Actually the pemmican had berries and a lot of fat in it. Eating JUST jerky creates a kind of protein poisoning that the pioneers called "rabbit starvation". But I agree about grains, esp. wheat: it messes up digestion big time. Rice doesn't appear to do that so much, although it is lacking in nutrients: a large portion of the human population these days lives off white rice mostly with bits of meat and some vegies, and they live longer than the average person in the US.
Some "meat" foods ... like eggs, shellfish, whole small fish, milk ... are rather balanced and people can live on them. The actual populations that don't do farming DO eat a lot of those kinds of foods, plus greens and berries and seaweed. Humans are big time omnivores, always have been! There is a really interesting article about this:
BTW someone asked me privately what "BAS" stands for. It's our official term :-) for what sounds to me like a great lunch: Rick's "Big A$$ Salad". I can only imagine what is in his, but if it was mine, it would be a big pile of: lettuce, artichoke hearts, olives, roasted nuts, dried cranberries, bacon, tomatoes, chopped fresh herbs ... tossed with a mixture of fresh-pressed garlic, vinegar, and olive oil.
On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 6:19 AM, RickS <rstewart@iaff.org > wrote:
Thanks for taking the time to write all of that out. I have noticed that I lose weight faster when I eat BASs with balsamic vinegar.
There is more to the story about the sailors though that doesn't usually get told. For centuries the English provided jerky as the staple food on their ships. Sailors got on just fine eating jerky and fresh water. As a cost cutting measure they decided to stop providing jerky and start providing bread and fresh water. Sailors began getting scurvy. Surgeon James Lind found that adding lemons and limes to their diet kept the incidence of scurvy down and since bread and citrus were still cheaper than jerkey, sailors got to eat bread and limes. Many phrases came from this period like, "Man cannot live by bread alone", "Scurvy dogs", and our referring to the English as "Limeys". So the citrus was really a bandaid for poor nutrition brought about by financial decisions to get rid of meat and institute bread instead.
American Indians would go on hunts for weeks or months and eat Pemmican, which is mammal fat mixed with ground dried meat, with no adverse effects. I think there's something in grains that increases our requirements for vitamins and minerals. Something to do with phytates. I'm currently researching all of this now but I don't know enough to go into detail.
-Rick
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