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VERY interesting.

Were there NO starches in the 'primal' saami diet?

I've read that almost every single culture bases their diet on STARCH - rice/potatoes/corn/white.flour -- and even in places like Hawaii there was some type of gourd they dug up and ate, I forget the name, but its STARCH, unlike all those fruity fructose pineapples. LOL

Let me know if you post anything anywhere any further about STARCH foods & STARCH digestion.

Thanks.
HP

All the Polar peoples live with a serious shortage of starch in their environment. There's so little plant life even the reindeer thrive on lichens. The humans eat the reindeer and the fish. They get lingonberry in season (which is a pretty low glycemic creation) and thereby supplement their need for Vitamin C.

In some areas seal were available and seal have Vitamin C in their skin.

Eskimos face the same situation as the Sa'ami and others in the far North.

There appears to be a limit for protein in the diet. It's supposedly about 40%, so you have to have some other form of food ~ fat or carbohydrate. All I can figure is that the Polar people are able to consume a higher percentage of protein, or their reindeer/fish/seal diets allow them to eat 60% fats and oils.

In more ancient times the Sa'ami occupied the entirity of the Fenno-Scandian peninsula. For the last few thousand years they've lived further North in the Sapmi (the coastal region extending from roughly Marshall Dillon's family's hometown on around to someplace on the Arctic in Russia past the Kola Peninsula.

During that time they've become ever more habituated to a diet short of carbohydrates ~ still, that characteristic could extend back into the Ice Age itself tens of thousands of years.

The problem for carnivores is if they have a sweet tooth (ability to taste sweets) they can become diabetic. Cats cannot taste sweet so they are not at risk. Dogs, on the other hand, can and do snack on sweet stuff but not to the degree you find among humans.

While writing this up I checked to see if there were articles about Sa'ami and a high fat diet, and there are ~ apparently they're adapted to it. My grandfather loved pigs feet in particular and would cut the bacon out of sidemeat and just throw it away so he could consume more fat. He wasn't alone in that family in doing that.

There are articles about the Sa'ami and diabetes ~ one of them suggests that a widespread haplotype (N1) suggests that a large percentage of them are immune to it ~ which really wouldn't matter since folks who can't consume carbohydrates efficiently who live where there are no carbohydrates are not at a disadvantage.