Expert answer:Cultural Anthropology Part 1

Expert answer:See attached ! 🙂 Chapter 13 textbookhttps://www.pearsonhighered.com/revel/username:password:Additional resources:There are several organizations for practicing and applied anthropologists. Here are two of there websites. Have a look around and see what these anthropologists are working on:http://www.sfaa.net/http://practicinganthropology.org/Here’s a short film about the traditional use of plants by a medicine woman in Panama:http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2007/03/panama_the_last.html#(2 Articles Attached)Due: Wednesday 11 AM PS
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The Inuit Paradox | DiscoverMagazine.com
http://discovermagazine.com/2004/oct/inuit-paradox
FROM THE OCTOBER 2004 ISSUE
The Inuit Paradox
How can people who gorge on fat and rarely see a vegetable be healthier
than we are?
By Patricia Gadsby, Leon Steele | Friday, October 01, 2004
RELATED TAGS: NUTRITION
Patricia Cochran, an Inupiat from Northwestern Alaska, is talking about the native foods of her
childhood: “We pretty much had a subsistence way of life. Our food supply was right outside our front
door. We did our hunting and foraging on the Seward Peninsula and along the Bering Sea.
“Our meat was seal and walrus, marine mammals that live in cold
water and have lots of fat. We used seal oil for our cooking and as a
dipping sauce for food. We had moose, caribou, and reindeer. We
hunted ducks, geese, and little land birds like quail, called ptarmigan.
We caught crab and lots of fish—salmon, whitefish, tomcod, pike, and
char. Our fish were cooked, dried, smoked, or frozen. We ate frozen
raw whitefish, sliced thin. The elders liked stinkfish, fish buried in seal
bags or cans in the tundra and left to ferment. And fermented seal
flipper, they liked that too.”
Cochran’s family also received shipments of whale meat from kin
living farther north, near Barrow. Beluga was one she liked; raw
muktuk, which is whale skin with its underlying blubber, she
definitely did not. “To me it has a chew-on-a-tire consistency,” she
GRAY SEAL
says, “but to many people it’s a mainstay.” In the short subarctic
summers, the family searched for roots and greens and, best of all
from a child’s point of view, wild blueberries, crowberries, or salmonberries, which her aunts would
mix with whipped fat to make a special treat called akutuq—in colloquial English, Eskimo ice cream.
Now Cochran directs the Alaska Native Science Commission, which promotes research on native
cultures and the health and environmental issues that affect them. She sits at her keyboard in
Anchorage, a bustling city offering fare from Taco Bell to French cuisine. But at home Cochran keeps
a freezer filled with fish, seal, walrus, reindeer, and whale meat, sent by her family up north, and she
and her husband fish and go berry picking—“sometimes a challenge in Anchorage,” she adds,
laughing. “I eat fifty-fifty,” she explains, half traditional, half regular American.
No one, not even residents of the northernmost villages on Earth, eats an entirely traditional
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northern diet anymore. Even the groups we came to know as Eskimo—which include the Inupiat and
the Yupiks of Alaska, the Canadian Inuit and Inuvialuit, Inuit Greenlanders, and the Siberian
Yupiks—have probably seen more changes in their diet in a lifetime than their ancestors did over
thousands of years. 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. And with westernization,
at least on the North American continent, comes processed foods and cheap carbohydrates—Crisco,
Tang, soda, cookies, chips, pizza, fries. “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. Shaped by glacial
temperatures, stark landscapes, and protracted winters, the traditional Eskimo diet had little in the
way of plant food, no agricultural or dairy products, and was unusually low in carbohydrates. Mostly
people subsisted on what they hunted and fished. Inland dwellers took advantage of caribou feeding
on tundra mosses, lichens, and plants too tough for humans to stomach (though predigested
vegetation in the animals’ paunches became dinner as well). Coastal people exploited the sea. The
main nutritional challenge was avoiding starvation in late winter if primary meat sources became too
scarce or lean.
These foods hardly make up the “balanced” diet most of us grew up with, and they look nothing like
the mix of grains, fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, and dairy we’re accustomed to seeing in conventional
food pyramid diagrams. How could such a diet possibly be adequate? How did people get along on
little else but fat and animal protein?
What the diet of the Far North illustrates, says Harold Draper, a biochemist and expert in Eskimo
nutrition, is that there are no essential foods—only essential nutrients. And humans can get those
nutrients from diverse and eye-opening sources.
One might, for instance, imagine gross vitamin deficiencies arising from a diet with scarcely any
fruits and vegetables. What furnishes vitamin A, vital for eyes and bones? We derive much of ours
from colorful plant foods, constructing it from pigmented plant precursors called carotenoids (as in
carrots). But vitamin A, which is oil soluble, is also plentiful in the oils of cold-water fishes and sea
mammals, as well as in the animals’ livers, where fat is processed. These dietary staples also provide
vitamin D, another oil-soluble vitamin needed for bones. Those of us living in temperate and tropical
climates, on the other hand, usually make vitamin D indirectly by exposing skin to strong sun—hardly
an option in the Arctic winter—and by consuming fortified cow’s milk, to which the indigenous
northern groups had little access until recent decades and often don’t tolerate all that well.
As for vitamin C, the source in the Eskimo diet was long a mystery. Most animals can synthesize their
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own vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, in their livers, but humans are among the exceptions, along with
other primates and oddballs like guinea pigs and bats. If we don’t ingest enough of it, we fall apart
from scurvy, a gruesome connective-tissue disease. In the United States today we can get ample
supplies from orange juice, citrus fruits, and fresh vegetables. 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. Scurvy—joint pain, rotting gums, leaky blood vessels, physical and mental
degeneration—plagued European and U.S. expeditions even in the 20th century. However, Arctic
peoples living on fresh fish and meat were free of the disease.
Impressed, the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson adopted an
Eskimo-style diet for five years during the two Arctic expeditions he
led between 1908 and 1918. “The thing to do is to find your
antiscorbutics where you are,” he wrote. “Pick them up as you go.” In
1928, to convince skeptics, he and a young colleague spent a year on
an Americanized version of the diet under medical supervision at
Bellevue Hospital in New York City. The pair ate steaks, chops, organ
meats like brain and liver, poultry, fish, and fat with gusto. “If you
have some fresh meat in your diet every day and don’t overcook it,”
Stefansson declared triumphantly, “there will be enough C from that
source alone to prevent scurvy.”
In fact, all it takes to ward off scurvy is a daily dose of 10 milligrams,
says Karen Fediuk, a consulting dietitian and former graduate student
HERRING
of Harriet Kuhnlein’s who did her master’s thesis on vitamin C.
(That’s far less than the U.S. recommended daily allowance of 75 to 90
milligrams—75 for women, 90 for men.) Native foods easily supply those 10 milligrams of scurvy
prevention, especially when organ meats—preferably raw—are on the menu. For a study published
with Kuhnlein in 2002, Fediuk compared the vitamin C content of 100-gram (3.55-ounce) samples of
foods eaten by Inuit women living in the Canadian Arctic: Raw caribou liver supplied almost 24
milligrams, seal brain close to 15 milligrams, and raw kelp more than 28 milligrams. Still higher
levels were found in whale skin and muktuk.
As you might guess from its antiscorbutic role, vitamin C is crucial for the synthesis of connective
tissue, including the matrix of skin. “Wherever collagen’s made, you can expect vitamin C,” says
Kuhnlein. Thick skinned, chewy, and collagen rich, raw muktuk can serve up an impressive 36
milligrams in a 100-gram piece, according to Fediuk’s analyses. “Weight for weight, it’s as good as
orange juice,” she says. Traditional Inuit practices like freezing meat and fish and frequently eating
them raw, she notes, conserve vitamin C, which is easily cooked off and lost in food processing.
Hunter-gatherer diets like those eaten by these northern groups and other traditional diets based on
nomadic herding or subsistence farming are among the older approaches to human eating. Some of
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these eating plans might seem strange to us—diets centered around milk, meat, and blood among the
East African pastoralists, enthusiastic tuber eating by the Quechua living in the High Andes, the
staple use of the mongongo nut in the southern African !Kung—but all proved resourceful
adaptations to particular eco-niches. No people, though, may have been forced to push the nutritional
envelope further than those living at Earth’s frozen extremes. The unusual makeup of the
far-northern diet led Loren Cordain, a professor of evolutionary nutrition at Colorado State
University at Fort Collins, to make an intriguing observation.
Four years ago, Cordain reviewed the macronutrient content (protein, carbohydrates, fat) in the diets
of 229 hunter-gatherer groups listed in a series of journal articles collectively known as the
Ethnographic Atlas. These are some of the oldest surviving human diets. In general, hunter-gatherers
tend to eat more animal protein than we do in our standard Western diet, with its reliance on
agriculture and carbohydrates derived from grains and starchy plants. Lowest of all in carbohydrate,
and highest in combined fat and protein, are the diets of peoples living in the Far North, where they
make up for fewer plant foods with extra fish. What’s equally striking, though, says Cordain, is that
these meat-and-fish diets also exhibit a natural “protein ceiling.” Protein accounts for no more than
35 to 40 percent of their total calories, which suggests to him that’s all the protein humans can
comfortably handle.
This ceiling, Cordain thinks, could be imposed by the way we process protein for energy. The
simplest, fastest way to make energy is to convert carbohydrates into glucose, our body’s primary
fuel. But if the body is out of carbs, it can burn fat, or if necessary, break down protein. The name
given to the convoluted business of making glucose from protein is gluconeogenesis. It takes place in
the liver, uses a dizzying slew of enzymes, and creates nitrogen waste that has to be converted into
urea and disposed of through the kidneys. On a truly traditional diet, says Draper, recalling his
studies in the 1970s, Arctic people had plenty of protein but little carbohydrate, so they often relied
on gluconeogenesis. Not only did they have bigger livers to handle the additional work but their urine
volumes were also typically larger to get rid of the extra urea. Nonetheless, there appears to be a limit
on how much protein the human liver can safely cope with: Too much overwhelms the liver’s wastedisposal system, leading to protein poisoning—nausea, diarrhea, wasting, and death.
Whatever the metabolic reason for this syndrome, says John Speth, an archaeologist at the University
of Michigan’s Museum of Anthropology, plenty of evidence shows that hunters through the ages
avoided protein excesses, discarding fat-depleted animals even when food was scarce. Early pioneers
and trappers in North America encountered what looks like a similar affliction, sometimes referred to
as rabbit starvation because rabbit meat is notoriously lean. Forced to subsist on fat-deficient meat,
the men would gorge themselves, yet wither away. Protein can’t be the sole source of energy for
humans, concludes Cordain. Anyone eating a meaty diet that is low in carbohydrates must have fat as
well.
Stefansson had arrived at this conclusion, too, while living among the Copper Eskimo. He recalled
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KELP
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how he and his Eskimo companions had become quite ill after weeks
of eating “caribou so skinny that there was no appreciable fat behind
the eyes or in the marrow.” Later he agreed to repeat the miserable
experience at Bellevue Hospital, for science’s sake, and for a while ate
nothing but defatted meat. “The symptoms brought on at Bellevue by
an incomplete meat diet [lean without fat] were exactly the same as in
the Arctic . . . diarrhea and a feeling of general baffling discomfort,” he
wrote. He was restored with a fat fix but “had lost considerable
weight.” For the remainder of his year on meat, Stefansson tucked
into his rations of chops and steaks with fat intact. “A normal meat
diet is not a high-protein diet,” he pronounced. “We were really
getting three-quarters of our calories from fat.” (Fat is more than
twice as calorie dense as protein or carbohydrate, but even so, that’s a
lot of lard. A typical U.S diet provides about 35 percent of its calories
from fat.)
Stefansson dropped 10 pounds on his meat-and-fat regimen and remarked on its “slenderizing”
aspect, so perhaps it’s no surprise he’s been co-opted as a posthumous poster boy for Atkins-type
diets. No discussion about diet these days can avoid Atkins. Even some researchers interviewed for
this article couldn’t resist referring to the Inuit way of eating as the “original Atkins.” “Superficially,
at a macronutrient level, the two diets certainly look similar,” allows Samuel Klein, a nutrition
researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, who’s attempting to study how Atkins stacks up
against conventional weight-loss diets. Like the Inuit diet, Atkins is low in carbohydrates and very
high in fat. But numerous researchers, including Klein, point out that there are profound differences
between the two diets, beginning with the type of meat and fat eaten.
Fats have been demonized in the United States, says Eric Dewailly, a professor of preventive
medicine at Laval University in Quebec. But all fats are not created equal. This lies at the heart of a
paradox—the Inuit paradox, if you will. 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. Their cardiac death rate is about half of ours,
he says. As someone who looks for links between diet and cardiovascular health, he’s intrigued by
that reduced risk. Because the traditional Inuit diet is “so restricted,” he says, it’s easier to study than
the famously heart-healthy Mediterranean diet, with its cornucopia of vegetables, fruits, grains,
herbs, spices, olive oil, and red wine.
A key difference in the typical Nunavik Inuit’s diet is that more than 50 percent of the calories in
Inuit native foods come from fats. Much more important, the fats come from wild animals.
Wild-animal fats are different from both farm-animal fats and processed fats, says Dewailly. Farm
animals, cooped up and stuffed with agricultural grains (carbohydrates) typically have lots of solid,
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highly saturated fat. Much of our processed food is also riddled with solid fats, or so-called trans fats,
such as the reengineered vegetable oils and shortenings cached in baked goods and snacks. “A lot of
the packaged food on supermarket shelves contains them. So do commercial french fries,” Dewailly
adds.
Trans fats are polyunsaturated vegetable oils tricked up to make them more solid at room
temperature. Manufacturers do this by hydrogenating the oils—adding extra hydrogen atoms to their
molecular structures—which “twists” their shapes. Dewailly makes twisting sound less like a chemical
transformation than a perversion, an act of public-health sabotage: “These man-made fats are
dangerous, even worse for the heart than saturated fats.” They not only lower high-density
lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL, the “good” cholesterol) but they also raise low-density lipoprotein
cholesterol (LDL, the “bad” cholesterol) and triglycerides, he says. In the process, trans fats set the
stage for heart attacks because they lead to the increase of fatty buildup in artery walls.
Wild animals that range freely and eat what nature intended, says Dewailly, have fat that is far more
healthful. Less of their fat is saturated, and more of it is in the monounsaturated form (like olive oil).
What’s more, cold-water fishes and sea mammals are particularly rich in polyunsaturated fats called
n-3 fatty acids or omega-3 fatty acids. These fats appear to benefit the heart and vascular system. But
the polyunsaturated fats in most Americans’ diets are the omega-6 fatty acids supplied by vegetable
oils. By contrast, whale blubber consists of 70 percent monounsaturated fat and close to 30 percent
omega-3s, says Dewailly.
Omega-3s evidently help raise HDL cholesterol, lower triglycerides, and are known for anticlotting
effects. (Ethnographers have remarked on an Eskimo propensity for nosebleeds.) These fatty acids
are believed to protect the heart from life-threatening arrhythmias that can lead to sudden cardiac
death. And like a “natural aspirin,” adds Dewailly, omega-3 polyunsaturated fats help put a damper
on runaway inflammatory processes, which play a part in atherosclerosis, arthritis, diabetes, and
other so-called diseases of civilization.
You can be sure, however, that Atkins devotees aren’t routinely eating seal and whale blubber.
Besides the acquired taste problem, their commerce is extremely restricted in the United States by
the Marine Mammal Protection Act, says Bruce Holub, a nutritional biochemist in the department of
human biology and nutritional sciences at the University of Guelph in Ontario.
“In heartland America it’s probable they’re not eating in an Eskimo-like way,” says Gary Foster,
clinical director of the Weight and Eating Disorders Program at the Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
Foster, who describes himself as open-minded about Atkins, says he’d nonetheless worry if people
saw the diet as a green light to eat all the butter and bacon—saturated fats—they want. Just before
rumors surfaced that Robert Atkins had heart and weight problems when he died, Atkins officials
themselves were stressing saturated fat should account for no more than 20 percent of dieters’
calories. This seems to be a clear retreat from the diet’s original don’t-count-the-calories approach to
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bacon and butter and its happy exhortations to “plow into those prime
ribs.” Furthermore, 20 percent of calories from saturated fats is
double what most nutritionists advise. Before plowing into those
prime ribs, readers of a recent edition of the Dr. Atkins’ New Diet
Revolution are urged to take omega-3 pills to help protect their hearts.
“If …
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