The Inuit Paradox is that the Inuit eat lots of fat and hardly any vegetables or fruit yet are much healthier than groups who follow conventional dietary guidelines. In particular,
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.
Likewise, the fact that Greenland Eskimos had very low rates of heart disease led to the discovery of the importance of omega-3 fatty acids. If you read anything on this subject you will come across the concept of “healthy fats”. Sure, some fats are good for you, no doubt about it. Weston Price was the first of many to make this point. But is it the whole story? Attempts to reduce heart disease by giving people fish oil have had disappointing results. Perhaps they got the dose wrong. Or perhaps they missed something crucial. Here is what the Inuit eat:
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.” [emphasis added]
In the rest of the article and in all discussions of the subject I have seen you won’t find a word about fermented food. Yet I believe that was crucial. The fermented food had lots of harmless bacteria that caused the immune system to stay awake; heart disease is caused by infection too slowly fought off. Why do the French have low rates of heart disease? It’s not only the wine, it’s also the stinky cheese they eat. Why do the Japanese have low rates of heart disease? It’s not only the fish, it’s also the miso and natto. I’ll be blogging more about this — stay tuned.
You will love Stephan’s series on the Tokelauan islanders who, before becoming Westernized, got 50% of their calories from saturated fat (coconut oil.) That’s the highest for any population ever recorded, including the Masai tribe. Tokelauan rate of heart attack? 0.0%
https://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/01/tokelau-island-migrant-study.html
heart disease is caused by infection too slowly fought off.
Quite an assertion, Seth — source?
“heart disease is caused by infection too slowly fought off”
Heart disease is caused by inflammation from eating too much sugar, which explains why the French, Japanese and Eskimos don’t get it as much as the Americans.
Bacteria don’t just produce antigens. They produce vitamins, proteins, enzymes, mineral complexes. But we’ve all got a trillion bacteria in our guts already, more than the eukaryotic cells in the rest of our bodies. What’s so special about the ones in rotten food?
Your excitement is contagious, but this is hardly new:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&fkt=929&fsdt=5958&q=probiotics+and+immunity&btnG=Google+Search
Would you have been this excited about this discovery if you’d just read an article somewhere describing the positive role of probiotics on the immune system? Or does hearing it with your own ears via a self-experiment result in an endowment effect of sorts?
What, exactly, is new about what you are stating?
Confidence, meet Tom, agl1, and Nathan Myers. The notion that the Inuit — not to mention the French and the Japanese — have a low rate of heart disease because of the fermented food they eat is entirely new, as far as I know. Of course, the low rate of heart disease in the French is often attributed to wine, but wine is not a probiotic. Nor do researchers think it is the dead bacteria in wine that are the crucial element. Some have suggested it is the alcohol (because beer intake has similar correlations). More recently — Sunday on 60 Minutes — resveratrol, found in grapes, was claimed to be important.
Nathan, the immune system must distinguish between the bacteria we have all the time and new bacteria, which can be dangerous. Fermented foods are a source of new bacteria.
Inflammation is due to infection or at least foreign bacteria. Heart disease is often linked to infection. For example, it is correlated with gum disease. When I say “heart disease is due to infection too slowly fought off” I mean it as a hypothesis, not an established fact. It is plausible because heart disease is linked to infection. Obviously the faster you fight off an infection the less damage it does.
Whether sugar has an effect on heart disease I don’t know. But since when do the French have a low sugar intake?
I see, you appear to be making two separate assertions:
1. Dead bacteria (and associated substances) improve the immune system
2. An improved immune system helps prevent heart attacks
That combination is pretty novel. Thanks for the followup.
I have suffered from tendonitis at one place or another for years. While all have had explanations, it seems like I had more problems than most people. This made me think I may have a systemic problem countering inflammation. The posts and comments on omega-3 fats and inflammation were one of the reasons I started reading your blog a couple of months ago.
I have also found some books on diet and inflammation. One of them (something like “The Anti-Inflammation Zone” by Sears, although I don’t have it in front of me so that may not be quite right), talks about a ratio of a certain omega-6 fat to EPA (an omega-3 fat) as an indicator of inflammation. He recommends staying in the 1 to 3 range. What makes this applicable to your post is that he references a study of Greenlanders from the 1970s who were in the 0.5 range. While they had very low rates of heart disease, depression, and other inflamation-linked afflictions, apparently they had trouble fighting infection (a benefit of inflamation). The author also mentions clotting problems at low ratios (not speficially in relation that study, I think, but also mentioned in the article you linked to above).
How about this hypothesis? The fats in their diet lead to low inflamation, which has the heart and other benefits. The probiotic foods stimulate the immune system, which helps balance their diet’s difficulty fighting infection.
Finally, on an unrelated note, I caught part of a nature documentary last month that said, “These baboons, like most primates, spend their early mornings grooming each other.” I thought immediately of your morning faces.
I am very skeptical of fermented foods-introduce-bacteria-that-keep-your-immune-system-awake hypothesis. (Why would would my immune system be asleep?)
Stephan has a lot to say about fermented foods and why/how they might be beneficial:
https://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/search?q=fermented
1. Pre-digestion of food
2. Eliminate anti-nutrients and toxins
3. Lower pH of certain foods making minerals more bioavailable
4. Probably most important:
Provides Vitamin K2 — (this is a very interesting post and addresses natto and foie gras https://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/06/vitamin-k2-menatetrenone-mk-4.html)
The French have a lower sugar intake than the Americans because they very rarely drink fizzy drinks like Coke. Insulin resistance is the root cause of the inflammation. Also, Spain, Portugal and Italy also have low rates of heart disease, and they don’t eat as much cheese as the French. There is a hypothesis that it is due to the sunshine.
So, rotted foods are favored by old people because young people have little difficulty finding bacteria they haven’t already been seeded with?
I suppose it’s important for the bacteria to be killed in the stomach so they don’t get established in the colon and necessitate finding yet other varieties. That seems to recommend eating rotted foods in small amounts, and not in a form in which the bacteria have already formed spores.
If it’s true, we should expect to see similar behavior in other long-lived mammals.
I am partial to the idea that fermented foods have numerous health benefits. I would also think that this would be easy to measure on a wide scale: koreans eat kimchee (fermented cabbage) everyday, nearly every meal. Meanwhile, the youth are eating it much less. So, we’d expect to see very low rates of some diseases (and frequency of colds?), but increasing.
Then again, there are a lot of other environmental factors increasing as well: stress, pollution, urbanization, social disconnection, etc., so maybe it is hard to isolate.
On the supposed benefits of ingesting bacteria:
“Eating dirt can be good for you – just ask babies”
https://iht.com/articles/2009/01/27/healthscience/snbabies.1-416618.php
The error is in considering this a “paradox.” The current mainstream guidelines, as expressed by, for instance, the USDA Food Pyramid, are mistaken and ill-founded.
As Taubes outlines in Good Calories, Bad Calories, a population’s incidence of the major chronic diseases (diabetes, heart disease, chancer) and conditions (obesity) follows the introduction of sugar and starch as staples. The more processed, readily available, and cheap these are, the greater the incidence. This phenomenon can be seen over and over through reading centuries of records of explorers, missionaries, settlers, etc.
Probiotics are undoubtedly beneficial, but the simplest answer to the Inuit’s good health was this: they didn’t live on foods that make humans sick.
In 1935, the Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson wrote a three-part article appearing in Harper’s Magazine about his experiences living and eating with the Inuit, and his subsequent Harvard-sponsored experiments with a vegetation-free diet. It’s a fascinating read. Google “vilhjalmur stefansson adventures in diet” to find the text online, or try this link: https://www.biblelife.org/stefansson1.htm
VesnaVK, thanks for the link. I’m very glad to have it.
Just to back up VesnaVK, I cannot recommend the Stefansson articles highly enough. Stefansson is an engaging writer with a wry sense of humor, and his accounts of how he slowly came round to enjoying the Inuit diet of boiled fish and rotten fish are both entertaining and educational. His second and third articles relate his later experiences leading other Arctic expeditions and his famous year-long meat-only experimental diet. In both cases, he had to deal with entrenched popular and scientific prejudices which are not much different from what we see today.
mgl, you will surely want to read my upcoming post on how Stefansson is a bad example.
All I can say about this is this stuff ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejuvelac ) is one of my favorite things, ever. Back when I was a database administrator at Whole Foods, I used to drink it daily and never felt better. It’s best when you have it on an empty stomach.
I would really like to do some self experimentation with it, but am not sure how to start or even what to track.
Have you seen this study? ‘Cognitive performance among the elderly and dietary fish intake: the Hordaland Health Study’, led by Eha Nurk. I found it at https://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/86/5/1470?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&author1=nurk%2C+eha&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&resourcetype=HWCIT . My wife was reading a summary of the study in a health/nutrition letter, which implied that the researchers were surprised that non-Omega-3-rich fish also were beneficial to the brain. Of course, I immediately thought of your premise in this thread and did a Wikipedia search to find that yes, Norwegians eat fermented fish (rakfish, sursild). Perhaps the detailed data for this study could be searched using a filter based upon whether food was fermented?
Yes, I’ve seen that study. Thanks for reminding me of it.
Have you considered fermented cod liver oil?
https://tinyurl.com/cck3gl
Another explanation of the ‘French Paradox’ – their milk is mostly of type A2 – same for Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Asia, Africa and Japan.
A1 (the bad stuff) is what we get in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and most of Scandinavia (Although A2 Corp in NZ makes only A2 milk).
A1 intake correlates closely with incidence of heart disease and type 1 diabetes
https://www.maternity.org.nz/pdfs/THE%20A1%20vs%20A2%20MILK%20CONTROVERSY.pdf