Thread by @mnvrsngh

Advocates of Paleo-inspired carnivore diets (e.g., @PaulSaladinoMD @SBakerMD) often point to the Inuit as having a traditionally carnivorous diet. Yet there are at least five problems with using the Inuit as the quintessential ancestral carnivores:

1. The Inuit lifestyle is relatively new. Human migrations into the Arctic occurred just a couple thousand years ago. If the idea is to return to an ancestral diet, they are arguably a less appropriate model than early agricultural populations who lived thousands of years before.

2. Inuit people ate plants. For example, in their intensive study of a Baffin Island community's diet in the 1980s, Kuhlein & Soueida found Inuit people eating kelp, berries, sorrel, & willow: https://t.co/MO9T8XA2xGsciencedirect.com/science/articl…

One of the most common sources of plant material seems to have been the stomachs of hunted animals. See, for example, this passage about Copper Inuit eating semi-digested moss. Franz Boas similarly observed Baffin Island communities eating plants from the stomachs of caribou.

3. Plants and vegetables have been popular as they've become available. Here's a passage about the Copper Inuit in the 1970s. Despite fruits and vegetables being expensive to bring in, people were willing to pay substantial prices to get them.

4. According to Karen Hardy, marine mammal fat has high levels of glycogen, which provides carbs when eaten raw or frozen. The same is not true for land mammals. The meat the Inuit traditionally ate thus seems to provide more carbs than farm-raised cows, pigs, and chickens.

5. The Inuit have evolved specialized adaptations to deal with their unique diets. They also have lower levels of ketones than non-Inuit, raising the question of whether ketosis has been harmful enough to select for adaptations to counter its effects. science.org/doi/full/10.11…

I think this last point is especially important. Pointing to the Inuit as a model of how non-Inuit should eat ignores the crucial fact that their physiologies have adapted to their exceptional diet, which potentially includes mechanisms for dealing with otherwise harmful effects.

The lesson from comparing the diets of hunter-gatherers & forager-farmers is not that there is a single human diet, especially a carnivorous one. Rather, humans have flourished on a diversity of diets, many of which have been high in plants & carbs:

https://twitter.com/mnvrsngh/status/1521505488780808195

Sources:
- Several of these points appeared in @HermanPontzer's "Burn" & a recent article by Hardy et al.:
- map: https://t.co/FCHF9rq0ag
- screenshots from Jenness (https://t.co/4MDJDGb7bf) & Condon (https://t.co/LXFQsh3qgU)sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
archive.org/details/lifeof…
ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/cultures/nd08/…