--- In fast5@yahoogroups.com, Heather Twist <HeatherTwist@...> wrote:
>
> On the other side of the coin, there isn't any culture that has lived on a
> nothing-but-meat diet either, which is the other extreme.
Hi,
This is not true. There are cultures both extinct and still just barely holding on where the main portion of their diet is meat + fat. Inuit, Masai, Mongol, American Plains Indians and traditional tribal African cultures.
Meat alone will kill you---- real quick.
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If you look at all
> the global cultures, the majority eat some kind of "staple" starch (yams may > have been the first staple food for hominids),
ME: This is not true. Depending on where you look on the globe the staple starch could be a seed, a herb or a grain such as millet, quiona, amaranth, rye or a tuber such as yam/yuca or even seaweed. It varies greatly by region.
And you have to look at global cultures at a particular point in time usually 1)before the discovery of the new world which signifies the introduction of previously unknown foods and 2)before the industrial revolution which indicates the introduction of the high-refined carb diet.
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with a lot of vegetable/fruit
> matter, and a fair amount of eggs, dairy, seafood, poultry, nuts. (Plus
> reptiles and insects in more Paleo cultures).
A doubt that there were lots of veggies and fruit around for most culutes. my guess is that veggies and fruit were eaten as they were found, and eventually they were fermented into alcohol or some sort of veggie-fruit paste that could be kept for a long time. Or they were sun-dried or mixed in with a meat/fat mixture for long term storage such as pemmican.
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And meat on feast days or
> after a big hunt. Plus, per Fast-5, the tendency is to eat one or two meals
> a day, since the meals are a lot more work to prepare.
ME: Again it depends on the culture and "when" you look at it. If they are a "stick and dog culutre" you are right.
but if they have domesticated animals in any way-birds, reptiles,bees dogs, pigs, camels, horses, goats, deer there was a constant supply of both meat, fat and milk-products-most of it freeze-dried, fermented or made into pemmican-type product.
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>
>
> The "European diet" (which the American diet is based on) has not been
> working for some time though.
ME: It depends on which European diet! French are fine. The island Italians are doing fine.
It is Europeans that have embraced a high-refined card diet (British) that are getting fat and sick but at a rate less than Americans.
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, and I think people are experimenting, trying
> to figure out why, ever since the explorers first noticed how healthy the
> "natives" were. But the issue isn't "meat" vs. "not meat". Europeans
> typically ate more muscle meat than "natives" did, and that is, I think,
> still true. None of the native groups were "vegan", but their sources of
> protein were (and are) more the ones I mention above. Which used to be the
> definition of a "vegetarian" diet (or a "fasting" diet on church "no meat"
> days). So a "vegetarian" diet in the sense of basing the protein content on
> fish, eggs, milk, nuts, poultry ... HAS been tried, and it works fine.
ME: But that is NOT a vegetarian diet if you eat fish, milk and eggs. That is the point! Fish is FLESH. Eggs are unborn Birds (Flesh). Milk has to come from a mammal that is lactating-you have to have a animal to get the milk.
Vegetarian diet means no animal by-products except for honey. PERIOD.
If you add in eggs you are an Ovo-Vegetarion, if you add in milk you are LActo-Vegitarian. Adding either one of these into your diet means you are in fact NOT a vegetarian.
The importance of adding eggs or milk into a veggie diet changes it and makes it better for people which is why you designate lacto or ovo
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>
> The current diet people are calling "high protein" isn't a diet that has
> been used in any culture over several generations, at least not
> successfully. There are people who rely on mainly ruminant meat for their
> protein ... like the sailors and pioneers ... but they had fairly serious
> health problems.
ME: Umm. The diet that is popular is based upon low-carbs. It includes fat, protein and low carb veggies and fruits-the traditional diet of man. This diet has worked for centuries. Sailors ate a high carb diet washed down with port or rum. Pioneers usually died unlesss the indigenous people showed them how to eat.
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There are loads of people who have used it short term and
> it seems to work short term for them ... as does veganism for the people who
> use it short term. No one really knows what would happen long term, because
> the experiment hasn't been done. But both extremes are low in different
> nutrients, so I don't think either one would be good for a developing fetus.
ME: Well, since man survived the meat based diet to populate the planet this shows that it works.
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>
> Personally, I think the issues with the European diet are likely:
>
> 1) The reliance on wheat as the "staple". Esp. when it's finely ground
> (feeds yeast) and enriched with too much iron, and full of bromine (which
> blocks iodine).
>
> 2) The reliance on beef, pork, sheep, and goat as the main meats. In America
> we have further narrowed "meat" down to mean mainly beef and pork muscle
> meat. Neither is an ideal source of protein.
ME: No. The problem is that we don't eat the organs and glands. When you kill an animal you never eat muscle meat first-you eat the glands. You have to eat eyes, brain, heart, blood and the other stuff-that is where the vitamins are.
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>
> That is a diet that is low in Omega 3 fatty acids, low in iodine, low in
> glucosamine, too high in iron, and pro-inflammatory (all the protein comes
> with neu5gc, and wheat promotes gut inflammation for many people). Anyway,
> it's a diet that has NOT worked well in Europe or the US. There are hundreds
> of other diet possibilities that would work fine, with or without "meat" per
> se.
>
>
> *** At this point someone always brings up the Inuit and the Maasai. I might
> point out that neither group relies mainly on "meat" in the American sense.
> The Inuit eat mainly seafood, including sea mammals, which are just not the
> same thing as land animals. The Maasai are pastoralists who drink mainly
> milk, with some blood, and rarely kill or eat their cows.
>
>
ME: Sea animals are meat. PAstured animals have similar composition to sea animals. And Masai eat a mixture of meat and milk and they do cooked it in different ways and add different food items to the blood. And they do eat their animals, and they do hunt game.
AMA in IL
>
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