Cold Comfort

Dr Declan Fox, who has worked extensively in Canada, talks about rrrrrrreal cold, tales of every day life in the Arctic.

Nanook says NO to NAMA.

Fed up with crashing western eco-nomies, toxic bank loans, rampant unemployment and hard-hearted mortgage lenders? Wondering will your kids ever get a roof over their heads? Well come with me and see how one highly-resourceful race coped with housing, and cold we can hardly imagine, not too long ago.

In the 1922 documentary, ‘Nanook of the North’, Nanook demonstrates how the Inuit built igloos in winter in the frozen Arctic wastes. Using an ivory knife to cut blocks of frozen snow, of the correct texture of course, it took him about one hour to build an igloo big enough for five people. A man could stand on top of a well-built igloo without damaging it. Now you might think that igloos were pretty cold places to live in and that by spring most Inuit were wandering around half-crazy from hypothermia, but no. They used flaps of animal fur as doors and blocked off the sunken entrance tunnel with more blocks when the storms came. They built raised ledges for sleeping because heat rises. What heat, you might ask? Prepare to be shocked. Interior temperature of a well-built igloo could rise to 16°C, simply from body heat, because snow blocks are such good insulators. And Nanook never heard of negative equity!

Nanook says YES to Scarsdale.

Then there was the infamous diet; high in protein and fat, lots of raw meat, very little fruit and veg during the long Arctic winter. How could you be healthy eating that stuff? What about ‘Five-a-day’ fruit and veg? How come they didn’t all die of scurvy? Or heart disease? Or kidney failure? Or gross Vitamin D deficiency leading to bone disease because they got so little exposure to the sun all winter? Fact is, they didn’t. They did cook some meat but most of it was eaten raw and it turns out that you get plenty of Vitamins A, C and D in raw meat. Cooking destroys those. As for heart disease, well the Inuit really only started suffering that when they adopted western civilisation’s unhealthy eating habits. Their original diet had plenty of monounsaturated fats and omega 3 stuff. And one big argument for following diets like Scarsdale, Atkins and Protein Power is that people like the Inuit lived very active healthy lives on similar diets.

Doctor! I’m late!

The long dark winters played havoc with Mrs Nanook’s periods. Clinics in the Arctic reported many requests for pregnancy tests in winter from women who had missed two or three periods, but about half the tests done turned out to be negative. Why? We know that climate affects the monthly cycle, as in Don’t-Depend-On-The-Rhythm-Method-During-Your-Two-Weeks-In-Lanzarote-Darling. Some scientists blame high cortisol levels for Mrs Nanook’s irregularities, the high levels being possibly in response to the extreme environment.

Kill what you eat

The Inuit certainly did not rape their natural surroundings. No mass killings of seal or walrus, no fertilisers during the summer, not much wood or oil burning. They lived in harmony with the environment. No trading in oil futures or genetically-modified crops for the Inuit. A tribe could live for a year on a young whale. That’s a huge animal to preserve, but it helps when you actually live in the deep-freeze.

It’s all gone now, of course. The Inuit and other tribes of the far North have all settled down and adopted white man’s habits like alcoholism, drug abuse, unhealthy diets and sedentary life-styles, becoming much less healthy as a result.

A shame because if they were still up there living the way they used to, we could have learned useful things from them as we struggle to adapt to post-capitalist life.