If you’ve been eating a couple of pounds of salmon or tuna a week, or gobbling fish-oil supplements as insurance against cardiovascular destruction brought on by your mainline diet of pizza, cigarettes, and General Tso’s chicken, there’s a new study out that may lead you to consider some lifestyle changes.
Because unless you’re Inuit, the study, published in the journal Science and reported in The New York Times and elsewhere last Friday, suggests that you may be whistling past the coronary bypass unit.
Four decades ago Danish researchers attempted to explain why Inuit people, for whom whales, seals and fish are staples of a high-fat diet, are not prone to heart disease. The answer: omega-3 fatty acids found in numerous fish species help prevent arrhythmias and increase good cholesterol while reducing bad cholesterol, blood clotting, and triglycerides.
A fat lot of good it will do you. The benefits of omega-3 accrue to Inuits because their ancestors evolved “genetic adaptions for metabolizing omega-3,” in the words of the Times. For those of you who vaguely recall studying Charles Darwin, this is what he meant by natural selection.
“As such,” the study finds, the Inuits “have probably adapted to the cold Arctic climate and to their traditional diet, which has a high content of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids derived from seafood and a content of omega-6 PUFAs that is lower than in Danish controls,” a reference to the 1976 study that spawned the omega-3/fish oil boom.
Think the research is bad news? Think again. The study doesn’t change anything; it simply informs us about how our bodies work. What could be worse than leading ourselves down the primrose path where our health is concerned?
The larger point of the study, says Rasmus Nielsen, leader of the research and a professor of integrative biology at the University of California at Berkeley, as quoted at TechTimes.com, is that different populations have adapted to specific diets.
Regardless of our non-Inuit genetic predisposition to benefit from omega-3 fatty acids (25 percent of Chinese and about 2 percent of Europeans have the gene variant found in almost every Inuit in the study), the health benefits of eating fish are almost too numerous to mention. So there are now more, not fewer, reasons to eat fish.
Still, it’s possible that even without the benefits of omega-3, the average Inuit has a healthier diet than many of us. There’s no way to prove this, of course, but it’s something to think about next time you’re at the county fair.
