The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed from the Western Diet and What We Can Do to Replace Them

8. OUT OF AFRICA . . .

EIGHT OUT OF AFRICA . . . The best food is that which fills the belly. ARABIC PROVERB IN THIS BRIEF TELLING OF THE LONG HISTORY OF HOW SCIENTISTS discovered the importance of omega-3 fatty acids, I’ve had to reduce the cast of characters enormously, as the reader has probably surmised. Out of the complicated tapestry of people and ideas that make up any new field of science, I’ve focused on the most dominant colors or threads. And in the process, I know, I’ve slighted some great scientists and great science. I’ve barely mentioned the work of the innovative fish biologist Robert Ackman, and I’ve said nothing yet about Howard Sprecher, the biochemist who worked out the complete pathway for the synthesis of DHA from alpha linolenic acid. But there are two scientists, William Lands and Michael Crawford, who have been as significant in shaping this history as Ralph Holman, Jørn Dyerberg, and Hans Olaf Bang, and it is time I gave them their due. I’ll begin with the English biochemist Crawford, who currently heads the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition at the London Metropolitan University, not because he’s older than Lands (in fact he’s younger, though they’re both in their seventies) but because his ideas about 86 fats and human nutrition were shaped in Africa, where we all began. “Africa was an awakening,” Crawford told me when I visited him in his office in north London in the fall of 2003. “The diseases of Western societies were almost nonexistent, but the people suffered from a wide panorama of very different diseases— many of which had an obvious connection to diet. They didn’t have atherosclerosis, but their hearts failed from endomyocardial fibrosis, due to diets too low in protein. They didn’t have diabetes or arthritis, but they did have liver cancer from consuming peanuts contaminated with aflatoxins.” Fresh out of graduate school in 1960, Crawford was made the head of the department of biochemistry at the Makerere University Medical School in Kampala, Uganda. He traveled extensively in Africa over the next five years, sometimes with his wife and two children. He was amazed at how sharply disease patterns could change over distances of just hundreds of miles. On one particularly treacherous expedition to the shores of Lake Rudolph in northern Kenya, Crawford and a number of other researchers and physicians crossed many miles of lava desert to see if they could determine what was causing the bowed legs of a small tribe of people called the El Molo. The people had legs that looked like sabers or like the legs of children with severe rickets, a deficiency of vitamin D. The tribe was separated from other people by the barren landscape that surrounds Lake Rudolph, and all of its food and water came from the lake. But the lake water, these researchers found, was extremely alkaline; in addition, the diet of these people, mostly fish, was very low in calcium . For those reasons, not genetics or infection, the shins of the El Molo, their weight-bearing bones, were weak and bowed. On another trip—to the very fertile shores of Lake Victoria, where a wealthy and sophisticated tribe of people called the OUT OF AFRICA . . . 87 Bugandans lived off the large green bananas that grow like weeds there—Crawford was shocked to see tribesmen driving their malnourished children to the hospital in cars. The sale of these green bananas, or plantains, and coffee has helped the Bugandans grow wealthy but not healthy, since plantains are low in protein and what protein they do have is deficient in several amino acids. Adults can survive on this food source if it is supplemented with small amounts of meat and vegetables, but children, with their fast growth rates and smaller stomachs, are prone to malnutrition . Their growth is often arrested, and they develop the potbelly that is characteristic of protein calorie malnutrition, or kwashiorkor. The plantain diet can cause problems even for adults, who may regularly eat more than two pounds of plantains at a sitting. That amount of food can cause intestinal obstructions —painful and potentially fatal twists in the gut that are the Bugandans’ major reason for surgery. These experiences and others convinced Crawford that “food really matters.” The popularity of Keys’s lipid hypothesis in the 1960s led him to develop...