The Maasai Paradox

• This man is feasting on raw bone marrow, and is likely to accompany it with a gulp of cholesterol-rich milk. Yet, like many in his community, he is unlikely to contract heart ailments. What’s his secret?

It is quite alarming to learn that deaths arising from heart diseases are increasing at a faster rate in developing countries such as Kenya than in Europe and America. It is estimated that, nine years from today (in 2020), out of every ten people dying from heart diseases worldwide, eight will be from developing countries.

Most of these heart diseases are strongly linked to consumption of foods high in unhealthy fats such as saturated- and trans-fats. Saturated fats are often found in dairy products such as milk, cheese, butter, cream, and fatty meat.

High consumption of milk, which is a dairy product, has been positively linked to heart diseases. Paradoxically, the rural Maasai eat a lot of fat from milk and meat, yet show no signs of heart diseases.

As early as 1960s, food scientists and other health experts exposed a concealed secret that, although the Maasai population consumed, predominantly, repulsively unhealthy foods consisting of milk, meat and blood, they exhibited no signs of cholesterol that clog arteries. The absence of the dreadful cholesterol translated to very low or absence of heart diseases among the Maasai.

The other astounding and well known fact is the French Paradox. Over the years, many studies highlighted a puzzle: French diet contains large amounts of butter, cream, and other foods rich in artery-clogging, ‘unhealthy’, saturated fats, but there was a very low prevalence of heart diseases among them.

What surprised scientists was that the French didn’t diet, didn’t spend hours panting at the gym like their European and American counterparts, yet they remained super healthy.

The French Paradox was coined by Dr Serge Renaud, a scientist from Bordeaux University in France. In 1992, Dr Renaud made a quite interesting scientific observation that death rates among the French arising from heart diseases were lower than their counterparts who consumed similar high levels of saturated fats. He went on to make a bold and controversial statement that moderate alcohol consumption helped the French against heart diseases.

This claim has so far been debated in and out of academic set-ups, and remains contentious. Renaud even sat in an American television studio and declared that the low number of deaths due to heart diseases among the French was due to drinking of wine in small amounts.

Rural Maasai maintain their subsistence lifestyle as pastoralists. Like most of such populations, their biggest health problem is under-nutrition, infectious diseases, sanitation and child mortality. Amazingly, they are relatively free of what is bothering the modern man.

Although high consumption of fat milk is associated with high risk of heart diseases, the rural Maasai consume milk as the single most important component in their diet, giving them 66 per cent of their 2,500 kilocalories per day. Despite surviving on this rather unhealthy diet, they are not victims of hypercholesterolemia, a condition characterised by high levels of dangerous cholesterol in the blood.

When researchers discovered the low incidences of heart diseases among the Maasai, they embarked on in-depth studies to establish the basis. Between 1960 and 1980, there were several publications unravelling the Maasai Paradox.

All these studies narrowed down to nothing out of another planet, but three simple reasons that any Tom, Dick and Harry can emulate. It is actually not very clear why many ignore them:

Physical exercise: The wonder drug: Life is sweet in the absence of physical tiredness. This is not the case with rural Maasai though. For them to enjoy a decent meal, they have to till their usually very small gardens (if any), walk into the forest to look for firewood, and walk their livestock for pasture.

To take pleasure in a cooked meal at home, they have to make long round trips to fetch water. All these tiring physical activities have been hailed as contributory reasons to why rural Maasai never complain of heart diseases.

Health wise, the benefits of physical activity are enormous, particularly the burning of calories. Consumed food provides energy to the body, and this energy is measured in calories. If too much energy-giving foods, such as carbohydrates, are consumed, the excess is converted into fat and stored in the body.

This fat is sometimes stored in the form of an unwanted layer lining the inside of the pipes (arteries) that carry blood from the heart, which leads to narrowing of the diameter of the arteries, causing the heart to overwork while pumping blood.

The recommended daily energy intake is approximately 2,500 kilocalories for men and 2,000 kilocalories for women. Any excess calories above these are converted by the body into fat. A sure way of avoiding this is to burn the calories through physical activity.

The rigorous physical activities of the rural Maasai can burn up to 2,400 kilocalories per day, which is phenomenally three times higher than the energy that an inactive urban Maasai and Bantu can burn. When a rural Maasai is burning up to 2,400 kilocalories in a day, a sedentary urbanite burns just 890 kilocalories.