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.
HALIBUT BONES |
“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.
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