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

2. A TRIP TO GREENLAND

TWO A TRIP TO GREENLAND Oh, call it not blubber! DR. ELISHA KENT KANE, POLAR EXPLORER DHA, THE QUICK-CHANGE ARTIST, WAS NOT THE FIRST OMEGA-3 FATTY acid to catch the attention of scientists. Their interest and concern had earlier been aroused by eicosapentaenoic acid, the fat I called the mediator or peacemaker of cell messengers. Eicosapentaenoic acid, whose name describes the makeup of its molecule —twenty (eikosi, in Greek) carbons and five ( penta) double bonds—was made a celebrity in the 1970s after two Danish physicians got it into their heads to go to Greenland and investigate stories they had heard about the Eskimos’ lack of heart disease . This absence was curious, these doctors thought, because the Eskimos, also known as the Inuit, eat a lot of blubber and fat. And isn’t fat the dietary demon that causes this disease? Heart disease, or angina pectoris, the condition that laypeople sometimes call hardening of the arteries, because it is often marked by the lining of the arteries filling with the waxy substance cholesterol, and physicians sometimes call morbus medicorum (illness of doctors), because it so frequently strikes those in the medical profession, was almost unknown at the beginning of the twentieth century. But by the middle of the century it was the 14 number one killer in countries such as Denmark and the United States—a status it would maintain, at least in America, until 2004, when it was bested by deaths from cancer. The heart attack that President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered in 1955 while on vacation in Denver galvanized Americans to seek out the reasons for this strange and sudden upswing. In the 1960s, one large epidemiological study (the Framingham Study) established a link between the amount of cholesterol in a person’s blood and his or her risk for heart disease; another (the Seven Countries Study) connected a population’s incidence of heart disease and its cholesterol levels to the percentage of calories consumed as fat. These associations were far from perfect, though. Some populations , including the Greeks, consumed large amounts of fat and had a low incidence of heart disease; and some individuals had low serum cholesterol levels yet died of heart attacks. As new ways of screening blood for fats in addition to cholesterol were being invented and refined, many physicians hoped that these new tests—such as those for triglycerides (the form in which plants and animals store fats), phospholipids (the building blocks of cell membranes), and lipoproteins (the protein-lipid complexes that transport fats within animals)—would be of even greater predictive value. Among them were two Danish physicians who intended to start a clinic in the northern city of Ålborg to treat patients with hyperlipidemia, or excessive amounts of fats in their blood. Hans Olaf Bang, a colorful figure known as “H.O.” who smoked a pipe and wore a beret and long gray cape, and Jørn Dyerberg, one of his young residents, had all the newest methods for screening blood and were prepared to use them. But in May 1969 Bang read something that changed the course, and the place, of their research. In an editorial published A TRIP TO GREENLAND 15 in the Ugeskrift for Læger, a weekly publication for physicians that is the Danish equivalent of the Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA) and the oldest medical journal in the world, a doctor who had spent a lot of time in Greenland, a selfgoverning province of Denmark, remarked on the fact that Eskimos died from tuberculosis and infection—but not diseases of the arteries. The piece caught Bang’s attention because of his current interests, of course, but also because he had been looking for a way to return to Greenland since the 1950s, when as a young doctor he had treated a measles epidemic there. “He had lost his heart to Greenland,” Dyerberg now recalls of his colleague , who died in 1994, “like so many who visit that place.” So when Bang read the editorial, he turned to Dyerberg and said, “Let’s go. Let’s go to Greenland and see how their blood lipids are.” He was intrigued by the apparent contradiction in the Eskimos, who were known for consuming large amounts of seal and whale blubber, and he didn’t know, or didn’t care, that Ancel Keys, one of the preeminent researchers in the field and the...