull and jam the science so it kinda sorta looks like it supports that premise. And that premise is built on limited data and unlimited interpretation. I've been amazed at how many smart people have fallen for this. Fortunately, some other smart people have heard the Paleo sales pitch but just wouldn't buy it. In this video I'll give a few of them the credit they deserve.
One of the best critiques of the Paleo diet idea I've seen was written by biology professor Marlene Zuk in the New York Times. I highly recommend you read this one.
Biological anthropologist Barbara King has Paleo totally pegged, from it’s design fallacy to it’s historical inaccuracies to its incompatibility with our modern world. Dr King is too smart for Paleo.
Marion Nestle has looked at the animal-food-based Paleo diet concept and found it out of step with our contemporary nutritional needs.
Christine Knight has written a couple articles that demonstrate her intelligence and skepticism. She understands the motivated reasoning propelling this repackaging of the old low-carb diet fad.
Dr Knight has noticed that even though this diet is rooted in a contrived nostalgia, ironically it separates people from their real culinary traditions.
Although Alexander Strohle's paper on the Paleo diet is in German, it does include an English abstract. It is apparent to him that the Paleo diet idea is hazy and speculative.
Here is another path to doubting the Paleo premise. This is an analysis from 2002 calling into question whether humans are all that well adapted to meat eating, concluding instead that we are essentially unspecialized frugivores.
These authors are warm to the Paleo diet idea but acknowledge its nutritional flaws. They stay rooted in our current realities, noting the problem of environmental toxins in fish while finding exciting possibilities in plant-based functional foods.
Katharine Milton knows we hardly need encouragement to eat more animal foods. Modifying our diets to be more like our primate ancestors so that we consume more fruits and vegetables would be the better strategy.
The great nutrition researcher, David Jenkins, put this idea to the test.
He conducted a study with an experimental diet based upon an even earlier era than the Paleolithic, the Miocene. This diet was compared to a simple and generally healthful diet that nevertheless included animal foods. In the end, the Miocene diet was even more effective for improving cholesterol than the first statins.
Jenkins was perceptive in noticing that eating such a nutrient-dense diet took a lot of time. Today many of us spend hardly any time at all preparing our food, but this was not the case for our ancestors. We should understand that the lowering of the priority we place on food today comes with a trade-off. Preparing and eating healthy fresh food requires extra time and effort. We shouldn't kid ourselves otherwise.
As you can see in the last paragraph, Jenkins didn't need to resort to primal fantasies to explain why the Miocene diet was so effective. Our modern knowledge of nutrition could have predicted its success. Take, for example, the amazing 145 grams of fiber the participants consumed per day.
We know people consume far too little fiber now.
If you like you can look to past populations and their high fiber diets and conclude we are evolved to eat this way.
Or you could look at contemporary research into fiber and see that people who eat more fiber live longer. It doesn't really matter how you choose to think of food as long as you are doing the right things to be healthy.
And that's the end of my Paleo Honor Roll. I am really disappointed that it isn't longer. I hope additions can be made soon.
The Primitive Nutriton Series now shifts gears to the topic of cholesterol. The new cavemen are doing their best to confuse us about it. I'll try to restore some balance next.
Primitive Nutrition 32: Ancient and Out of Fashion
Promoters of primitive nutrition like to keep our attention on cultures that depended heavily on animal foods. As I have shown you, the overall health picture in these cultures has been presented in an overly sanitized and idealized way.
If they were truly interested in learning from successful traditional diets, they would find there is much to contradict their beliefs. Some of their omissions are glaring.
Before I get into some of those, I should acknowledge that authors from long ago brought their biases into discussions of food just as authors do today.
If you look for them, you can find claims of the wonders of a meaty diet far less reserved than those of Weston Price. For example, here you see that raw flesh can produce ferocity of mind, not to mention a love of liberty.
Perhaps a dietary pattern more widely agreed to promote good health and longevity, if not ferocity of mind and love of liberty, is the Mediterranean diet, with its plentiful fruits and vegetables.
The next time you see a study claiming to compare a fad diet to the Mediterranean diet, look at the fiber intake and remember this slide. The real Mediterranean diet is a high fiber diet.
The longest lived among those eating a Mediterranean diet consumed lots of fruits and vegetables. Greens were not just part of the salad but also the main dish.
The Japanese have also long been admired for their health and longevity, which cannot be said for hunter gatherers.
They were famous for these virtues even in the 19th century.
This slide will give you an idea of what they were eating then. These are the results of a survey conducted in 1879 showing the high carb diets enjoyed throughout Japan. Most were eating plenty of cereals.
Here are the findings from another survey, this of the Okinawans in 1919. The Okinawans are perhaps the most studied of the long-lived populations. Back then their carb-heavy diets didn't vary much by class.
Japan was also a country believed to have unusually low rates of cancer. Some physicians saw this as fitting a pattern. In countries where meat consumption was at a minimum, cancer was less common.
In Gambia hardly anyone ever suffered from cancer. This was true throughout the Gold Coast.
In this region very little animal food was eaten. Once again, these people ate high carb.
A connection between meat eating and cancer had been observed in other parts of Africa as well.
Observations like these have also been made in the present day.
This author had Weston Price-like ambitions of presenting successful dietary practices from around the world with an emphasis on physical fitness.
Overall the author saw a consistent link between physical strength and the consumption of plant foods. Where this link was not apparent, he thought poverty and disease could be blamed.
Among the cultures known for physical strength, only a handful ate much meat by his reckoning. Legumes seemed to be particularly beneficial.
This book also includes observations about the rarity of cancer and appendicitis among vegetarians in Africa.
He attempts some rough cancer epidemiology...
and he finds strong correlations for alcohol, tobacco and meat, and these correlations are seen today as well. He was, however, off base in his implication of coffee and tea.
We can see a connection between strength and diet in other old sources as well. Here is a text that contrasts the strength of the carnivorous Eskimos, who were said to be relatively weak, with the natives of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, who were said to be extremely strong. So what did they eat?
The Andamaners mainly ate tubers and fruit. High carb beat low carb for strength then as now.
I'll offer a few other examples of overall health in primitive cultures that resist the primitive nutrition dogma. Loren Cordain has referenced the Pygmies as possessing a healthy metabolism due to their primitive lifestyle. What does that lifestyle include?
Lots of carbs. They will actually trade their meats for carbs.
And among those carbs are grains. The pygmies are a poor example of the Paleo diet idea.
They are certainly hunters, though. They are also very small in stature. Here Pygmy height trends are compared with those of African Bantus over time. Whereas the Pygmies did not grow by much in nearly a century, in sixty years Bantu grew quite significantly. What do the Bantu eat?
Their staple food is corn. They also eat grains, legumes and tubers. Meat is less important in their diets. Doesn't Paleologic say grains and legumes made people shorter?
Lastly, here is an isolated Brazilian hunter gatherer population that exhibits no increase in blood pressure with age, low cholesterol, and low blood sugar. The authors of this study give some credit to their diet of complex carbohydrates and vegetables.
If you've watched all the videos in the Primitive Nutrition Series so far, you know now why I am not impressed with the Paleo diet idea. I'm not alone, either. A Paleo Honor Roll is next.
Primitive Nutrition 31: The Native Australian Model
Australian aborigines are another primitive culture to gain recent prominence online as examplars of superior health.
The dentist Weston Price found them to have excellent teeth. These men certainly have enviable teeth. No doubt diet at least partially explains their lack of dental caries as Price noted. So these people weren't eating sugar.
The arrival of Europeans in Australia brought a variety of problems for the Aboriginals extending to the present day. Their traditional diet had been low in sugar and refined carbohydrates, but the Europeans brought to them new and unhealthy foods. By 1975 some were consuming as much as 400 lbs of sugar per year per capita. This single fact expresses just how bad the industrialized diets of poor Aboriginals could get. Price was witnessing an early stage of this trend.
Diet may not be the only factor to explain Price’s observations of their teeth. This author raised the possibility that selective pressures on dentition were important for some Aboriginal ancestors. Perhaps, once again, genetics was a factor.
Another important consideration is the naturally occurring fluoride in the water where some Aboriginals lived. Remember that fluoridation came into practice in the US following epidemiological studies linking higher natural fluoride concentrations in drinking water sources to low tooth decay. Here you see this has been seen as a contributor to Aboriginal dental health even quite recently.
Fluoride levels were so naturally high in some areas that up to 30% of children had moderate to severe fluorosis, which is the staining or damaging of teeth by excess fluoride. This important factor was left out of Price's book.
Australian aboriginals seem to have had their reputation enhanced online by this photo featuring an older gentleman with a great physique, right there in the middle.
Here is the source of the photo. Not surprisingly, the man in the center is a tribal chief. The title states he died of fright upon seeing an automobile. So in spite of his healthy appearance he likely died of a cardiovascular event.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say this man's physique was probably not representative of Australian Aboriginals of his day. His Tiwi culture conferred status based on foraging ability. Maybe he was a chief because his fitness and his hunting and gathering skills went hand and hand.
Here are some other older Aborigines. They aren't built quite the same, are they? Weston Price thought these were among the oldest humans in the world. I doubt he based this belief on official birth records.
This book from 1894 tells a different story, stating their men seldom lived to see their 50th year.
Let's look at some other Aborigines. These guys look fine but unexceptional.
Same thing here.
And here, too. They certainly weren't overweight, but few people were before they encountered industrialized foods.
Here's another unremarkable guy. This text informs us that Aborigines smoked, ate insects, and occasionally practiced cannibalism. None of these are recommended in fad diet books.
This author rated the physical strength of Aboriginal males as below average.
Let's look more closely at their diets. This very old book says they ate corn and tubers. Those aren't exactly Paleo. Moths and frogs were enjoyed as well.
The aborigines did have dietary practices that might be more enjoyable to copy than eating moths and people. They ate a lot of high-fiber foods, too, so I'll put up one of my favorite slides again from the Paleobiotics Lab.
In the middle paragraph you see the Aborigines were big consumers of fruit and dietary fiber. No wonder they maintained a healthy weight.
Paleopathology of Aboriginal Australians, Stephen Webb
As best we can tell, Aborigines were relatively healthy, but they really don't fit any idealized notion of perfect health. They were not free of disease and stress.
Unfortunately, like all primitive cultures, the Aborigines dealt with parasitic infections. This is a very important fact to consider when assessing the health of primitive humans.
And lastly, some hunter gatherer aboriginals were very far from model Paleo dieters. Some hunter gatherers in the Western Desert of Australia ate plenty of cereals.
Their diets could have been described as predominantly vegetarian.
As you can see, the model Paleo cultures weren't quite as ideal and representative of their beliefs as the fad diet promoters want you to think. If you want to see examples of old dietary practices that actually produced uncommonly good health, you'll want to watch the next video.
The Masai tribe of east Africa are a favorite model for the primitive nutrition crowd. It seems their attention is drawn to them by two publications.
The first is again Weston Price's book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Price related a unique Masai ritual.
They puncture the necks of their cattle to drain and consume their blood.
Visit The History Channel website and you can see this process in living color. Here they capture the blood in a gourd. Then they physically pound it into a gelatinous clump.
Here is what results. It's ready to eat. Does it look appetizing to you?
I have yet to see a Paleo dieter eat anything like this. There are drawbacks to consuming uncooked blood, as I'll show you soon.
It appears to me the other source which piqued interest in the Masai was this study, which indicated their blood cholesterol was low despite diets rich in animal foods. Heart disease seemed rare. The lead author, George Mann, did not conclude animal foods are somehow protective against heart disease back then, but some of today's primitive dieters will say just that.
Mann later examined the bodies of Masai men at autopsy. He observed that although they did not develop lesions that might lead to heart attacks, he did note that their arteries were as thick and hardened as those of old men in the United States. By this time he thought what saved the Masai from heart attacks was the larger diameters of their blood vessels, perhaps due to exercise.
Primitive nutrition bloggers have drawn their own conclusions.
Surely the atherosclerosis observed at autopsy was due to the intrusion of modern foods among some of them. The thought that the meat and animal fat in their diets may have caused their atherosclerosis, which is the most obvious explanation, is not entertained.
George Mann's observations intrigued other researchers, who sought explanations for their low cholesterol. It was shown that urbanized ethnic Masai who did not consume traditional diets were similar to ethnic Europeans in body size measurements, although their blood pressure and cholesterol levels were lower. Perhaps genetic traits were part of the explanation.
Attention was also given to the dairy component of their diet. George Mann tested the effects of the fermented milk products they consumed for lipid-lowering effects. He believed special properties in their milk explained their cholesterol levels as well,
A recent study examined the bacteria in the fermented milk products the Masai consume. These bacterial strains were shown to be able to survive the acidic environment of the stomach. Could they then lower cholesterol?
Perhaps. Under controlled circumstances, bacteria in fermented milk have been shown to lower cholesterol levels. We might therefore say that in a sense, the Masai were on a natural cholesterol lowering medication.
Some plants can also be thought of as lipid lowering agents. We know they can be almost as effective as statins.
The Masai recognized the medicinal properties of many plants...
So they may have benefited from this fact. Most of the plants these researchers linked to the Masai diet could potentially lower cholesterol.
I'll offer one more explanation for the low rates of heart attack among the Masai. They live on a plateau at high elevation.
High altitude lowers LDL or bad cholesterol...
and raises HDL or good cholesterol, so high altitude probably does protect against heart disease.
High altitude probably explains the low cholesterol observed in people living in the Swiss Alps ...
And people living in the Himalayas.
Recently it has been shown that high elevations are protective against ischemic heart disease, too.
No one was aware of the effects of altitude on heart disease back when Mann presented his findings in the '70s. Not everyone agreed with Mann's belief that their dairy protected them, including these researchers, who I think really nailed what is probably the most important factor. They just don't eat very much.
These researchers demonstrated that energy intake among the Masai was extremely low. You will see a pattern in the material I present in these videos that low calorie diets regardless of composition improve blood lipids. On a side note, you can pause the video if you'd like to read about how their grass-fed cattle added a lot of saturated fat to their diets.
This is further evidence of their very low energy intake compared to energy expenditure.
Look at pictures of Masai and it will be apparent to you that they have low BMIs. Eat few enough calories and you might look like this, too, regardless of the plant to animal ratio in your diet.
Consuming raw blood probably means consuming parasites. The Weston Price Foundation present themselves as concerned about prenatal nutrition. You should bear in mind that one of their favorite so-called wise traditions cultures produced outrageous levels of sterility and infant mortality during Weston Price's era. These people were heavily burdened by parasites. Somehow the Weston Price Foundation thinks this is a model for us today.
Here again is my slide to make the point that parasitic infections lower blood cholesterol. We now have a list of factors contributing to their low cholesterol that includes genetics, bacterial strains in their fermented dairy, plant sterols, altitude, low calorie diets, and parasitic infections. Yet the intransigent animal-food promoters ignore all this and simply choose to believe that animal foods don't raise cholesterol or cause heart disease. Those are called confounders, folks. You need to account for them.
They have another problem. The Masai aren't the big meat eaters they want them to be. That's just ahead in Part II.
Primitive Nutrition 30: The Masai Model, Part II
The Masai diet is usually described as almost all milk, meat and blood. Look at old accounts like this one and you'll see this is an oversimplification. Only the young excluded other foods.
After the age of twenty-five, they then ate more vegetables and even grains.
This 1925 book makes clear that diets varied by age and gender and include flour. These Masai weren't very committed to the Paleo diet.
But they definitely ate a lot of animal foods, so it is little wonder they needed to find some effective natural laxatives.
Even this old trade publication for the meat industry took note of their constipation. Here they compare the Masai to a vegetarian tribe. Quoting the article, "The carnivorous tribe, however, showed greater prevalence of intestinal stasis and of rheumatoid arthritis than did the vegetarian tribe." Intestinal stasis is constipation, and once again, Paleo imaginings of animal foods helping rheumatoid arthritis are undermined.
The Masai are an unlikely model for the Paleo crowd. They consume meat only on rare occasions. Most wild game is taboo.
Like other cultures that rely on animal foods, they inhabit marginal lands. Droughts have forced them to practice agriculture these days. In other words, the Masai are adapting to modern realities. Imagine that. Pastoralists adopting agriculture in response to changing facts. How very human. This foreshadows my Waking to Realities section.
As inhabitants of marginal lands, the Masai have religious beliefs that center around cattle, which are considered sacred. Paleo dieters should note their view of carnivores. They see them as gluttonous, competitive, and selfish. Meat presupposes death and is therefore restrained.
Due to their marginal environment cattle are considered a capital good. They are more valuable alive to produce milk. Eating them would directly make them poorer and more vulnerable.
Once you understand how much the Masai valued their cattle, you can begin to appreciate their remarkable gesture after 9/11, when they donated 14 cattle to the United States. I am quoting a line from this article now. "As one elder told a reporter, a cow is a “handkerchief to wipe away tears”."
You may recall that Loren Cordain links dairy to higher levels of IGF-1 and cancer. Did the Masai suffer from cancer?
Here is a survey that looked at various Kenyan tribes and their rates of nasopharyngeal cancer. The Masai were in a cluster of groups with higher rates of these.
The tribes that suffered more than them were also dependent upon cattle and milk, such as the Nandi,
The Kipsigis,
And the Elgeyo.
Notice one tribe is especially low. The Taita had only one case observed. Maybe we should copy their lifestyle instead.
The Taita were effectively banned from hunting long before the survey of cancers was conducted.
Consequently, the Taita are serious consumers of healthy carbs from whole plant sources, including grains, legumes, and potatoes.
Only occasionally would meat supplement their high-carb anti-Paleo diets. They have a dish called Kimanga that sounds fantastic.
Their diet was dominated by vegetables, beans, and grains, with very little meat or dairy.
Returning to the Masai, as I have shown you, they have very low BMIs, generally speaking. They are also very tall. This conforms with Allen's rule. They have adapted to their environment over time to better dissipate heat from there lanky bodies.
Hard core Paleo Crossfitters who think they are following the footsteps Masai tribesmen should remember that the Masai men were known for their thin physiques. After their warrior days, they preferred to just take it easy.
As I mentioned earlier, the Masai lifestyle produced difficulty with fertility. Real Paleo-style seasonal stress is part of the explanation. In their marginal lands, food shortages are a recurring problem.
The Weston Price Foundation might be surprised to learn that milk was a taboo food for their pregnant women. They deliberately avoided dairy fats. They were concerned milk would cause their babies to grow too much, making for an unmanageable delivery. They preferred carbs during pregnancy, instead. This is not the only reference I found for this practice.
Here's another.
I wonder what Sally Fallon would make of all this.
This may have been a wise tradition indeed. As you've seen, animal proteins do seem to increase ovulatory infertility.
And dairy does appear to increase birth weight.
Dairy also seems to promote height. Maybe the height among Masai is partially explained by this. Dairy does seem to make things grow, like calves, for example.
And cancer.
One final note. George Mann, the researcher who first brought to light the low cholesterol of the Masai, let their example push him to the fringes of medicine, preferring to believe in saturated fat conspiracy theories rather than accept that other factors might be at play with the Masai. Here you see in 1979 he had marginalized himself.
Not that he minded. He liked to argue.
As you'll see, the cholesterol deniers' beliefs are all over the map. In Mann's case, he accepted that cholesterol was a contributor to heart disease, just not cholesterol from the diet. He preferred to explain heart attacks as the result of a lack of exercise. Of course, exercise is a good prevention strategy, but Mann's views of cholesterol in the diet have not fared well over the years. He has not been the only one to be overly distracted by the Masai. I hope these videos lay this outlier group's example to rest once and for all.
I'll look at one more Paleo model culture, the Australian Aborigines, in the next video.
Historical Eskimos, with their blubbery, meaty diets, are favorites of modern day cavemen and low carb promoters.
Weston Price. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.
Weston Price presented them as one of his models of nutritional wisdom. They do seem to have had good teeth on their traditional diets. As for the rest of their bones, we'll soon see.
Just like with the other cultures he documented, Price included the usual photos of what he felt were the effects of the consumption of junky industrialized foods rather than traditional foods.
Whenever an animal-food based primitive culture is shown to have had a health problem, predictably the low carbers attribute it to a carb here or there that was somehow sneaked into their diets, as though it were a powerful toxin able to obliterate all the great benefits of the saturated fats. That's why we're lucky to have this old issue of National Geographic.
It has an article about the discovery of two female mummies around 440 years old discovered near Point Barrow, far inside the Arctic Circle. If there had ever been a perfect time and place to be naturally low carb, this was it. One mummy had been in her early 40s, the other in her 20s.
Here are the remains of the woman in her 40s..
Just as we would expect of people living in such a hostile, frigid place, their remains showed evidence of stress. Despite their young ages, they showed evidence of atherosclerosis, a type of hardening of the arteries. They also suffered from osteoporosis, or the degradation of their bones. A painful parasitic infection was apparent as well. All this could be called the inevitable result of a diet of mostly raw animal carcasses.
This is the coronary artery of an even older female mummy than the two in that National Geographic issue, in this case from around 400 AD. We see pronounced atherosclerosis. This is natural cardiovascular health the low carb way, long before refined carbs.
What we have here are effectively long term studies of an animal-based "wise traditions" diet, and the results aren't pretty. We see evidence of heart disease, weak bones, and parasitic infections. Let's look at these three problems a bit more closely in Eskimos, starting with their cardiovascular disease.
Early in The Paleo Diet, Loren Cordain tells us the Greenland Eskimos were exemplars of heart health, referencing the work of Bang and Dyerberg.
This is a less-than-ideal reference for a man who argues that lower cholesterol is better. Bang and Dyerberg found that the Greenland Eskimos had what we would today call borderline high cholesterol levels.
To whatever extent they may have been protected from heart attacks, Bang and Dyerberg said it was likely because of the extremely high levels of omega-3 fatty acids they consumed. They thought the price for this protection was their higher rate of stroke, which Cordain fails to mention.
The myth of low cardiovascular disease among Eskimos was examined by these researchers. They found heart disease was not less common in Eskimos than in whites. Mortality from stroke was higher, however. I'll mention here that I will use the terms "Eskimo" and "Inuit" interchangeably in these videos.
Those researchers also found a reliable old testimonial indicating that cardiovascular disease was actually quite common for these people.
In addition to Cordain, another Paleo diet founder,
radiologist S Boyd Eaton,
references the supposedly low cholesterol levels of Canadian Eskimos to make his case for caveman cuisine.
Cordain cited Canadian Inuit for low cholesterol as well in this article. This is an interesting but totally misleading chart. Low blood cholesterol is definitely a good thing. However, this chart is wrong to imply a meaty diet is the best way to get you there. If you fact-check this chart, you'll see that all that meat didn't deliver low cholesterol for the Eskimos.
This website did the fact-checking for us. I recommend you visit it and read this blog post. I'll just borrow enough of their material here to show you that they certainly did not have low cholesterol and, more importantly, they had horrible life expectancy. The perspective of the authors here is that higher cholesterol is better, so obviously I don't agree with their take on this. I'll say more about this site later in my Playing Games With Your Heart videos.
Paleo promoters should also understand the Greenland Eskimos were consuming cereals at least as far back as 1855, and those were likely refined rather than whole grain and therefore unhealthy. Look at the bottom right at that radical increase in the consumption of sugar for the 1930 through 1933 period and you won't blame Weston Price for being troubled by the trends he was seeing back then. Of course, those old frozen mummies were not eating any sugar and they still had diseased arteries, so this doesn't get their blubbery diets off the hook for that.
For the Ancel Keys detractors out there, it's worth a mention that this pioneer of heart health was aware of the Eskimo diet. He was also aware of their tragically short life expectancy.
Here is more evidence of heart trouble among the Eskimos. Between 1956 and 1958 the bodies of Eskimos were autopsied for this study. Hardening of the arteries was observed to be quite common.
More recently a large cohort of Eskimos were studied. Despite favorable lipid profiles, rates of stroke and cardiovascular disease were high. Notice they carried a high pathogen burden. That brings us to another problem created by their traditional diet.
Parasitic infections. Eskimos certainly had them. Here you see a 1950 record of the prevalence of intestinal parasites among them. This is inevitable if you are routinely consuming raw untreated fish and meat.
These parasites would have had the effect of lowering their blood cholesterol. Drs Eaton and Cordain should have clued you in on this, don't you think?
Circumpolar natives had high infection rates of one notorious parasite, toxoplasma. The Inuit were the most afflicted group in this study with 72% of their pregnant women infected.
In the next part of this video I'll get back to their osteoporosis, and bring up a few other issues as well.
Primitive Nutrition 28: The Eskimo Model, Part II
So far we've seen that Eskimos on traditional diets suffered from parasitic infections and heart disease.
What about the osteoporosis observed in those Eskimo mummies? This Paleopathologist attributed that to their high protein diet.
Extreme protein intake is fingered for blame here as well. Bone mineral content in Eskimos was assessed as deficient in a 1974 study. The Eskimos compared poorly to whites, who presumably were eating a lot more carbs than the Eskimos were.
So is their high protein intake really the best explanation for their weak bones? There are conflicting studies regarding the effects of high protein diets on bone health. However, the evidence is more clear that dietary saturated fat is highly damaging to bones.
This has been demonstrated through animal experimentation.
What were the traditional Eskimo diet and lifestyle like? First, as you could tell from that National Geographic article, Eskimos suffered serious privations. If you pause the video to read this excerpt from Captain Charles Francis Hall's 1864 book Life with the Esquimaux you can understand how other migrations to frigid climates might have failed. This is the real hardcore Paleo lifestyle you are not likely to see practiced by the modern fad dieters.
Under these conditions the Eskimo learned to not be overly picky about their meat. If it was rancid, they would eat it anyway.
They ate every part of their catches as well, including brains, blood, and feces. They even found a way to get a little fiber eating the partially digested moss in caribou stomachs.
Eskimo were known to eat outrageous quantities of meat. This is a good slide to remember when someone tells you meats promote satiety.
Such extreme conditions and foods left a mark on the genetics of the Eskimos, who sometimes display a rare sugar intolerance. They were not as good with carbs as you probably are. Your genome is probably much different, and in more ways than just this.
Eskimos have greater tolerance for cold than other races. No surprise there.
Also, circumpolar populations epitomize Allen's rule, having shorter relative limb length than other races. This is an adaptation to cold climate.
Cold environments produced an example of Allen's rule in Neanderthals, too. Here you see an analysis of the Neanderthal body shape that considered climate pressures, which would have favored less skin surface area for better retention of heat.
Eskimos are a curious choice of dietary model for Paleo dieters and Crossfitters. It is in the interest of those in cold climates to have more insulating body fat. Eskimos were long ago considered unusually short and overweight. They were not considered to be physically strong, either.
They were observed to age poorly as well. This is usually not an openly stated goal for fad diets.
Descriptions of Eskimo from the nineteenth century can be uncomfortable to read. These unflattering descriptions wouldn't be worth reviewing if Eskimos weren't presented as a model for us today.
Traditional Eskimos had other health problems as well. They have been afflicted by some cancers, for example. A century ago reports stated otherwise, but they were later shown to be inaccurate. Any observed low occurrence of cancer soon was understood to only be a result of infectious diseases which ended their lives before cancers had a chance to develop.
Eskimos actually have some of the world's highest rates of certain cancers.
Here is a graph for that.
A cancer was also identified in the remains of an extinct Paleo-Eskimo.
Perhaps some of that can be explained by the toxins in their food supply. Eating such fatty food so far up the food chain is bound to convey environmental contaminants into these people. Inuit milk contained up to 10 times the level of persistent organochlorine compounds as found in the milk of women in Quebec. These authors say Inuit women have the highest known body burdens of these pollutants.
I'm not sure what to make of Eskimo vitamin A levels. To briefly repeat what I presented in my Weston Price video, the Weston Price Foundation would have you believe vegetarians are deficient in vitamin A because they don't consume toxic levels of preformed vitamin A. Here again the price for this meaty, fatty diet is a body burden of heavy metals and other pollutants.
Despite obtaining their vitamin A in what low carbers says is a preferable, highly absorbably form, Alaskan Eskimos have been observed to have deficient levels in their blood. Maybe there is more to the vitamin A story than they will tell you.
More evidence that Eskimos of the old days aren't ideal models of health comes from this doctor's account from 1935 of his services to them. This is sometimes referenced to argue that they were especially healthy, but such a reading requires ignoring some key passages. In this one, children were said to frequently die after eating meat that had begun to spoil.
He said Eskimos also commonly suffered from appendicitis. Eskimos called this "rotten guts."
Higher rates of appendicitis in other cultures have been linked to increased meat-eating.
My final slide for the Eskimos brings us back to our mummies. Here you see that all those omega 3 fatty acids don't seem to help Eskimos keep plaque out of their arteries. For the Eskimos, just like everyone else, saturated fat causes atherosclerosis.
In the next video I'll look at the Masai of Africa, another fabled low-carb culture. They don't have to endure the icy conditions of the Arctic. Can they be a better example for us than the Eskimo? Join me and we'll find out.
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