Ketogenic diets - when they're not ketogenic, Part 2.

Continued from Ketogenic diets - when they're not ketogenic.

If I said that Eskimos eating their traditional diet were eating processed carbs, what would you think?

Structure of the chitin molecule, showing two of the N-acetylglucosamine units that repeat to form long chains in β-1,4 linkage.

Eskimos eat marine mammals & oily fish, also any edible vegetation that they can find. Marine mammals eat oily fish which in turn eat crustaceans. Crustaceans have an exoskeleton made of Chitin. Chitin has a structure similar to cellulose and a function similar to keratin (hair & fingernails/claws). Humans cannot digest chitin unless it's first powdered and hydrolysed. Certain fish and bacteria are able to digest it using chitinases.

If Eskimos consume the stomach contents of the animals that they kill for food (they usually consume the whole animal, sometimes after leaving it for a long time to auto-digest), there is likely to be a significant amount of pre-digested chitin in their diets. Freshly-killed animals also contain glycogen. Therefore, Eskimos eating a traditional diet ate more carbohydrate than you would expect, which would reduce/eliminate ketogenesis.

Then there's the protein... See STUDIES ON THE METABOLISM OF ESKIMOS.