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What is ESSENTIAL to a healthy diet?

hanadr

Expert
We tend to learn that fruits and vegetables contain vitamins and minerals that we need. what is often not understood is that fatty meat contains more vitamins than they do.
Vilhalmur Stefansson and Karson Andersen Lived for a whole year on nothing but fatty meat ( constantly under supervision) in the mid 1920s. Anderson even survived pneumonia, which he caught during an epidemic, In fact he recovered faster than most other patients. their body chemistry was investigated befor the test started and afterwards. Stefansson's health remained good Anderson's actually improved.
When they began the experiment, the supervising doctors predicted that the'd both be ill in a fortnight and near death on 90 days. Stefansson had previously lived with Canadian Inuit people.
this piece of knowledge is so subersive to some people that someone has even invented the notion that the inuit peoples, whose traditional diet is almost carb free, collected and dried berries to provide them with carbs, the year round. They DIDN'T.
Stefansson discovered that if fats were resricted, he wasn't well until he got them back again.
these fats were animal fats, which nowadays we are told are "bad fats", whilst plant oils are "good fats".
 
Yeah, the Bellevue Hospital Experiment ought to have been a seminal study, a turning point in the understanding of health and nutrition.
All the usual predictions were made for Stefansson and Andersen's health;
such as that scurvy will result from the absence of vegetable elements, that other deficiency diseases may be produced, that the effect will be bad on the circulatory system and on the kidneys, that certain harmful micro-organisms will flourish in the intestinal tract, and that there will be insufficient calcium.
All of the predictions were disproved of course, but somehow the understanding of nutrition doesn't seem to have moved on very much in the intervening 90 years!
I suppose it's a bit facile to repeat the old homily that there are essential fats and essential proteins but no such thing as an essential carbohydrate?

fergus
 
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