Historically, Inuit cuisine, which is taken here to include the Greenlandic, the Yupʼik and Aleut cuisines, consisted of a diet of animal source foods that were fished, hunted, and gathered locally.

After hunting, they often honour the animals' spirit by singing songs and performing rituals. Although traditional or country foods still play an important role in the identity of Inuit, much food is purchased from the store, which has led to health problems and food insecurity. According to Edmund Searles in his article Food and the Making of Modern Inuit Identities, they consume this type of diet because a mostly meat diet is "effective in keeping the body warm, making the body strong, keeping the body fit, and even making that body healthy".

There has been a decline of hunting partially due to the fact that most young people lack the skills to survive off the land. They are no longer skilled in hunting like their ancestors and are growing more accustomed to the Qallunaat ("white people") food that they receive from the south. The high costs of hunting equipment—snowmobiles, rifles, sleds, camping gear, gasoline, and oil—is also causing a decline in families who hunt for their meals.

Because the climate of the Arctic is ill-suited for agriculture and lacks forageable plant matter for much of the year, the traditional Inuit diet is lower in carbohydrates and higher in fat and animal protein compared to the global average. When carbohydrate intake is inadequate for total energy requirements, protein is broken down in the liver through gluconeogenesis and utilized as an energy source. Inuit studied in the 1970s were found to have abnormally large livers, presumably to assist in this process. Their urine volumes were also high, a result of additional urea which the body uses to purge waste products from gluconeogenesis. However, in multiple studies the traditional Inuit diet has not been shown to be a ketogenic diet. Not only have multiple researchers been unable to detect any evidence of ketosis resulting from the traditional Inuit diet, but the ratios of fatty-acid to glucose were observed to be well below the generally accepted level of ketogenesis.

Inuit might consume more carbohydrates than most nutritionists have assumed. Because some of the meat the Inuit eat is raw and fresh, or freshly frozen, they can obtain more carbohydrates from their meat, as dietary glycogen, than Westerners can. The Inuit practice of preserving a whole seal or bird carcass under an intact whole skin with a thick layer of blubber also permits some proteins to ferment into carbohydrates. Furthermore, the blubber, organs, muscle and skin of the marine mammals that Inuit eat have significant glycogen stores, which assist those animals when oxygen is depleted on prolonged dives. For instance, when blubber is analyzed by direct carbohydrate measurements, it has been shown to contain as much as 8—30% carbohydrates. While postmortem glycogen levels are often depleted through the onset of rigor mortis, marine mammals have a much delayed onset of rigor mortis, even in warm conditions, presumably due to the high content of oxymyoglobin in the muscle that may permit aerobic metabolism to continue slowly for some time after the death of the animal. Additionally, in cold conditions, glycogen's depletion is halted at −18 °C (−0.4 °F) and lower temperatures in comminuted meat.

Traditional Inuit diets derive approximately 50% of their calories from fat, 30–35% from protein and 15–20% of their calories from carbohydrates, largely in the form of glycogen from the raw meat they consumed. This high fat content provides valuable energy and prevents protein poisoning, which historically was sometimes a problem in late winter when game animals grew lean through winter starvation. It has been suggested that because the fats of the Inuit's wild-caught game are largely monounsaturated and rich in omega-3 fatty acids, the diet does not pose the same health risks as a typical Western high-fat diet. However, actual evidence has shown that Inuit have a similar prevalence of coronary artery disease as non-Inuit populations and they have excessive mortality due to cerebrovascular strokes, with twice the risk to that of the North American population. Indeed, the cardiovascular risk of this diet is so severe that the addition of a more standard American diet has reduced the incidence of mortality in the Inuit population. Furthermore, fish oil supplement studies have failed to support claims of preventing heart attacks or strokes.

Vitamins and minerals which are typically derived from plant sources are nonetheless present in most Inuit diets. Vitamins A and D are present in the oils and livers of cold-water fishes and mammals. Vitamin C is obtained through sources such as reindeer liver, kelp, muktuk, and seal brain; because these foods are typically eaten raw or frozen, the vitamin C they contain, which would be destroyed by cooking, is instead preserved.

Searles defines Inuit food as mostly "eaten frozen, raw, or boiled, with very little mixture of ingredients and with very few spices added". Some preparations include: