Came across this, a comment by Chris Masterjohn http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/about-cholesterol-and-health.html ...

I would like to see some reliable information on exactly what the Inuit Greenlanders are eating. The Inuit and other natives in Alaska have been in the process of modernization for nearly a century, and they are not on anything remotely like a "primitive" diet.

This is what I found for native Alaskans as of the late 1980s:

According to this reference:

Nobmann ED, Byers T, Lanier AP, Hankin JH, Yvonne Jackson M. The diet
of Alaska Native adults 1987-1988. Am J Clin Nutr 1992; 55: 1024-32.

... as of the late 80s, these were the top ten foods eaten by Alaskan
natives, ranked by frequency of consumption:

1. Coffee and tea
2. Sugar
3. Whitebread, rools, crackers
4. Fish
5. Margarine
6. White rice
7. Tang and Kool-aid
8. Butter
9. Regular soft drinks
10. Milk (whole and evaporated)

Notice that the only native food in the top 10 is fish, and that it is
out-ranked in consumption by coffee, eat, sugar, and white bread.

Compared to the US population in the NHANES II data, native Alaskan
men consumed 28% more protein, 11% more fat and 7% more carbohydrate.
Native Alaskan women consumed 48% more protein, 28% more fat, and 18%
more carbohydrate. Native Alaskan men and women even consumed 24% and
37%, respectively, more vitamin C than Americans, the principle source
of which was orange-flavored breakfast drink.

Native Alaskan men and women had 30% lower risk of heart disease,
women had a 20% higher risk of cancer, men had a 60% lower risk of
diabetes and women had a 50% lower risk of diabetes. Cancer of
breast, uterus, prostate, bladder and melanoma are comparatively low,
whereas cancers of the nasopharynx, salivary gland, liver, gallbladder
and cervix greatly exceeded those of US whites. Iron-deficiency
anemia was found at high rates, 13% of men and 15% of women.

Their intake of fat remained stable since the 1950s, at between 34%
and 39% of calories. In 1987-88, fish supplied 11% of the fat, seal
oil supplied 6%, and whale blubber supplied 3%. Rivaling fish was
agutuk or "Eskimo ice cream" at 10% of the fat contribution, which "is
currently often made with hydrogenated vegetable shortening. . . .
Although individual recipes vary, typical ingredients for fish agutuk
include flaked cooked whitefish, whipped shortening, sugar and corn
oil. Fruit agutuk consists of whipped shortening, corn oil, sugar,
water, and blackberries or other berries; meat agutuk consists of
caribou tallow, seal oil, caribou meat, and cooking broth."

So it would appear that modern native Alaskans continue to eat some
native foods but have been eating highly modernized diets full of junk
food for decades.

Viljalmhur Steffanson stayed with the non-modernized Inuit for long periods of time and studied them in depth in the early part of the 20th century. He was able to obtain some statistics on life expectancy from churches. He found high infant mortality (typical of pre-industrial societies) as well as high death rates across the spectrum, but also found a fair amount of people living into their 70s and 80s.

He concluded in Cancer: A Disease of Civilization?:

"Thus the most nearly "primitive" sample group I was able
to obtain does not support Dr. Keys very strongly in his contention that "a
primitive Eskimo over the age of 50 is a great rarity." Nor does it quite
confirm Dr. Greist's statement that "the Eskimo of the North . . . lived to
a very great age."

I would really like to know WHAT they were dying from. From what I have read, the life of the native Eskimo was very dangerous. I believe I even read in one source that they would sometimes procure eggs by hanging themselves over a cliff by rope to steal them from nests. They were also subject to cyclical periods of scarcity or near starvation in many cases, and depending on the area, many of them were fairly warlike. In one analysis I read, many of them had fractures of the face and other areas that seemed to suggest warlike injuries.

If the early deaths that Steffanson found were due to cancer and heart disease and other degenerative diseases, I will grant this is evidence that their diets were harmful, but it seems to me there are numerous other explanations and no way to quantify it. I certainly wouldn't take the white bread and margarine diet they are currently eating to indicate the same just because it has a spattering of wild game in it.

And by the way, they did eat nutrient-rich plant foods. The healthy Eskimo that Weston Price studied ate as follows:

"The food of these Eskimos in their native state includes caribou, ground nuts which are gathered by mice and stored in caches, kelp which is gathered in season and stored for winter use, berries including cranberries which are preserved by freezing, blossoms of flowers preserved in seal oil, sorrel grass preserved in seal oil, and quantities of frozen fish. Another important food factor consists of the organs of the large animals of the sea, including certain layers of the skin of one of the species of whale, which was found to be very high in vitamin C."

Looks like a diet very high in carbs:

1. Coffee and tea

carbs: 2. Sugar
carbs: 3. Whitebread, rools, crackers

4. Fish

processed non-food: 5. Margarine

carbs: 6. White rice
carbs: 7. Tang and Kool-aid

8. Butter

carbs: 9. Regular soft drinks

carbs: 10. Milk (whole and evaporated)

When looking at life expectancy, there is a lot more involved than just diet. How healthy can it be to eat nuts that were gathered by mice? Or to what are the dangers of collecting eggs obtained by hanging over a cliff?

Some other "food for thought":

"Saturated Fat Consumption Not Associated With Mortality" http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/849401

"Vegetarians have much lower sperm counts" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/active/mens-health/11172519/Vegetarians-have-much-lower-sperm-counts.html

"No Evidence to Support Dietary Fat Recommendations, Meta-Analysis Finds" http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/839708?src=wnl_edit_medn_wir&uac=28595DY&spon=34 A friend adds this commentary to the article:

Back in early 1980s, Big Pharma started to promote cholesterol reducers (statin).

Shortly thereafter, the American Heart Association (AHA), the American Diabetic Association (ADA#1), and the American Dietetic Association (ADA#2) started to promote the benefits of the low fat diet because it… (a) is low in cholesterol and (b) prevents weight gain.

All three happen to be the largest beneficiaries of the “charitable donations” from Big Pharma. Both "benefits" were actually lies because:

(a) Dietary cholesterol doesn’t play any role in the level of cholesterol in the blood, and…

(b) Low fat diet doesn’t prevents obesity because people simply replaced animal fats with even more vegetable fats and carbohydrates. That was also the time when the epidemics of diabetes and obesity started in earnest.

Since Big Pharma then (and now) was one of the top advertisers, newspapers, magazines, and network television were easily manipulated into spreading these lies in countless articles and shows.

Federal and state governments — the ones that had to pay for Medicare and Medicaid — bought the message from all of the above, and chimed in with anti-fat propaganda through their immense public outreach, further inciting the anti-fat hysteria.

Finally, Big Agra and Big Food got into the play, and started peddling “low fat” processed foods. What can be more profitable than skimming the fat off whole milk, and selling it for huge profit as butter and cream to those who haven’t heard the message. The skim milk didn’t go to waste either. It was repackage as “no fat” and sold as a premium health food.

Well, It took about thirty years to reach the nadir of this murderous insanity:

-- Over 105 million adult Americans of all ages are affected by prediabetes and diabetes, respectively 79 and 25.8 million people. Prediabetes and predominant type 2 diabetes (~86%) are entirely avoidable lifestyle-related disorders. Diabetes is the leading causes of permanent nerve damage, kidney and liver failure, cardiovascular disease, blindness, nontraumatic lower limb amputation, and premature death. The direct cost of treating diabetes alone exceeds $116 billion a year (in 2007). Upward of $150 billion is spent managing obesity and related complications.

-- Over 160 million adult Americans (68%) are overweight or obese.[ii] This number doesn’t include 12.6 million obese or overweight children (17%).[iii] Both conditions are incontrovertibly lifestyle-related disorders, and, in turn, they drive the pandemics of diabetes, hypertension, atherosclerosis, heart disease, and strokes. American consumers pay upwards of $60 billion annually on various weight loss products, programs, and surgeries.

-- Close to 150 million Americans are taking at least one prescription drug[iv]. Medication related medical errors alone result in 305,000 deaths annually. Some of the most common side effects of these drugs — depression, fatigue, somnolence, inability to concentrate, dizziness, vertigo, and blurred vision — cause a large number of fatal accidents and suicides that aren’t directly attributed to “medical errors” or these drugs.

If all of the above facts and stats aren’t a secret to yours truly, they are also not a secret to actuaries who work for insurance companies and government.

In 2014, our healthcare expenditures ($2,8 trillion) were 5.4 times larger than our defense budget ($520 billion). Who needs terrorists when we voluntarily murder ourselves with a far greater efficiency.

But this rampage is also ruining the states and Federal treasuries who have to pay for most of the bills to care for people with low-income and elderly. To prevent a near certain ruin, we are going back full circle.