Inuits May Have a Gene to Help with Fat Metabolism

#1

Today I listened to the LLVLC with John McDougall. I know probably a mistake. I thought his resorting, I am a doctor thats why I know to be a bit much. I was a little concerned about his comment about the Inuit women from 500 years ago who were found frozen and having osteoperosis to be a little concerning so I started doing a little more research. Found this article

about this study http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/09/fish-oil-good-you-depends-your-dna

We realize now that different human populations have adapted to different diets, so what’s healthy for one person might not be healthy for other people Nielsen says

There were also some references online to Inuits eating their traditional diet who aged faster and did not live as long. To go completely down the rabbit hole here is one from T. Colin Campbell http://nutritionstudies.org/masai-and-inuit-high-protein-diets-a-closer-look/#cite-ref-3

Thoughts?

(Bunny) #2

The Critical Differences Between Omega-3 Fats From Plants and Marine Animals

The 2 Sources of Omega-3 “…You can obtain omega-3 fats from both plants and marine animals like fish and krill. However, it’s really important to realize that these sources provide DIFFERENT TYPES of omega-3, and they are NOT interchangeable. …” https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/09/11/omega-3-from-plants-vs-marine-animals.aspx

Fish Oil Versus Flaxseed Oil (lack of phytoestrogens explains the osteoporosis in your post above) https://www.betternutrition.com/natural-rx/fish-versus-flax-oil

(Bunny) #3

Masai and Inuit High-Protein Diets: A Closer Look

“…Perhaps the best dietary survey done on Masai people is from the early 1980s, done by the International Livestock Centre of Africa[2]. This was at a time there had already been a dietary transition occurring among the Masai. Nonetheless, Masai women and children were found to consume large amounts of milk from their herd animals. Interestingly, they only consumed meat about 1-5 times per month. Again, the men’s intake was too difficult to accurately track but it seemed that they had more access to meat.

In addition, in this pastoral population, physical activity is a major way of life. If inactive Americans wanted to get the same amount of exercise, they would have to walk an additional 19km (almost 12 miles) per day(cited in 3). Because of the enormous energy expenditure and the relative resource limitations, the 1982-83 survey estimated that women and children were only consuming 50-70% of their “estimated average energy requirement”[2]. That is quite a calorie deficit, accounting for the thinness in the population.

So the diet, when measured, was not as meaty and bloody as the popular belief dictated, though it was very rich in milk. They consumed maize in the early 1980s, but this may have been a recent addition to the diet. Further, there was extreme physical activity and relative calorie insufficiency. Is it possible that these factors contributed to health of the Masai? …” http://nutritionstudies.org/masai-and-inuit-high-protein-diets-a-closer-look/

#4

Yes I saw that and it does not support using the Masai as an example of LC eating.

Please elaborate. So lack of vegetation and plant estrogens give the Eskimos osteoporosis? How does that help someone who is considering zero carb for example?

(Bunny) #5

Short answer: L-Carnosine supplementation (anti-sugar- glycate; sugar molecule’s bond with protein) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnosine

  1. Scientists Explore Carnosine’s Longevity Benefits http://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2012/6/Carnosine-Proven-Longevity-Factor/Page-01
  2. Antioxidants can extend lifespan of Brachionus manjavacas (Rotifera), but only in a few combinations. “…We tested 60 two-way combinations of selected antioxidants and only seven (12%) produced significant rotifer life extension. None of the 20 three- and four-way antioxidant combinations tested yielded significant rotifer life extension. These observations suggest that dietary exposure of antioxidants can extend rotifer lifespan, but most antioxidants do not. We observed significant rotifer life extension only when antioxidants were paired with trolox, N-acetyl cysteine, L: -carnosine, or EUK-8. …” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/22270335/

image
8652B4DE-21E0-4A53-BF6B-19A8D76F2892.jpeg1162Ă—1805 507 KB

Long answer:
Phytoestrogens help women with bone density variables; [real cause of osteoporosis is bad bacteria in gut flora; same anti-bodies that form to attack the bad bacteria also attack cartlidge, then the post menopausal low estrogen levels lower bone mass density and then bones break with the slitest provocation of physical stress. Lectins in marine sources of food are probably the culprit preventing proteases and digestive enzymes from digesting (breaking down) the fats\oils, sugars, proteins and carbohydrates (or something to that intercombinationary nature?) that cause the bad bacteria cultures in the gut flora!]

  1. Lectins and Protease Inhibitors as Plant Defenses against Insects http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf020192c
  2. Lectins in foods and their relation to starch digestibility http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0271531785801056
  3. Rheumatoid Arthritis and Osteoporosis The Rheumatoid Arthritis - Osteoporosis Link https://www.webmd.com/rheumatoid-arthritis/rheumatoid-arthritis-and-osteoporosis
  4. Lectins and Mitogens “…When a lectin contains multiple binding sites, they can interconnect large numbers of cells, causing them to clump together or agglutinate. Each molecule of a lectin has two or more regions, perhaps clefts or grooves, each of which fits a complementary molecule of a sugar or several sugar units of an oligosaccharide. It is by means of these combining sites that the lectin attaches itself to the sugars on cell surfaces. … http://www.dadamo.com/txt/index.pl?3011

Men* have their beloved testosterone at higher levels!

*Foods For Gynecomastia

HOW TO LOSE MAN BOOBS NATURALLY: BEST EXERCISES
https://gynecomastiapro.com/how-to-get-rid-of-man-boobs/

How To Get Rid Of Man Boobs? – The Complete Gynecomastia Treatment Guide http://nogyno.com

(Chris) #6

Neat article, unfortunately the actual study is paywalled so we can’t pick it apart.

That gyno site is hilarious, teaches different methods of fat loss and hocks fake gyno pills with the ads! :laughing:

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #7

The New York Times article is all “may”, “could,” and “might possibly,” so I’m betting that the underlying study’s conclusions are mostly speculative.

That said, there is no reason that the Inuit should not have adapted to their diet; the Northern Europeans and the Masai are known to both have mutations that allow the persistence of lactase production into adulthood, and I recently read there have been three other such mutations discovered as well.

But one thing that the Times article mentions is the assumption that the Inuit switched to a mostly carnivorous diet from some other diet, and I don’t believe that is very well-documented. It is documented, on the other hand, that a wide variety of hunter-gatherer cultures have eaten almost exclusively meat and have avoided most plant food sources—until they were brought into full contact with the rest of the world and were introduced to the Western diet.

Since so many non-Inuit seem to do equally well on an almost exclusively non-plant diet, I would say that although the Inuit might have an advantage, it is a general human capacity to thrive on an absence of carbohydrate. And also, without comparing Inuit DNA to the DNA of our Paleolithic ancestors, it cannot be said conclusively that the genetic differences discovered in this study are mutations away from the human norm; the other possibility is that non-Inuit populations have mutated to cope with diets that contain less meat and more carbohydrate. Without such a comparison it is impossible to say which of the two assertions is correct.

#8

Without doing a bunch of research and personally having no background in anthropolgy (so talking out of my aThis text will be blurred$s here), I do know there was a mini ice age that started about 1400 and lasted about 300 years and which had followed a period of global warming that had lasted a few hundred years, the Thames froze over in that time and Stradivarius violins were carved from icy trees, giving them their famous sound. This resulted in Greenland as a continent going from being a new home for northern europeans with plenty of grassland to being mostly abandoned as a frigid wasteland. I would imagine the same thing happened in other parts of the arctic circle with necessary adjustments to the diets of the people that lived there so it is entirely possible that the inuits did not always live on whale blubber

What concerns me is the claim by McDougall that they were not in fact thriving and had developed osteoperosis and the claim that the Masai really subsist on milk rather than meat. I am particularly concerned about this because I am at an age (early 50s) where my bones are not getting any stronger on their own. For my own reasons I cannot get a Dexa scan so do worry about this

(Lolly O'brien) #9

I am 1/4 Greenland Inuit and recently had my DNA and genomes analyzed. I have a gene that is specific to Inuk that actually allows fat to convert to energy. Apparently it’s rare and not found in other populations. I’m currently in an archaic gene study and this is what I have been told thus far.