Mike Keen only ate local food and frequently sent samples of feces to a lab in Nuuk. He hopes his journey will inspire others to adopt ‘common sense’ diets based on local ingredients.
A couple of weeks ago, Mike Keen’s kayak, with a year’s delay, finally reached its destination: the town of Qaanaaq, in the far north of Greenland. His journey had been 3200 kilometers long and started last year in the town of Qaqortoq in the south of the country. Safe to say that it was somewhat of a culmination.
Fittingly, on the beach, a crowd of enthusiastic locals had gathered to cheer him on, and in the days that followed he was invited for dinners with locals, for an interview on the Qaanaaq radio station, and was even featured on national Greenlandic television.
In Qaanaaq, a town of around 600 people, Mike Keen, at least for a little while, had become a star.
“The most memorable moment was the finish. The whole way I had been supported by the Greenlandic people but when I arrived in Qaanaaq it felt like half the town was waiting for me. They were singing traditional songs for me, shooting fireworks and rifles, and just giving me a very warm welcome,” Mike Keen told Polar Journal AG.
The welcome was, indeed, out of the ordinary, and Mike Keen believes that it was caused by his championing of Inuit food. During the entirety of the trip, he was only eating local food; fish, seal, whale, walrus, and the occasional sea bird; all products he bought along the way.
“Hopefully, I came across as being genuine in my love for the country and its food. I think that’s why I was so well received,” he said.
The three q’s
Mike Keen’s journey started with three “q”’s: Qaqortoq (a town in South Greenland), Qaanaaq (a town in North Greenland), and Qajaq (Greenlandic for kayak).
Every summer for six years, he had been working as a chef all over Greenland, and two years ago, while working in the Nuuk Fjord, he got talking to a colleague about the language and its guttural ‘q’s. It was through that discussion that the three q’s came up.
“It just kind of got stuck in my head: wouldn’t it be cool to kayak from Qaqortoq to Qaanaaq? So, I started looking into it and found that it was around 3000 kilometers: that’s 30 kilometers a day for 100 days: that’s possible I thought,” said Mike Keen, who was not an experienced kayaker before.
But, to make the trip more meaningful, he decided to add another aspect to it. For a long time, he had been a proponent of locally sourced food so he decided to put his beliefs to a test.
He allied himself with two seperate scientific teams. One in England who would test his weight, fat, and blood levels to see how the trip would affect him physically, and another team based in Nuuk, Greenland who would test the effects of an entirely inuit diet on his gut microbiome.
So, before and after the trip he underwent extensive medical tests in England, and during the entirety of the trip he sent samples of his own feces to Nuuk.
“It’s only in the last 100 years or so that we have started eating food that is full of antibiotics, hormones and is out of season. So, because I am a chef and do talks on the benefits of evolutionary diets, I decided to add that aspect to the project too,” Mike Keen said.
The interrupted journey
Initially, the trip was intended to start and finish last year, but right away he ran into problems. In April of 2023, the beginning of his trip was delayed by two weeks because too much sea ice had blown into waters around Qaqortoq.
This also meant that the temperatures that were meant to be like in spring were more like in winter. So, Mike Keen had to deal with freezing temperatures while in the kayak and nights around minus 8 to minus 10 degrees.
But the biggest set-back came as he made it further north. When he reached Upernavik in the northwest, he had to give up for the year.
“Melville Bay was always going to be the most difficult bit, and in Upernavik they told me that I just wouldn’t be able to get through; that there was too much sea ice,” he said.
Waiting in Upernavik for the waters to clear was not an option; it was simply too expensive. Instead, he decided to put the last bit of the trip on hold and finish it in 2024.
“I wasn’t too upset about it actually because one of my goals was to raise awareness of climate change, and the interruption helped show that the weather systems in Greenland have been thrown out of whack in the last few years,” he said.
Awoken by a loose kayak
So, after a year of recuperation, in July of 2024, Mike Keen came back to finish what he started. The trip through Melville Bay took about a month, and two weeks ago he reached Qaanaaq to the tunes of fireworks and Inuit songs; a moment he describes as the highlight of the entire journey.
But, on his way up the coast, there were plenty of bad moments too. The worst one, he recalls, happened about a day’s kayaking north of Maniitsoq in the center-west of the country. There, he was pinned down by a storm that kept him in his tent for four nights and three days.
That in itself was bad, the wind in the tent made him “a bit deaf”, but the real lowlight came on the third night, when the wind picked up the kayak and slammed it into the tent.
“It broke the tent pole and cut me under the eye. I was sleeping at the time so it was a bit of a shock. The kayak had been blown a further 10 meters up the hill into a frozen lake, so I had to go out and pick everything up. It was the middle of the night, but thankfully the sun didn’t really set at that time of the year,” he said.
“But it was quite a shock to go from feeling I was safe inside the tent to suddenly being out in the cold storm, thinking that I could be in serious trouble,” Mike Keen said.
Thankfully, he managed to put on his drysuit, get in a sleeping bag, and to wait out the wind.
The data and the learnings
To be sure, his kayaking journey will live forever in Mike Keen’s own memory and for a long time in the memories of the Greenlanders whose diets he promoted. But how about the scientific outcomes of the trip? Can anything be learned from the data he collected?
Well, there is no doubt that he underwent physical changes during his journey. He lost 14 kilograms in the first four weeks, going from a weight of 90.2 and down to 75.9.
“That was quite alarming because I thought I was just using up my fat reserves, but at 75 the weight stabilized and stayed the same for the rest of the trip. To me that was amazing; my body kind of got into a balance with the environment,” he said.
Part of his journey also involved eating fermented food, a practice that Inuits have been swearing to for generations. And for three weeks, he ate between six and ten capelins, a small fish known locally as Ammassat.
The food’s effect on his gut microbiome was measured through the feces samples that he diligently sent back to Nuuk. Here, they were analyzed by a team led by the scientist Aviaja Lyberth Hauptmann, who, among other things, are researching Inuit diets. The results of these analyses have not yet been published.
But for the other tests, which were conducted by the nutritionist Tim Spector, the results are ready. And, according to Mike Keen, they indicate that eating a locally based diet and avoiding processed food, really does make a difference.
“He said that I went out as a normal guy and I came back with an athlete’s body. That was quite impressive; no one has ever accused me of being an athlete before,” Mike Keen said.
Some of the results, although they can be difficult to interpret, can be read here:
| BEFORE | AFTER | |||||
| Metabolic age | 49 | 39 | ||||
| Basal metabolic rate | cal | 2083 | 1803 | |||
| Body mass index | kg/m2 | 26,4 | 23,5 | |||
| Body fat | kg | 18,3 | 12,8 | |||
| Body fat | % | 20,3 | 16,90 | |||
| Phase angle | degree | 6,8 | 6,6 | |||
| Body water | litre | 49,2 | 43,9 | |||
| Body water | % | 54 | 57 | |||
| Extra cellular water | litre | 20,2 | 18,1 | |||
| Fat free mass | kg | 71,9 | 63,1 | |||
| Intra cellular water | litre | 29 | 25,8 | |||
| Left | Right | Left | Right | |||
| Fat arm | kg | 0,9 | 1 | 0,7 | 0,7 | |
| Fat leg | kg | 2,9 | 2,8 | 2 | 2 | |
| Fat trunk | kg | 10,7 | 7,4 | |||
| Lean mass arm | kg | 4,8 | 2,4 | 3,9 | 3,9 | |
| Lean mass leg | kg | 12,3 | 12,3 | 10,6 | 10,7 | |
| Lean mass trunk | kg | 37,8 | 34 | |||
| Muscles arm | kg | 4,5 | 4,4 | 3,7 | 3,7 | |
| Muscles leg | kg | 11,6 | 11,6 | 10 | 10,1 | |
| Muscles trunk | kg | 36,3 | 32,5 | |||
| Skeletal muscle mass | kg | 68,4 | 60 | |||
| Visceral fat rating | units | 10 | 8 | |||
| Weight | kg | 90,2 | 75,9 |
Eat your environment
This year, before the second leg of the journey, he tested the same diet but without the kayaking journey. Again, he lost 15 kilos and his general health improved.
“The big takeaway is: don’t believe modern food advice from the government. I didn’t touch a single piece of fruit or vegetable for 95 days, and all my health markers were improved,” he said.
For people who do not live in a place where the Inuit diet is easily accessible, he advises ‘common sense’. Buy local produce and avoid food that needs to be transported long distances before consumption.
His next project will test another indigenous diet, but one that is very different from the fat and protein rich Inuit diet. Next year, he will be going to Ecuador to live with an indigenous tribe in the rainforest.
“Their diet is about 30 procent meat, and the rest is fruit and root vegetables. It will be super interesting to see my blood results and how they compare to the Greenland diet which was mostly ‘keto’,” he said.
“My suspicion is that if it is local to the environment I am living in, and if it’s not full of Coca Cola and Pringles, it will show similar results,” said Mike Keen, whose Instagram handle is @eatyourenvironment.
Ole Ellekrog, Polar Journal AG
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