"Inuit are under the belief that if they do not follow the alliances that their ancestors have laid out, the animals will disappear because they have been offended and will cease to reproduce.Borré tells of a time when she saw an Inuit woman fall ill who blamed her sickness on the lack of seal in her diet. 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. “Because if we don’t take care of our food, it won’t be there for us in the future. By contrast, whale blubber consists of 70 percent monounsaturated fat and close to 30 percent omega-3s, says Dewailly.Ok….got all that? Borré explains that through this alliance "both hunter and seal are believed to benefit: the hunter is able to sustain the life of his people by having a reliable source of food, and the seal, through its sacrifice, agrees to become part of the body of the Inuit. Science has shown that the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 should be as close to a ratio of 1:1 and certainly no more than 4:1. This is customarily done at the request of the individual concerned, but not always so.
63. Many prefer the name "Inuit," which means "the people" or "real people."
Much more important, the fats come from wild animals.Wild-animal fats are different from both farm-animal fats and processed fats, says Dewailly.
Native foods easily supply those 10 milligrams of scurvy prevention, especially when organ meats-preferably raw-are on the menu. And fermented seal flipper, they liked that too.”Cochran’s family also received shipments of whale meat from kin living farther north, near Barrow. But vitamin C oxidizes with time; getting enough from a ship’s provisions was tricky for early 18th- and 19th-century voyagers to the polar regions. During the summer they became pack animals, sometimes dragging up to 20 kg (44 lb) of baggage and in the winter they pulled the sled. “The young and urbanized,” says Harriet Kuhnlein, director of the Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment at McGill University in Montreal, “are increasingly into fast food.” So much so that type 2 diabetes, obesity, and other diseases of Western civilization are becoming causes for concern there too.Today, when diet books top the best-seller list and nobody seems sure of what to eat to stay healthy, it’s surprising to learn how well the Eskimo did on a high-protein, high-fat diet. Polar bears have played an important role in indigenous Arctic cultures for thousands of years. Cambridge Histories Online. “The traditional Inuit diet is fats and proteins, no sugar at all,” says Dewailly. You give thanks to the animal that gave up its life for your sustenance. During raids against other peoples, the Inuit, like their non-Inuit neighbors, tended to be merciless.A pervasive European myth about Inuit is that they killed elderly (Aged people who have outlived their usefulness and whose life is a burden both to themselves and their relatives are put to death by stabbing or strangulation. Most fish is still eaten raw. (1926). These fats appear to benefit the heart and vascular system. Farm animals, cooped up and stuffed with agricultural grains (carbohydrates) typically have lots of solid, highly saturated fat. You get to know where to pick which plant and what animal to take.“It’s part, too, of your development as a person. Modern Inuit and Inupiat value the flavor nuances of different bears or parts of a bear. The closer people live to towns and the more access they have to stores and cash-paying jobs, the more likely they are to have westernized their eating.