Atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) begins in
childhood. Post-mortems on American soldiers who died in
Korean War showed that there were already clear indications of
atherosclerosis in twenty-year-olds.
In Greenland atherosclerosis is a more or less unknown
disease. For example, in the 1970s there was not a single
death due to cardiovascular disease in the hunting district of
Uummannaq with about 3,000 inhabitants. In recent years some
Greenlanders have moved to Denmark. Following the same pattern
as elsewhere in the world, these immigrants have contracted
the same cardiovascular diseases as the Danes. So the very low
incidence of cardiovascular disease in Greenland cannot be
explained by hereditary immunity. In other words, something in
the environment has given the Inuit protection against "the
big killer". So it is a natural step to investigate the
Greenland diet.
As early as 1908 the Danish doctors Krogh & Krogh studied the
Greenlandic diet. They demonstrated that Greenlanders were the
most meat-eating population known at that time. The Danish
doctors Bang and Dyerberg confirmed this in the studies they
made between 1970 and 1979. They found that certain poly-
unsaturated fatty acids, the so-called OMEGA-3 fatty acids,
are richly represented in the diet, which consists mainly of
seal and small whales. These polyunsaturated OMEGA-3 fatty
acids may explain the low incidence of cardiovascular
diseases. It is true that the food in the diet of the western
world also includes polyunsaturated fatty acids, especially
since vegetable margarine has replaced butter on most people's
lunch tables; but these belong to another family - the OMEGA-6
acids.
Both OMEGA-3 and OMEGA-6 are essential substances which the
organism needs to get from its diet. OMEGA-3 is particularly
well-represented in sea-food, OMEGA-3 in food from land.
Both these fats are structural elements in every single cell
in the organism, and can to some extent replace each other.
But it is very important whether it is one type or the other
that forms part of the blood platelets. The more OMEGA-6, the
stronger the tendency for the blood platelets to clot. This
lays the basis for thrombosis, and to some extent for
atherosclerosis. In the diet of the western world the ratio of
OMEGA-6 to OMEGA-3 is 50:1 (that is 50 kilos of meat for every
kilo of fish). In the Inuit diet the ratio is 1:1.
These studies created the basis for the fish oil boom. The
large quantities of OMEGA-3 in fish could be extracted,
concentrated and sold as medicine at high prices. The raw
material price for refined sardine oil is between DKr 3 and 4
per kilo, while the selling price for capsules is about DKr
1,000 per kilo. The raw material is so cheap that it is used
as heating fuel in some places.
However, new studies have shown that fish oil has no effect on
atherosclerosis. Nor does fish oil seem to have influence on
either the cholesterol content in the blood or the formation
of free radicals.
For the last two years Greenland has been participation in the
International Atherosclerosis Project. This is a project
supervised by experts at the Louisiana State University in New
Orleans in the USA. Among other things, they have studied the
coronary arteries of the hearts of over 23,000 deceased
persons from sixteen different countries. It is the coronary
arteries that the fatal blood clots from.
The provisional results of the new studies in Greenland have
shown that atherosclerosis is far less widespread among the
Inuit than elsewhere in the world. But there are also great
individual differences. Inuit who have lived on the diet of
the western world have developed atherosclerosis just as in
Europe and the USA. But a seventy-year-old who has lived on
the traditional Inuit diet of seal and whale has coronary
arteries that are just as elastic as those of a twenty-year-
old Dane.
Advertisements for fish oil claim that Inuit have a low
incidence of cardiovascular disease because they eat a lot of
fish. This is not the case. Inuit do not eat very much fish,
and have never done so. This was also evident from Bang and
Dyerberg's studies. On average, they only ate fish once or
twice a week, while they ate seal or whale twice a day! Many
nations eat much more fish than Greenland, and interestingly
enough these nations have a far higher incidence of
atherosclerosis.
Another interesting thing is that more fisheating nations on
average have a higher cholesterol level than people do in
Greenland. Calculations have been done to estimate how much
one could lower the cholesterol count of a European if he ate
Inuit food. It emerges that the figure one arrives at is still
higher than the cholesterol level in Inuit. So there must be
some thing else in the Inuit diet that can lower the
cholesterol count - something other than the OMEGA-3 fats.
A person with a high level of cholesterol came to the National
Hospital in Nuuk. He had tried different diets and medicinal
treatment, but his cholesterol count was still higher than was
good for him. He was urged to eat only traditional Greenlandic
food. In just a month his cholesterol count fell by a whole
70%. Of course, more work is being done on this observation.
It is essential to find out which elements in the diet have
such a dramatic effect. As a first step we have been looking
more closely at seal blubber.
In the work of extracting oil from seal blubber, it was
striking to see how stable this oil is. Some oil has been kept
for two month in a small, open jar and - despite the fact it
had been standing in the furnace room - it had not gone off.
It has since been confirmed that seal oil contains large
quantities of Vitamin E and selenium as well as some anti-
oxidants which protect it from oxidation and thus from
becoming rancid.
There is also a process of "going rancid" in the human
organism, but here it is a much more dangerous matter. The
constant oxidation process leaves the very toxic "free
radicals" which we now know are one of the factors that start
off a wide variety of illnesses, including atherosclerosis.
The presence of antioxidants is crucial in avoiding these
illnesses. And anti-oxidants have in fact become a popular
article in health food stores.
About ten years ago, in the Greenlandic hunting community of
Siorapaluk, the northern most settlement in the world, it was
established that there was a very high selenium content in a
number of blood tests. The level was between ten and twenty
times higher than in Europeans and Americans. So we must
presume that the free radicals do not have much of a chance
with an Inuk.
Atherosclerosis is still not a widespread disease in
Greenland. The traditional hunting of sea mammals is kind to
the environment and shows consideration for the animals
hunted. But after the campaign against sealskin in particular,
it is not very profitable. And the traditional diet is having
to compete hard with the cheap chicken dishes and minced meats
sold in the Greenland shops of today.
The Inuit have always known that you need to eat seal and
whale to stay in good health. Science is now also arriving at
the conclusion that the diet of the Inuit has qualities that
have gone unrecognized hitherto.