arctic

 I just moved to Chicago recently and have been settling into my new job and new apartment (in Lincoln Park), so that's the cause of most of the silence recently. In the meantime, I've been enjoying some music. I'm a huge fan of a type of music called joiking, which is a traditional Sami style of singing that is mainly wordless chants. I mentioned Torgeir Vassvik in another post, who has a traditional album and a jazz-fusion (very popular in that region) album. Here are two joik bands I've been listening to. One is Adjagas, which has kind of a rootsy folk sound:

Another is Wimme, who uses an electronica background:

From another part of the Arctic, comes this deer song involving throat singing from the Even tribe of Siberia. Someone in a comment mentioned that the only polar people whose diets we can study are the Inuit, which is not true. There are many circumpolar indigenous peoples. In Siberia (a massive part of the world) there are several tribes that have been poorly studied in the past, but there is some interesting research coming out of there right now. I keep meaning to read The Reindeer People, which is about the Even.

In Siberia, shamans combine a distinctive imagery of reindeer and of bird-flight. Their costumes sometimes include imitation reindeer antlers, occasionally tipped with wings or feathers, placed on the headdress or attached to the shoulders at the very point where reindeer are tattooed on the Pazyryk mummies. Like the participants in the Eveny midsummer ritual, shamans may ride to the sky on a bird or a reindeer. But their relationship with these animals goes far beyond mere riding. One shaman is suckled by a white reindeer during his initiatory vision as he incubates in a bird's nest on a branch high in the tree that links earth and sky. Another becomes a reindeer himself by wearing its hide, while hunters with miniature bows and arrows surround him and mime the act of killing. The hide is then stretched across the broad, flat drum that the shaman will beat as accompaniment to his trance. Another shaman, seeking to consecrate his reindeer-skin drum, is guided by spirits as he combs through the forest to find the location where the reindeer was born and traces every place it has ever visited over the course of its life, right up to the point where it was killed. As he picks his way through bogs and over fallen branches, he picks up the scattered material traces of its existence — snapped twigs, dried dung — to gather together every possible part of its being, and then moulds them into a small effigy of the reindeer. When he sprinkles the effigy with a magical ‘water of life’, the drum comes to life. Like a reindeer itself but with enhanced power, it is now capable of bearing the shaman aloft with its throbbing beat to nine, twelve, or more levels of the heavens.
 

I also enjoyed this throat singing from Eivor, an artist from the Faroe Islands:

 If throat-singing and joiking just aren't your thing, here is a baffling and gorgeous music video I've been enjoying from a indie folk band called Phosphorescent:

Hmmm...just got done doing chores and it's time for bed? Nope, it's time to disobey Robb Wolf's wise advice about sleep and continue December's theme of heroes gone wrong.

Today it's Vilhjalmur Steffansson, Arctic explorer who unintionally became a low-carb hero because of his experiments with an all-meat diet and his books on life with the Inuit.

Apparently he was also a sociopathic liar and it's quite astonishing he managed to keep up his reputation over the years, though there was plenty written about him during his time that was critical. That's because he led or planned two notably disastrous expedition and afterward engaged in nefarious behavior to cover up his wrong-doings. But he was charismatic and even people who had suffered under him remained loyal.

One of the disastrous expeditions was to a small island on the coast of Siberia called Wrangel Island. He sent four men to claim it for Great Britain. Problem is that the men weren't so experienced and Great Britain didn't even want the island! Along with the men went a Inuit woman named Ada Blackjack. I just finished an excellent book about her.

She was an acculturated Inuit, which means she had spent her life in a town eating white people's foods like bread. She did know how to sew though and the men brought her along to keep them outfitted, which was important on the cold and desolate island. Ada took the job because her son was suffering from tuberculosis and the money would help pay for a good hospital.

VS said that life in the "friendly arctic" would be easy and that he'd be back to pick them up and resupply the new colony next year.

Two years later, a ship finally arrived. Ada and the expedition's cat were the only ones left.

Admittedly the young men made mistakes. One of them overcooked all his meat and didn't realize he had scurvy until it was too late. The others went for help and supplies. Their fate remains unknown.

But thing's weren't like VS told them. At first game was plentiful, but the next winter it was scarce and starvation became a reality. Thick ice blocked any ships from arriving. When the three men went for help, they left Ada and Lorne Knight, the man suffering from scurvy. Soon Lorne died and Ada was left by herself. Amazingly, she taught herself to hunt and managed to survive. She had nothing to keep her company besides a cat and a Bible. Her desire to get back home to her son keeps her going on the lonely and desolate island. Her story is incredible and I couldn't put this book down and missed my subway stop because of it.

The part that was less fun starts when the rescue ship finally arrives. The boy's families struggle with VS and the rescue's commander for the diaries left behind. Both VS and the commander wanted to use them for profit and spin their contents to suit their stories. Ada is a reluctant star and simply wants to live a quiet life with her son, but she struggles financially and with the memories of the tragedy on the island.

If you are interested in adventure books I'd definitely recommend picking up a copy.

If you want to see some beautiful photos of traditional fish eating in a Gwich'in camp, look here, though keep in mind that at the time these pictures were taken, this tribe was eating modern foods.

Lately health blogger Matt Stone has been creating a bit of a controversy in paleo circles by blaming thyroid issues on low carbing. There is no question that many long term low carbers and paleo dieters suffer from thyroid issues . Why? Arctic cultures like the Inuit, Koyoukon, Yupik, Sami, and many others have a traditional diet that is very low in carbohydrates. Many people have written about how healthy they are despite following a diet that's not exactly the USDA food pyramid. 

I think it's pretty clear that the problems people are having are not due to a lack of cornbread. What all the healthy arctic people had in common was that they consumed a wealth of marine foods ranging from seal liver to seaweed. Marine foods have nutrients all of us could benefit from. Traditional cultures not only ate fish, they ate whole fish: fish eyes, liver, and bones. This stuff is a hard sell to those of us who grew up eating the typical American diet, but it's definitely worth getting used to eating, as the arctic explorers did. 

Arctic explorer and low carb idol Vilhjalmur Stefansson forced himself to like fish, as he recounts in his interesting book online:

Until I was twenty seven I had the belief about myself that I could not eat fish and felt certain that its taste was obnoxious to me. I thought it an interesting peculiarity and assumed that everyone else would think so and there were few things I told about so often as the fact that I was peculiar in that I could not eat fish. I think I might have lost the notion sooner if it had not formed such an excellent topic of conversation 

I've said it many times: if your paleo or low carb diet is a bunch of ground meat and some chicken breasts, you probably need to rethink things. As far as the carb controversy, it's a rather old one. The Weston A. Price Foundation has been criticizing the paleo diet for not including traditional dairy and fermented grain/legume products. In his books food ecologist Gary Nabhan recounts how Native American tribes like the Pima never suffered from obesity on their traditional high carb diet.  Born To Run recounts the impressive athletic fears of the corn-loving Tarahumara tribe. The yam eating Kitavans don't have too many problems either. 

But the paleo diet is about more than just not being obese. Plenty of people follow it to heal from autoimmune conditions and damage from eating the Standard American Diet. Others follow it to improve athletic performance. The truth is that while traditional agrarian cultures didn't have type II diabetes epidemics, the healthiest bones that anthropologists have found were those of coastal foragers. As Dr. Kurt Harris says "tolerated is not optimal."

Raw flesh might sound scary, but every traditional healthy culture studied by Weston A. Price ate at least some raw animal products. I was reminded of that when I dug up this article from the Washington Post about raw meat eating in Siberia. Raw meat also has a following in NYC too and I know several people who subsist on over 50% raw. I started doing raw foods as a vegan, but I gradually moved over to raw meat when I found that raw veganism made me feel malnourished and fatigued. That was a time in my life when I had been a little wild and I had probably done some damage to my stomach. I found raw meat, eggs, and fish was about the only thing that I could eat that didn't make me feel like crap. I never fell ill during this time. 

Why don't I eat raw anymore? Well, I certainly eat plenty of raw foods still, primarily oysters, fish, and some grass fed meat. But raw is expensive because you really have to be careful about sourcing and you absorb fewer calories per gram of meat according to Richard Wrangham's book Catching Fire. I'm also a foodie at heart and once my stomach was healed, it was hard for me to find a reason not to eat delicious cooked food. But the raw paleos have some good arguments for their way of eating and it is definitely beneficial to eat some raw food even if it's just an oyster or two. 

There has also been lots of buzz about carnivore-only diets in the paleo community lately. Such diets are traditional and there are numerous instances of healthy peoples like the Inuit who ate that way. Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson was perhaps one of the first urban NYC cavemen when he frequented Greenwich Village Salons back in the 1930s. Studying the Inuit, he was amazed to find that there were healthy despite eating a diet of almost 100% flesh. Back in the States, he did a study where he and another explorer agreed to eat only meat for a year to prove anyone could be healthy on such a diet. The diet was a success and he remains an idol to the carnivore community. I suggest everyone check out his excellent books.

I think though that while such diets can be successful, they are not paleo (there is no evidence of completely carnivorous pre-neolithic cultures) and not necessarily appropriate for everyone. In the long term, Inuit suffer from osteoporosis, probably because of excessive amounts of protein. There are some genetic differences that appear to allow them to eat their diet more successfully. Carnivore is just one option to investigate if other diets don't work, but it can be a difficult road and perhaps it's not so optimal for the long term. 

Either way, there is much we can learn from cultures like the Inuit. Here are several rules I have gleaned

• Eat both marine and land animals
• Eat LOTS of fat and enjoy it!
• Eat at least some of your meat and fish raw
• Eat nose to tail...marrow, brains, eyeballs, and all the nasty bits