By Mukaila Kareem
As someone who spent my early life in rural Nigeria, one of the most surprising things I observed in rural America was vegetable canning. In my experience in the village, okro, tomatoes, and peppers were literally dried in the sun to preserve them for use in the dry season. These same farming products were preserved by canning methods principally due to a stark difference in geography.
Plants have evolved strategies shaped by geography. For example, fruits form a biological contract with insects (via nectar) for pollination, and with animals and humans (via fruit sweetness) for seed dispersal. Obviously, seeds and grains are incapable of photosynthesis and therefore depend on the fats that are embedded in them for growth and development before they can grow leaves for self-sustenance. It is worth noting that terrestrial plants do not store fats in leaves, stems or roots but exclusively store fats in the seeds. Therefore, fats in seeds are for self-survival and are not designed to attract anything as they are exclusively stored for seed germination often in protective hard shells.
Simple sugars are chemically stable in all climates as berries in cold Alaska have the same sugar as cashew fruits in my hot humid village back in Nigeria. However, as no farmers in the USA would dare to dry their okro or tomatoes in the sun leaving them to rot and damage, plants face the same challenge and have evolved their fat storage and composition based on the climate and geographical location. In West Africa, red palm oil, which is very rich in saturated fats, is very popular and has been used for all kinds of cooking for centuries before the advent of modern medicine. This is not by choice of “medical” nutrition guidelines of western medicine. Tropical perennials store durable, oxidation-resistant saturated fats—ideal for hot, humid climates where seeds may lie dormant for months.
On the other hand, temperate zone seeds need oils typically rich in unsaturated fatty acids with their characteristic kinky and loosely packed hydrocarbon chains, due to double bonds, which keep them fluid in cold and often freezing environments. In addition, in aquatic environments, algae produce polyunsaturated fats to keep them buoyant on water as saturated fats would make them heavier and likely to sink. The fish consume algae because the liquid unsaturated fats, the often-mentioned omega-3 fatty acids in popular health discourse, protect their blood from clotting and keep their bodies flexible and adaptable for aquatic environments.
Given the fact that fats are engineered by plants for survival and not designed for human health, the type of fat in a seed is mostly climate adapted and not a nutrition message for humans. Yet nutrition science has long cherry-picked indigenous diets to support modern agendas. The Maasai are often romanticized for their lifelong milk consumption but few mention that their milk is rich in saturated fat. Somehow, that inconvenient truth disappears from the discussion.
In contrast, when European settlers observed the Inuit, aka Eskimos, thriving on a high-fat, animal-based diet rich in omega-3s they conveniently ignored the fact that they consume bear and whale fats with abundant saturated fats. Whales, like the Inuit who consume them, store dense saturated fats in their blubber—a metabolic buffer that withstands cold oceans and prolonged fasting. Nature encoded this fat storage, not nutrition labels. Also, bears bulk up with saturated fats before hibernation—not to clog arteries but to survive months of fasting and immobility. This is seasonal metabolism, not a heart-health hazard.
In spite of the obvious nonselective fat consumption by the Inuit, the narrative somehow shifted to portraying omega-3 as the hero, and soon an entire supplement industry followed. Yet the Hadza tribe, a hunter-gatherer tribe in East Africa, consume virtually no marine foods but have not been shown to have omega-3 deficiencies. Why? Because omega-3s aren’t exclusive to fish—they’re synthesized, conserved, and modulated naturally in functional metabolic ecosystems.
Modern medicine, driven by western culture, still holds the view that saturated fats raise the “bad” LDL cholesterol levels, but no one bats an eye at the saturated fats in Mama’s milk, and rightly so too. Infants need dense, stable energy to fuel rapid growth, brain development, and immune function.
There are no seeds with predominantly saturated fat storage in temperate climates, and hardly any perennial plants with predominantly unsaturated fat storage in the tropics. Tropical plants store stable, semi-solid saturated fats. Mediterranean plants favor monounsaturated fats—like olive oil, the darling of “nutrition experts” in subtropical zones. Cold-climate plants pack fluid polyunsaturated oils. Essentially, fat is biochemically shaped by its environment and not by diet trends.
Therefore, you can no more advise unsaturated fats in the tropics than push saturated fats in the temperate zones. While promoting global heart healthy diet, modern medicine which often advocates personalized patient-centered care somehow has not paid attention to the fact that climate is metabolism, and metabolism is climate. Lacking comparative approach, it has also failed to notice that hunting and gathering societies hardly develop heart disease despite high intake of saturated fats.
Metabolism thrives on cycles—feast and famine, activity and rest—not endless consumption in a sedentary world. The modern lifestyle is a metabolic anomaly, out of sync with the rhythms that have sustained humans and animals throughout history. This is what plants, fish, and mammals have always known—even if modern nutrition science has forgotten.
Mukaila Kareem, a doctor of physiotherapy and physical therapy advocate, writes from the USA and can be reached via makkareem5@gmail.com
