This is the key statement.

That too is another point of contention, and that too has very little evidence to support it. With the Bellevue all-meat experiment again, can we conclude that "it's very important to eat as much of the animal as we can"? No, but we can conclude that if we did like they did, we'd be just fine. So, mostly fat, mostly muscle meat, and little of anything else.

Stefansson relates the anecdote of a hunt by a native hunter, where the hunter took the back fat and the hide, discarded the rest, because he just didn't have the means or the time to take the entire animal with him, i.e. he took the essential parts of the animal. Or for example, that the lean was given to the sled dogs, while humans ate the rest, primarily the fat, and in the event of a famine, the humans ate everything, then they ate the dogs.

Context is important. In abundance, why would we eat inferior food? No reason, we have ample superior food. During famine, inferior foods are eaten, not because it's preferred, but because they're starving. Here, it's the idea of abundance foods and starvation foods. Which part of the animal would they have eaten first, if they had been starving for a while? The preferred parts. What parts would those be? The same as if they'd have abundant game to hunt. OK, there's meat and potatoes on your plate, which one do you eat completely, which one do you likely waste if you're full half-way through? Meat first, potatoes go to waste. If you got just enough to buy either meat or potatoes, which one do you buy? Meat, of course. OK, it's between meat and potatoes here, but make it between meat and tripe, meat and liver, meat and kidneys. Now let's say you're rich and you can buy all the food you'll ever want. Why would you buy potatoes, or liver, or whatever else that you don't prefer? For me, it's Angus rib steak all the time. Nothing else even comes close.

A fundamental principle is total absence of science as argument to support eating anything for any reason, or as means to choose proper foods. So, no clue about calories, vitamins, minerals, fiber, essential fatty acids, protein and amino acids, and basically anything else measurable through direct analysis. So if we want to find out what they ate and why they ate it, we can't use any method they didn't use.

For example, the adrenals to cure scurvy or other ailments. We do a direct analysis of adrenals, and find all kinds of therapeutic things in there. We conclude, that's why they chose to eat adrenals. No, cuz they never did any kind of direct analysis. The reason they chose to eat adrenals is empirical, through trial and error, they ate it, looked at the effects, drew conclusions.

Or for example, lichen and other plant stuff pre-digested in caribou stomach. Lichen and other plant stuff is toxic to humans as is (as written in the article, I don't actually know, but that's the premise), but not if it's pre-digested by a caribou, right? We must know this from direct analysis of lichen, but also from actual empirical knowledge of eating lichen. Well, they have that same empirical knowledge about eating lichen, cuz that's the kind of knowledge they have, the only kind of knowledge they have. Which one would they have known about first, the effect of eating pre-digested lichen in the stomach of the caribou they just killed, or the effect of eating lichen straight from the ground? Well, when you're starving, and when you're smart, you look at what other things eat. So, they knew the caribou ate lichen, so they must have tried to eat it too, cuz food is food, why not try it, we're starving and dying anyway. They try it, get sick, die, don't try it again. Oh, got an idea, if lichen is good for the caribou, but it makes us sick, maybe the caribou can somehow neutralize the stuff that makes us sick so it doesn't make it sick. Maybe it's in the stomach cuz stuff gets transformed in there, and we know this from empirical knowledge. OK, let's go kill a caribou and see what gives. Right, so here's a freshly killed caribou, we're all starving so let's try to eat the stomach with all that pre-digested lichen. Hey smart guy, we just killed a caribou, it's got 100lbs of back fat on it, and you want to try to eat the stomach full of toxic lichen?

I went to another forum once and got yelled at for suggesting turnips were low carb. People are nuts.

This is an understatement! I was just reading a thread on a FB Ketogenic IF group, and the poster (and many commenters below him) were ranting about a Ketogenic group that someone was 17 days into a water only fast and how unhealthy it was!

Yes, I encountered the attitudes you're referring to amongst those on the meat only Facebook group. Coincidentally, it made me feel rather ikky inside after trying it for a week or two. Maybe that's why they're all grouchy, they feel deprived and malnourished.

For awhile I read that FB group. Did not understand some of the freak-outs. It seems some of their rules are meant to be broken and some are not. For example mayo is ok but not "optimal." Interesting to read different ones' experiences though. I don't like meat enough to eat the amount suggested (2-3 pounds/day). And I don't like being "Thanksgiving stuffed" every day. Politely full on eggs is my style. They don't seem to claim their way is going to be for everyone though.

I questioned them on bacon because they sale fresh, not processed meats. Minimal to no spices. Rare vs over cooked. Bacon is the antithesis of this. Yes, there is lots of contradiction.

As I said above, people tend to think that other people think as they do. Husband has some strange beliefs about decor, handed down from his mother, and is quite sure, despite a LOT of empirical evidence to the contrary, that he's not at all unique in those beliefs.

So, if you have the discipline to eat meat only, and lots of it, and you feel good and have lost weight and (insert benefit here), and you see other people who do NOT eat as you do, somewhere inside your head, you may be thinking, "What's wrong with them? They KNOW that this is the best way to eat. They're either stupid, stubborn or lazy, to eat any other way."

People who do NOT have the single-mindedness necessary to eat only meat usually know that they, themselves, mess up on a regular basis in all areas of their lives, and may be a little more tolerant of the differing choices of others.

I'm somewhere in the middle. I do a lot of research. I tend to try to translate it into language that someone with no medical background can understand, because that's what I've done for 15 years: gotten the information I need to help clients, and then figured out how to share it in a compelling fashion.

People in a group of like minded, highly motivated individuals don't feel the need to put on those filters, at least, most of them don't: they are preaching to their own carefully selected choir, and if one of them starts the song, the rest will join in the chorus.

My point (one of them) is that humans have completely lost touch with how they should eat, we have zero intuitive sense of what makes a healthy diet. What we've been raised on makes a huge difference as far as what we prefer, and that may not correlate at all with what our bodies need to function effectively. Take for instance, my stepson, who is the ultimate "picky eater" and has been basically allowed to determine his own diet. His "meals" are chicken nuggets, canned soup or Domino's pizza, maybe a hamburger at times. Augmented with cheese fish, Ritz crackers, Gogurt, applesauce and of course candy. If you give him a carrot, he'll throw it away. I am flabbergasted that a body can survive on such a diet, obviously he has some health issues. Culture is what protected our diet for a looong time, but it has been scrambled and lost. Wild animals do much better than we do at diet selection.

More to say, but I should be working....

Okay, maybe somebody was crazy, so they tried eating stomach contents. Who knows? Or perhaps they saw their dogs eating the stomach contents, and from that considered the possibility that it was safe to eat.

People probably wouldn't be starving when there were caribou walking around with 100's of pounds of back fat. Starving people hunting down starving caribou in the lean part of a hard year might have been more adventurous about eating less obviously appealing parts of the animal.

Farther south, corn became a staple--prepared in such a way to prevent the pellegra that people would otherwise suffer from on a corn based diet. Or acorns--those contain dangerous amounts of tannin, without proper treatment, acorns would be dangerous. Yet acorns were a common staple, with a long drawn out process to decrease the tannin content. Legumes have a long history of human consumption--and are very poisonous raw.

Here's a possibility--outside of the caribou's stomach, people might have discovered ways to treat lichen, to make it edible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethno...ichens_for_food

OOh Lichen, yum, I have a hard time not snacking when I'm tree pruning



I tend to believe that at some point, we had some intuitive sense about what we should be eating. So for instance, the body senses a deficiency in certain vitamins that are high in organ meat, we taste organ meat, it tastes "more-ish", we eat the organ meat. Body needs protein, you crave an Angus steak (based on previous tasting of a steak, and how the body reads it). Uncivilized animals seem to operate this way, why wouldn't we before the advent of modern foods and advertising.

I also tend to believe that we had (like animals) an intuitive sense of what would poison us (before refined sugar). Certain compounds would send an immediate signal that this was not edible. Now that we are eating "parmesan cheese" made out of wood fiber, we've completely lost the ability to pick up on those subtle signals. And of course if you are starving, you'll eat just about anything in desperation. So if our bodies are "starving" for nutrition, and we're just filling our stomach with crap, not getting the vital nutrients we need, then we'll just keep eating to try and fill that void--even if it should signal as "poison".

You too? Snacking on lichens while trimming trees and positioning landscaping rocks was my best kept secret. Tough to admit!

Agree with the fact we've lost it. Due to so many frankenfoods and the over-stimulation of our eating senses, we've lost the ability to feel real hunger and to feel real satiety. Not sure how our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have fared, as they were intelligent enough to recognize that when one of them keeled over dead due to mushroom consumption or from toxic berries that maybe they ought to stay away from those things. More of a trial and fatal error type of approach. I know that some groups in the past would watch what birds consumed on cacti and other vegetation to determine what was poisonous or not. Smart. That's one of the things our species has going for it. However, that may be the very thing that undermined our ability to detect a slow death due to processed foods causing metabolic syndrome. We now have seen obesity and death rates skyrocket due to the lack of nutritional knowledge. It's a very slow canary in the coal mine type of dynamic. Hey, but we seem to be catching on . . . .

I am a zero carb eater. MY WAY!

in that if I opt 'one day' out of 30 in the month to eat a few radish cause 'I want to' is my business.

ZIOH is specific. they are meat and water. no 'extras' and while I say go fit into a group that is SO specific is good if you want to do that----I know when I read their FB page so many cheat it is stupid LOL

but there is great info on that board.

see 'thru the circus' of it all and gain the main info that is wonderful to ''''us who need VERY low carb'"" to make it in this journey.

we see the weird, the wild, the crazy, the 'koolaid'---take what you need and move on from the rest

do it 'your way' and if you don't fit into a group, it is ok, cause a group is not needed if you are secure in yourself and the results you receive.

That's very true, and I've learned that over time. Maybe it was coincidence, and maybe it was just my own lack of understanding, but the first posts I saw on the one group seemed completely militant.

The other group seems a bit more tolerant and encouraging.....