In your mind it's refuted, but the evidence speaks a different story - there is no population in the record that consumed only one animal, or worse, an animal but threw away nutrient-dense parts of it! You're setting up a strawman - the current condition of agriculture and transport - as the reason to consider variety important....yet look at human history - we've long traded what one population has in adbundance for what another has in abundance to add variety to our foodstuffs, to spice it up, to enhance it --- and this was long before our subsidy policies and price supports, etc.

As I've already noted - we're highly efficient in the face of a deficiency of a nutrient - time to overt symptoms presenting depends on the nutrient in question, how we store it, how much we store, etc. -- you can't simply say any level of deficiency leads to quick symptoms - B12 is an excellent nutrient that refutes this......we have years and years of B12 stored.....makes you wonder why, doesn't it?



We're not carnivores - unlike carnivores, we have taste buds that detect sweet for one; our teeth are that of an omnivore; our enzymes and gut bacteria speak volumes that we're designed to consume a wide variety of options, including plant foods; and again, you can't point to a population that completely avoided all carbohydrate and/or plant foods for life - even the Inuit populations consume plant foods when they're available, and they did this long before any outside influence came to their lives.



None is virtually impossible - you know that.....unless of course you only consume animals slaughtered under high stress conditions, and only eat the muscle and fat....not consuming any organs or other parts - then, maybe, since stress depletes glycogen, you could almost get to zero.

I was being serious Martin - what you're saying is that one does not have to ever consider consuming anything but flesh (muscle) and fat.....and that's fine.....and if that is what you're saying, then ground beef should do it for life, right? Or am I misrepresenting your contentions?

The word "meat" is highly subjective - is it just muscle + fat or do you agree that organs and other parts should be part of the diet too? That's what I'm asking - nothing more - I want to know if you think just muscle meat + fat is sufficient, that one need not ever include anything else - not the brain, heart, kidneys, liver, eyeballs, skin, bone marrow, etc. -- just plain old muscle meat and fat without anything else. Can you clarify your stance on this so we're clear what you mean by "meat"?

Let me spell it out better:

Let's say one eating just 70/30 ground beef.....thinking it's all meat, therefore just fine. Does ground beef - that is just some muscle (flesh) and fat, ground together, provide all necessary nutrients?

Well 100g of ground 70/30 lacks any vitamin A or vitamin C....yet, if one were to eat some of the liver, brains, eyes, or the bone marrow, they'd get vitamin A.....if one were to include some kidney, brain, tongue or liver, hey there's the vitamin C.

So one can, as I've already SAID, eat just an animal based diet - and meet nutrient requirements -- you'd be hard pressed to do so on just the muscle + fat though, you need other parts of the animal to round out what's missing in the muscle. Like us, animals store different nutrients in different places - and in this example, the vitamin A and vitmain C are easily had by simply eating more than just the flesh and fat.

This is getting tedious arguing over semantics.

That's precisely what I mean.

No, let me spell it out better. Muscle meat and fat is enough.

You win, Regina! There is no evidence at all that all humans "need" to eat an "all-meat" diet.

My problem when I read about what traditional societies eat is that a lot of it sounds seriously yukky - autolyzed flesh??? - no thank you very much. Fermented seal blubber??? Pass the bucket!

I feel that a low-carb diet is about the best we can do in the modern world to eat as healthily as our current cultural options allow us. Here in Germany I can get some organ meats (brains, tripe, kidney, heart, liver, marrow bones) at my local butcher's, but a lot of the fermented foods that people used to eat until pretty recently are simply not available (I bought some fresh sauerkraut recently, but didn't eat it, I'm afraid - I didn't like the smell of it and I wasn't even sure if it wasn't pasteurized) and to make them for a family of four would be time-consuming. Equally, the highly-praised raw milk is available to but a few. The best I can do is to get yoghurts with live bacteria or cheese made from raw milk. But raw milk is banned here, I do believe.

We will never go back to our "paleo" diets. The likelihood of our eating all those organ meats (the adrenal glands to ward off goitre, for example) is virtually nil, unless there is a big change in thinking and attitudes, which I really don't see happening. I have begun to eat more organ meats, partly because they are cheap because no-one wants them - irony of ironies - but there isn't a wide range available.

Low-carb is the best option for health and balanced nutrition as far as I'm concerned. Zero carbs is simply not an option for me. And I really do not believe that it ever has been for any human beings.

amanda

It isn't.

But it may take decades for the damage to show up.

Or you might be one of the lucky ones in the genetic lottery and you can eat just muscle meat and fat for the next fifty years, live till you're 120 with no side-effects or diseases.

When that happens, let me know and then I'll believe that muscle meat and fat is enough.

In the meantime I'm playing it safe and eating low-carb.

Good luck with your experiment: I hope you won't regret it in a few years.

amanda

I also agree with the above.

It's one of the many reasons Cronies supplement their diets almost to the extreme and consume approximately 30% of their calories from protein.

Do you remember back in 2007 when you posted This Link?

Bo

I agree that the Inuit do not eat only one animal their entire life, however...

As far as plants go, the only Inuit populations that relied more (but not heavily) on plants circa Stefansson's book were the Inuit populations which already had much contact with 'white men' (as Stefansson puts it). The Victoria Island Inuit, which Stefansson 'discovered' (so to speak) had no previous intervention with white men.. and while there is a tuber used by both populations, according to Stefansson: [note: Alaskans = 'white man intervention', Victorians = 'no white man intervention']


The Victoria Island group of Inuit, when asked why they didn't eat the berries in the bushes near them, stated they 'did not consider them food'. So sure, they ate some items, but apparently they did pass up some opportunities as they came.

OTOH, you're also right about using the whole animal. It was very interesting to me to read that some of the groups made soup out of seal blood.

Claiming that damage will show up later is purely fictional fear mongering. There is nothing that can lead us to believe what you just wrote. Even you can't spell out specifically what will happen or when. All you're saying is something bad is going to happen sometime in the future. Vague and pointless.

By comparison, everybody here has first hand experience of what will happen on a high carb, low fat, calorie restricted diet.

If CRON was possible, its proponents wouldn't see the need to supplement. Therefore they really practice simple caloric restriction with supplementation in order to simulate optimal nutrition. They don't trust the tenets of CRON.

Thanks for stating things so well. I never understood why, if they were getting "optimal nutrition" they would need supplements.

As you are utterly confident that your all-meat diet will do you no harm, I am sure you are not the least bit afraid of any consequences your WOE may have.

I equally have no clue whether my WOE is the best way to go, but it makes me feel better now, for one, and, two, I feel relatively confident that my WOE is probably doing me more good than harm. But, at the end of the day, I have no way of knowing whether your way of eating or mine is the better one. Time will tell.

Having tried out the high-carb, low-fat, calorie-restricted diet, on which I did indeed lose weight, but also muscle, (and permanently felt hungry, too), there is no way I'm going back to that.

An all-meat diet may indeed be healthier than the Standard American Diet, but that doesn't mean it's the best diet for me.

But I must say I admire your tenacity and perseverance with your creed.

amanda