On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 6:32 AM, free2bmekeywest <dogdoright@aol.com> wrote:
Hi,
--- 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.
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.
Except those people do NOT eat just "meat". The Maasai drink mainly milk. The Plains Indians had a quite varied diet that did include buffalo, but also included a kind of prarie potato, greens, grasshoppers, plus whatever they raided from other tribes. Also, they had a low birthrate and relied on raiding to get new tribe members. It's likely their lifestyle changed drastically after they got horses from white people, so no one knows how they lived previously. The Mongols carried bags of rice with them, and drank a lot of milk. Tribal African cultures defined themselves by their "staple" which was some starch ... yams, millet, etc. Also lots of grubs.
I agree, meat alone will kill you. Humans need like 20-30% protein, and the rest varies between starch and fat. I think for a healthy metabolism, the percentage of starch vs. fat isn't that important (you body can turn starch into fat quite nicely!) and it varies greatly throughout the world. My point is: the 20-30% protein is almost never purely "muscle meat" in traditional cultures. The whole "muscle meat" thing is a luxury of our current culture.
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.
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),
Isn't that what I said?
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/fruitA 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.
> matter, and a fair amount of eggs, dairy, seafood, poultry, nuts. (Plus
> reptiles and insects in more Paleo cultures).
??? Have you studied any cuisines of earlier cultures? I was with a guy doing his doctorate on coastal Indians, on a tour, and we gathered about the same foods they did. They had *hundreds* of plants they ate, and a wide variety of animal foods too (mostly from the coast: sea snails, fish, clams, crabs, seals that washed up, etc). But there were LOTS of fruits and vegies, for sure, for most of the year. And this isn't even the tropics. One researcher in Arizona tried to eat the foods the Indians there ate, and was surprised that even in the desert, he could gather vegies year-round.
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And meat on feast days orME: Again it depends on the culture and "when" you look at it. If they are a "stick and dog culutre" you are right.
> 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.
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.
Most early pastoralists don't eat the animals very often. The Maasai, for instance, regard the cows as almost part of the family. They drink the milk, and bleed them sometimes, but they don't ordinarily kill them. Muscle meat isn't nearly as nutritious as either milk or eggs are, and most of those kinds of animals don't have much fat (water birds and camels do, and pigs, hippos, and crocs). According to the bones they've uncovered from early cultures, the usual pattern was to eat very young male animals, and keep the females. That doesn't give enough "meat" for it to be a daily staple, unless you are also rich. For example, the pattern in Europe was to butcher one pig per year, and that fed the entire family for the year. Which means the ham was for flavor and fat, not the basis of the diet.
And I'm sure they ate plenty of deer etc. It's just that this was just one item on the menu, and probably not the main one.
>> working for some time though.
>
> The "European diet" (which the American diet is based on) has not been
ME: It depends on which European diet! French are fine. The island Italians are doing fine.
The French and Italians eat lots of fish, eggs, and cheese. That's my point. The
Spanish too. When I was in Spain, it was next to impossible to get much in
the way of "steak" ... you got like one teeny slice of beef that was pretty
bad. But you could easily get a superb fish, and a big egg omelette was generally
the meal's appetizer. And dessert was usually fruit. Lots of greens too.
Compare that to a typical American meal: steak and potatoes. Hamburger
on a bun. Hamburger casserole. Roast beef and potatoes. Many meals
(probably most) are starch plus muscle meat, with a tiny bit of vegies maybe
thrown in for decoration.
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.
Um. The French are very much into their bread, and the Spanish do rice, the Italians do pasta. The Asians all do rice. All of those are high-glycemic carbs. That doesn't seem to be a factor for them.
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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
That's where the semantics get so problematic. A VEGAN diet means, "no animal products". A lot of people use "vegetarian" to mean "vegan" these days, but in the past, that was not necessarily the meaning. The word "meat" meant mainly "muscle meat from 4-legged animals", so "fish" didn't count as "meat". Milk didn't count as meat either, or eggs.
Most human diets throughout history were, as I said, low in "meat" as defined as "muscle meat from 4-legged ruminants". My point is that many of the people who are "high protein" today eat mainly "meat" (plus fat) ... which I think is less than ideal. People who eat more fish/eggs/vegies/fruits not only have a more tasty diet (IMO) but get a wider variety of nutrients.
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.
It hasn't worked, is the thing. That meat-based diet happened about the time people started getting thin faces and losing their teeth a lot. I expect the wheat had a lot to do with that (wheat messes up digestion for a good chunk of the population), but preserved pork and beef just aren't as nutritions as eggs and fish. A person certainly *could* eat low carb by eating more eggs and fish, and lots of greens, but that's not the diet that most people tend to follow.
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ME: Well, since man survived the meat based diet to populate the planet this shows that it works.
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.
You have this assumption that people have in fact survived mostly on meat.
Statistically, this just isn't the case. Populations that live inland and eat only
land animals tend get cretinism and goiter: it's epidemic globally.
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.
Well, you are obviously convinced. I'm going to keep studying what people actually did eat, rather than continue to theorize about it. There are books and articles now that go into more detail about what tribal cultures actually consumed, and how much, rather than relying on what they talk about. And people who have actually lived with the tribes and eaten what they eat.
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