Unfortunately, the clinical chemists never tested the Inuit for heart disease. Instead, they insisted that the omega-3 fatty acids in their diet were somehow preventing the development of heart disease in the population.
There’s just one problem with the research – no one ever really discovered how the Inuits eventually died. In the remote regions studies, doctors and any sort of medical attention were few and far between, requiring a trip to a larger town if trouble developed. When a local person died, many times their death certificate was filled out by a local bureaucrat, who was not medically attuned to the need of filling out the cause of death. Because many heart attacks kill instantly, the resulting shroud pulled over the population left a wide gap in cause and relation.
Bang and Dyerberg relied on the death certificates and hospital admissions of the Greenland chief medical officer to reach their conclusion. They noted that only a few heart disease cases occurred in Uummannaq.
Subsequent studies that took a more rigorous research approach, including one that rounded up all the studies of Inuit heart health in the United States, Greenland and Canada, concluded that the population suffered just as much heart disease as other populations.
Communication Breakdown
Despite those missteps, the Bang and Dyerberg conclusions took on a life of their own, being cited in numerous subsequent studies by researchers too lazy to question the results. As a result, the idea that omega-3 fatty acids were the Holy Grail in preventing heart attacks and strokes took hold, to the point where highly respected medical publications began repeating the dubious Bang and Dyerberg findings in their own reports.