What Does Peat Have To Say About Tribal/indigenous Peoples Eating Pufa?

pro marker

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i just cant seem to find anything on this.

"Salmon are an extremely important animal to both the lifestyle and the spirituality of many Native American cultures, especially the tribes of the Northwest Coast and the Columbia River. Like buffalo, salmon willingly give themselves up as food for humans in many Northwest Native American myths, and therefore these fish hold a special position of honor and respect. There are many taboos and other tribal rules regarding salmon, so as to avoid offending them, and special Salmon Dances and First Salmon Ceremonies are celebrated at the beginning of salmon fishing season throughout the Pacific Northwest region. In Native American artwork and literature, salmon are often used as a symbol of determination, renewal, and prosperity."

-a random quote pulled from first page of google but when visitng America i got the impression that salmon was very important to them. i find it hard to believe that the same people who would ride on horses without saddles and live so long would eat something so bad for them. as for the Inuits, they ate a very unique diet so i don't think they are a good example.
 

boris

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Traditional people are smart, they eat the whole fish including the head, so they get some amount of thyroid with it, which will mitigate some of the anti-metabolic effects. We just eat some slices of the flesh and throw the good parts away.
 
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pro marker

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Traditional people are smart, they eat the whole fish including the head, so they get some amount of thyroid with it, which will mitigate some of the anti-metabolic effects. We just eat some slices of the flesh and throw the good parts away.
tell me about it. in Norway its illegal for farmers to slaughter their own animals and sell them. if you wanna sell them you have to use a slaughterhouse. the slaughterhouse wont let you keep the organs or anything. i cry thinking of the tons and tons of blood and guts and organs that are thrown down god knows where. the big slaughterhouses wont even let you keep the head.

still, a large amount of salmon must cumulate a lot of pufa. i just can not get aboard with the fact that fresh omega 3 can be that bad.
 

DANIEL

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still, a large amount of salmon must cumulate a lot of pufa. i just can not get aboard with the fact that fresh omega 3 can be that bad.

I think it just goes back to whole foods being preferred in all scenarios

Isolated PUFA found in n-3 supps bad, salmon from a trusted source good
 

JeffsDunham

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Traditional people are smart, they eat the whole fish including the head, so they get some amount of thyroid with it, which will mitigate some of the anti-metabolic effects. We just eat some slices of the flesh and throw the good parts away.

I agree and does anyone remember the fish head song?

 

lvysaur

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There are large differences in PUFA metabolism between ethnic groups.
There are a lot of different SNPs to consider and it's very complex, but it's becoming clear to me that:

Indo-Caucasoids and Africans are saturated fat/sugar adapted
Mongoloids are PUFA adapted

rs174546 - SNPedia

"Dietary n-3 and n-6 polyunsaturated fatty acid intake interacts with FADS1 genetic variation to affect total and HDL-cholesterol concentrations" Dietary n-3 and n-6 polyunsaturated fatty acid intake interacts with FADS1 genetic variation to affect total and HDL-cholesterol concentrations in the Doetinchem Cohort Study - PubMed
associations between rs174546 and cholesterol concentrations were observed in the group with a high intake of n-3 PUFAs but not in the low-intake group. The C allele was associated with high total and non-HDL-cholesterol. Furthermore, the C allele was associated with high HDL-cholesterol in the group with a high intake of n-6 PUFAs but not in the group with a low intake

"Single nucleotide polymorphisms in the FADS gene cluster are associated with delta-5 and delta-6 desaturase activities estimated by serum fatty acid ratios."


Mongoloid peoples are also known to have dry earwax, and their earwax lacks certain fatty acids: https://www.researchgate.net/public..._fatty_acids_from_wet_and_dry_ear_wax_samples

It is plausible that the dry earwax is caused by a lack of certain fatty acids from lower desaturation.
 
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lvysaur

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Put shortly, Asians can eat O3/O6 PUFA without rocketing their cholesterol.

Specifically Southeast Asians and Siberians/Latinos, North Chinese look similar to Europeans. Latinos have this due to the American ancestry which formed in northeast Siberia.
Indians and Africans as expected, should avoid PUFA even more strongly.

Interestingly this gene (and similar ones) have asymmetric pattern across Asia. It's always highest in Siberians and SEAsians. North Chinese always look more "Caucasoid-like".

I believe this non sequitir is due to farming. Rice farming started in south China. Rice is devoid of protein. Thus, Southern Chinese ate a high proportion of animal flesh (mostly fish and chicken). It's well known that various fish/frogs live in rice fields and farmers eat them.

In SEAsia proper, the chicken was domesticated, and I believe the high ancestral egg consumption (very high n6 PUFA food) led to a similar thing.

The cow was domesticated in the Mideast and India, spreading also to Africa/Europe. The high protein of wheat and milk (the only PUFA-free animal food) allowed less flesh consumption, and the flesh that was eaten was more saturated and also lower PUFA (beef/lamb).

Northern China is a wheat region and thus resembles the west more, in terms of desaturase genes--the food there is also wheat-meat based, rather than fish-egg based.
 
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ljihkugft7

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Is it not also location based?
Most pufa rich zones are cold climates, so they wouldn’t oxidise as rapidly as in hot and sunny climates?

And they also would’ve received the natural Vit E to balance it out - the salmon was probably way leaner?
Our scales are so heavily tipped towards pufa and away from vit E. I also think all the animal feeds/grains high in pufa has made modern pufa foods even higher in pufa and lower in vit e.
 

reality

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I’m not convinced pufa/omega 3 is all that bad when it comes from fish. Salmon, especially, has a good amount of vitamin e and astaxanthin which is a powerful antioxidant and will protect against any harmful oxidation

UNDERSTANDING ASTAXANTHIN & AstaReal™

salmon is extremely nutritious I don’t think it’s a problem having it now and again.
 

lvysaur

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Most pufa rich zones are cold climates
This reasoning is only true in theory.

In reality, "PUFA adaptation" has little to do with climate. It has to do with Asians vs. non-Asians.
Asians (and particularly Southeast Asians from Thailand and co.) have much better adaptations to both types of PUFA than westerners.


I believe that Peat's recommendations will average out being the least relevant to East Asian ethnicities. Of course everybody is an individual, so mileage may vary. @tyw confirmed he couldn't get milk to work, and IIRC believe he had positive posts about O3s.
 

gaze

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"They are advancing a myth about human nature, so I will advance a counter-myth. At the time people were growing their large brains they lived in the tropics. I suggest that in this time before the development of grain-based agriculture, they ate a diet that was relatively free of unsaturated fats and low in iron--based on tropical fruits. I suggest that the Boskop skull from Mt. Kilimanjaro was representative of people under those conditions, and that just by our present knowledge of the association of brain size with longevity, they--as various "Golden Age" myths claim--must have had a very long life-span. As people moved north and developed new ways of living, their consumption of unsaturated fats increased, their brain size decreased, and they aged rapidly. Neanderthal relics show that flaxseed was a staple of their diet."

-
Ray Peat


He clearly does not think tribal people are living optimally for longevity, they're just adapting to what's available in the environment to survive​
 
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lvysaur

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I suggest that the Boskop skull from Mt. Kilimanjaro was representative of people under those conditions, and that just by our present knowledge of the association of brain size with longevity, they--as various "Golden Age" myths claim--must have had a very long life-span. As people moved north and developed new ways of living, their consumption of unsaturated fats increased, their brain size decreased, and they aged rapidly.
If anyone is interested in "Golden Age" stuff, I suggest checking out my thread: Aryanism, veganism, blood type, empathy and the Indo-European lie.

Brief summary: A guy on the internet thinks that most of our culture came from carb-eating farmers. He has some vegan dogmatism but apart from that his logic is pretty sound (and it could be the case that people were once vegan, for what it's worth). All in all though, he has some Peat-affinity--intellectually curious, pro-carb, leftist in some ways.

He maintains that the farmer diet selects for a noble, kind, intellectual behavioral type. While the hunter diet selects for a power-seeking, "might makes right" archetype. The lack of veganism among modern cultures could be due to the vegan farmers inevitably overtaken by the aggressive meat-eating hunters (and mixed with them).

Lactose tolerance hints at this. There are dozens, even hundreds of genes for it. But in Europe, there are only 2 (12+ discovered in Africa).
And what's more, these 2 genes were completely absent in indigenous Europeans (WHG). But after the Anatolian and Yamnaya invasions (both had Middle Eastern ancestry), this gene appears, and gets selected extremely rapidly to 100% in many areas.

This RAPID and AGGRESSIVE evolution only makes sense in one context: It was a way to extract more calories, particularly more CARBOHYDRATES, from milk.

Africa has many different weak lactose genes,
which add up to the same effect. This is BC most of time, digesting lactose is unnecessary in Africa (you can always eat fruits/plants for carbs).
Europe has only 1 strong one. In Europe, the environment has few carbs. EXCEPT FOR MILK. So whoever can digest these carbs, has a HUGE ADVANTAGE and outcompetes everyone else. And thus the gene is selected rapidly.

What we have now is exactly what you'd expect from the mixing of these "farmer" and "hunter" types. We lack the absolute violence and mortality of hunter gatherers. But all the same, we also have fallen far from the Golden Age of the farmers. Because we are all mixed somewhere in between
 
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tankasnowgod

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There's this from Oils in Context-

"An oil researcher[0] spent 100 days eating what he considered to be the "Eskimo diet," seal blubber and mackerel paste. He observed that his blood lipid peroxides (measured as malondialdehyde, MDA) reached a level 50 times higher than normal, and although MDA is teratogenic, he said he wasn't worried about fathering deformed children, because his sperm count had gone to zero. Evidently, he didn't have a very thorough understanding of the Eskimo way of life. In most traditional cultures, the whole animal is used for food, including the brain and the endocrine glands. Since unsaturated fats inhibit thyroid function, and since Eskimos usually have a high caloric intake but are not typically obese, it seems that` their metabolic rate is being promoted by something in their diet, which might also be responsible for protecting them from the effects experienced by the oil researcher. (According to G. W. Crile, the basal metabolic rate of Eskimos was 125% of that of people in the United States.)

People who eat fish heads (or other animal heads) generally consume the thyroid gland, as well as the brain. The brain is the body's richest source of cholesterol, which, with adequate thyroid hormone and vitamin A, is converted into the steroid hormones pregnenolone, progesterone, and DHEA, in proportion to the quantity circulating in blood in low-density lipoproteins. The brain is also the richest source of these very water-insoluble (hydrophobic) steroid hormones; it has a concentration about 20 times higher than the serum, for example. The active thyroid hormone is also concentrated many-fold in the brain."


 

RealNeat

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Read "Nourishing Diets" by Sally Fallon and you'll get your answer, theres a lot left out and assumed in your OP, seal blubber is a crucial part of the puzzle. Also look into Chris Masterjohns dissection of Keto resistance in the Inuit, thatll help you connect even more dots. I love salmon and respect it as an animal and am greatful for every being that gives its life so I may eat, however, that idea is not equal to using it as a primary food source and shouldnt be viewed as such.
 

ljihkugft7

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Thi
If anyone is interested in "Golden Age" stuff, I suggest checking out my thread: Aryanism, veganism, blood type, empathy and the Indo-European lie.

Brief summary: A guy on the internet thinks that most of our culture came from carb-eating farmers. He has some vegan dogmatism but apart from that his logic is pretty sound (and it could be the case that people were once vegan, for what it's worth). All in all though, he has some Peat-affinity--intellectually curious, pro-carb, leftist in some ways.

He maintains that the farmer diet selects for a noble, kind, intellectual behavioral type. While the hunter diet selects for a power-seeking, "might makes right" archetype. The lack of veganism among modern cultures could be due to the vegan farmers inevitably overtaken by the aggressive meat-eating hunters (and mixed with them).

Lactose tolerance hints at this. There are dozens, even hundreds of genes for it. But in Europe, there are only 2 (12+ discovered in Africa).
And what's more, these 2 genes were completely absent in indigenous Europeans (WHG). But after the Anatolian and Yamnaya invasions (both had Middle Eastern ancestry), this gene appears, and gets selected extremely rapidly to 100% in many areas.

This RAPID and AGGRESSIVE evolution only makes sense in one context: It was a way to extract more calories, particularly more CARBOHYDRATES, from milk.

Africa has many different weak lactose genes,
which add up to the same effect. This is BC most of time, digesting lactose is unnecessary in Africa (you can always eat fruits/plants for carbs).
Europe has only 1 strong one. In Europe, the environment has few carbs. EXCEPT FOR MILK. So whoever can digest these carbs, has a HUGE ADVANTAGE and outcompetes everyone else. And thus the gene is selected rapidly.

What we have now is exactly what you'd expect from the mixing of these "farmer" and "hunter" types. We lack the absolute violence and mortality of hunter gatherers. But all the same, we also have fallen far from the Golden Age of the farmers. Because we are all mixed somewher

DM’d instead cos off topic :)
 

iROH

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Something like Northwest indeans had other staples more portable and lasting longer like bear fat or berries ; pemmican.
 

ljihkugft7

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Something like Northwest indeans had other staples more portable and lasting longer like bear fat or berries ; pemmican.
Animal fat also just seems more convenient to me.
In one of liziqis (Rural China YouTuber) YouTube videos she shows how she makes rapeseed oil, and they use a modern machine to extract the oil. So, I highly doubt that they would have been doing that throughout History.

You get tons of oil cooking meat - I’m constantly trying to figure out what to do with all the tallow I get from my slow cooking.
 
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