On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 6:58 AM, Deanna <WAPFbaby@salvonix.com> wrote:
I can offer anecdotal evidence that potassium is hard to get from animal foods; at least for an active gal such as myself. I eat fish a few times a week - including whole fish. I eat bone stock-based soups a few times a week as well. But when I ate a highly carnivorous diet for a few months last spring, I got the early morning leg cramps from hell. Potassium supplements cured them. I also felt a muscle tightness that increased over time. As a martial artist this was not a good thing. So now I am back to enjoying some salads and other veg. And seaweed (a protoctist, not a plant!).
Ah, the technical approach! I WAS going to quip "well, at least it isn't
an animal" ... but with sea life it's hard to tell what is vegetable and what isn't.
Some are sorta inbetween.
Inuit - especially inland tribes - are known for osteoporosis and a disease called tetany. I am pretty sure this is true of people on native foods beyond the age of 40. Google scholarly articles and books for more detail. That is exactly what I did during my carnivore stint. And what I learned was that they were not ALL so optimally healthy as some think. WA Price spent a season with the coastal Inuit. Stefansson lived with them (inland, I think) for a year. But there are other accounts that don't paint as rosy a picture for them long term.
I agree. And also you have to look at the entire *cuisine* of the people. Some
researcher found a chemical in raw milk that de-activates the sticky part
of gluten in the intestines: which means the "milk+bread" might be not
as harmful as the "bread" diet: and the populations that drank a
lot of raw milk overlap largely with the populations that use wheat or barley
as a grain. And the Japanese diet is pretty specific
about what they eat: if you just eat the white rice part of it it's pretty bad,
but combined with whole fish and vegies it's pretty good.
Plus there is genetics: when you have people like the Inuit or the Masai, isolated and
living on the edge, their genes do adapt (or at least the ones that
can't survive there, don't).
My goal in life right now is to find the "optimal human diet" ... we know
pretty well what the optimal diet is for a cow or a goat or a chicken,
but no one really knows for a human being. I'm pretty convinced at this
point that intermittent eating is one part of it. No matter what population
you look at on Earth, NONE of them (except folks in the last 50 years)
ate all day long.
-- Heather
__._,_.___
0 comments:
Post a Comment