how did the inuit get fibre and greens in their diet?
Answers
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.”
Answer:Inuit Food Sources
Hunted meats:
Sea mammals such as walrus, seal, and whale. Whale meat generally comes from the beluga whale and the bowhead whale. The latter is able to feed an entire community for nearly a year from its meat, blubber, and skin. Inuit hunters most often hunt juvenile whales which, compared to adults, are safer to hunt and have tastier skin. Ringed seal and bearded seal are the most important aspect of an Inuit diet and is often the largest part of an Inuit hunter's diet.
Land mammals such as caribou, polar bear, and muskox
Birds and their eggs
Saltwater and freshwater fish including sculpin, Arctic cod, Arctic char, capelin and lake trout.
While it is not possible to cultivate native plants for food in the Arctic, Inuit have traditionally gathered those that are naturally available, including:
Berries including crowberry and cloudberry
Herbaceous plants such as grasses andfireweed
Tubers and stems including mousefood, roots of various tundra plants which are cached by voles in underground burrows.
Roots such as tuberous spring beauty and sweet vetch
Seaweed
They also eat all parts of the animals, including stomach contents.
From the same article:
"Traditional Inuit diets derive approximately 50% of their calories from fat, 30-35% from protein and 15-20% of their calories from carbohydrates, largely in the form of glycogen from the raw meat they consumed. This high fat content provides valuable energy and prevents protein poisoning, which historically was sometimes a problem in late winter when game animals grew lean through winter starvation. It has been suggested that because the fats of the Inuit's wild-caught game are largely monounsaturated and rich in omega-3 fatty acids, the diet does not pose the same health risks as a typical Western high-fat diet. However, actual evidence has shown that Inuit have a similar prevalence of coronary artery disease as non-Inuit populations and they have excessive mortality due to cerebrovascular strokes, with twice the risk to that of the North American population."
The Inuit are adapted to their environment. Though they were the last group to cross into the Americas about 10,000 years ago. They originated in Eastern Siberia, and were adapted to conditions on the tundra and coasts of Siberia.
