ally5555 said:
mm - would live very dull just eating meat
I don't fancy it myself - but Stefansson (who was one of the volunteers) got to like it. He spent most of the rest of his life living on an ultra low carbohydrate diet consisting of mostly meat and fish (he lived to be 83 - quite healthily). He wrote a book on diet called "Not by Bread Alone" - I would like to read it, although it has been out of print for many years and I have yet to track down a copy.
ally5555 said:
is there a mention of their teeth and where are they getting calcium from?
That is a very good question, and one that occurred to Stefansson. They followed the Inuit habit of eating fish bones and chewing rib ends, but even so, he wrote:
Toward the latter part of the test it became startlingly clear, on paper that we were not getting enough calcium for health. But we were healthy.
All that I can think is that the conventional wisdom of mineral requirements, as in so many areas of nutrition, is simplistic and not that well understood by science. Not only is there an enormous variation between individuals metabolisms, but there are also often a lot of complex interactions between different biological systems. Take, for example, what is probably the best known story in all of nutritional science - that of scurvy.
Everyone with a bit of secondary school biology knows that scurvy is caused by a vitamin C deficiency. It was the great scourge of the seventeenth century sailors, but it was totally prevented by the inclusion of various vitamin C rich food (lime juice, sauerkraut etc.) in rations from the mid eighteenth century onwards. This is a neat story - unfortunately it isn't true. This illustrates one of the most common mistakes in science - confusing correlation with causality. Just because vitamin C can be shown to cure scurvy and prevent scurvy, doesn't mean that a lack of vitamin C causes scurvy. Inuit, living on a traditional diet that has virtually no vitamin C were never been known to get scurvy. Neither did Stefansson and his colleague. There is now quite good evidence that vitamin C metabolism is regulated by glucose metabolism, and dietary carbohydrates cause it to be excreted by the kidneys. That isn't a problem, so long as it is replenished but if it isn't then the victim will come down with scurvy. If the diet is low enough in carbohydrates, then vitamin C isn't excreted - and it is possible to live on the tiny traces that are found in animal flesh.
ally5555 said:
I once had a pt as a student who only ate 12 eggs and 4 pounds of roast beef a day - she was in the metabolic unit of a london hopsital . Her chol level was the equivalent of 30 and her teeth had fallen out - the diagnosis was scurvy.
This is a horrible story, but a very interesting one. If the carbohydrate/vitamin C theory is correct - why did she get scurvy? 12 eggs are quite a lot - maybe there is enough carbohydrate in them to trigger the excretion of vitamin C. Alternatively, this is an extremely restrictive diet. In the Stefansson trial the volunteers ate a very wide range of meat and fish (as do Inuit), but no milk and no eggs. A beef and eggs only diet is much more limited - maybe there was some other compounding deficiency?
I guess that the moral of all this is that although really extreme diets aren't necessarily dangerous they might be - and if anyone feels a burning desire to try one then they should do so extremely cautiously and under close medical supervision. Mind you, I would like to know what effect the traditional Inuit diet would have on a diabetes - my guess is that it could be spectacular. Sadly, we will probably never know. Modern Inuit buy their food from supermarkets and go to McDonalds, and they are suffering an explosion of type 2 diabetes - just like the rest of the world.
