Protein poisoning
Protein poisoning (also referred to colloquially as rabbit starvation, mal de caribou, or fat starvation) is a rare form of acute malnutrition thought to be caused by a complete absence of fat in the diet.
Excess protein is sometimes cited as the cause of this issue; when meat and fat are consumed in the correct ratio, such as that found in pemmican (which is 50% fat by volume), the diet is considered nutritionally complete and can support humans for months or more. Other stressors, such as
severe cold or a dry environment, may intensify symptoms (my note: dry weather and severe cold intensify protein poisoning symptoms. Hence, people in high altitudes consume higher amounts of fats. Example, people at high altitude typically prefer to eat sheep, not goat. Sheep is more fatty. Simiarly, people in northern hemisphere countries like US prefer beef which is quite fatty). or decrease time to onset. Symptoms include diarrhea, headache, fatigue, low blood pressure, slow heart rate, and a vague discomfort and hunger (very similar to a food craving) that can be satisfied only by the consumption of fat.
Protein poisoning was first noted as a consequence of eating rabbit meat exclusively, hence the term, "rabbit starvation". Rabbit meat is very lean; commercial rabbit meat has 50–100 g dissectable fat per 2 kg (live weight). Based on a carcass yield of 60%, rabbit meat is around 8.3% fat[1] while beef and pork are 32% fat and lamb 28%.[2]
Possible mechanisms[edit]
Given the lack of scientific data on the effects of high-protein diets, the US Food and Nutrition Board does not set a tolerable upper intake level nor upper acceptable macronutrient distribution range for protein.[3]
Observations[edit]
In U.S. Military Arctic Light Infantry Training (ALIT), it is taught that rabbit takes more vitamins to digest than it returns. It is recommended in survival situations to refrain from eating at all if rabbit is the only thing to eat.
The Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson wrote as follows:
The groups that depend on the blubber animals are the most fortunate in the hunting way of life, for they never suffer from fat-hunger. This trouble is worst, so far as North America is concerned, among those forest Indians who depend at times on rabbits, the leanest animal in the North, and who develop the extreme fat-hunger known as rabbit-starvation. Rabbit eaters, if they have no fat from another source—beaver, moose, fish—will develop diarrhea in about a week, with headache, lassitude and vague discomfort. If there are enough rabbits, the people eat till their stomachs are distended; but no matter how much they eat they feel unsatisfied. Some think a man will die sooner if he eats continually of fat-free meat than if he eats nothing, but this is a belief on which sufficient evidence for a decision has not been gathered in the North. Deaths from rabbit-starvation, or from the eating of other skinny meat, are rare; for everyone understands the principle, and any possible preventive steps are naturally taken.[4]
During the Greely Arctic Expedition 1881–1884, a harrowing experience of 25 expedition members, of whom 19 died, Stefansson refers to "'rabbit starvation' which is now to me the key to the Greely problem," which was why "only six came back." He concludes that one of the reasons for the many deaths was cannibalism of the lean flesh of members who had already died. Stefansson likens this to rabbit starvation, which he explains somewhat as in the above quoted observation.[citation needed]
Charles Darwin, in The Voyage of the Beagle, wrote:
We were here able to buy some biscuit. I had now been several days without tasting any thing besides meat: I did not at all dislike this new regimen; but I felt as if it would only have agreed with me with hard exercise. I have heard that patients in England, when desired to confine themselves exclusively to an animal diet, even with the hope of life before their eyes, have hardly been able to endure it. Yet the Gaucho in the Pampas, for months together, touches nothing but beef. But they eat, I observe, a very large proportion of fat, which is of a less animalized nature; and they particularly dislike dry meat, such as that of the agouti. Dr. Richardson, also, has remarked, “that when people have fed for a long time solely upon lean animal food, the desire for fat becomes so insatiable, that they can consume a large quantity of unmixed and even oily fat without nausea:” this appears to me a curious physiological fact. It is, perhaps, from their meat regimen that the Gauchos, like other carnivorous animals, can abstain long from food. I was told that at Tandeel, some troops voluntarily pursued a party of Indians for three days, without eating or drinking.[5]
In Into the Wild (1996), Jon Krakauer conjectured that Chris McCandless might have suffered from rabbit starvation.
See also[edit]
Clostridial necrotizing enteritis, a.k.a. pigbel, another lethal protein-related diet problem
Country food/Inuit diet, the traditional diet of the Inuit and First Nations
Kwashiorkor – Disease resulting from sufficient caloric intake with very low protein content
Marasmus – Disease caused by inadequate caloric intake
No-carbohydrate diet
Protein toxicity – damage caused by buildup of protein metabolic waste products in the bloodstream
Proteopathy – damage caused by misfolded proteins
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning
Pemmican is a concentrated mixture of fat and protein used as a nutritious food. Historically, it was an element of First Nations cuisine in certain parts of America.
Ingredients[edit]
The specific ingredients used for pemmican were usually whatever was available. The meat was often bison, deer, elk, or moose. Fruits such as cranberries and saskatoon berries were sometimes added. Blueberries, cherries, chokeberries, and currants were also used, but almost exclusively in ceremonial and wedding pemmican.[4]
Traditional preparation[edit]
Ball of pemmican.
Traditionally, pemmican was prepared from the lean meat of large game such as buffalo, elk, deer, or moose. The meat was cut in thin slices and dried, either over a slow fire or in the hot sun, until it was hard and brittle. (About 5 pounds (2,300 g) of meat are required to make 1 pound (450 g) of dried meat suitable for pemmican.) Then it was pounded into very small pieces, almost powder-like in consistency, using stones. The pounded meat was mixed with melted fat in an approximate 1:1 ratio by volume.[5] In some cases, dried fruits, such as blueberries, choke cherries, cranberries, or saskatoon berries, were pounded into powder and then added to the meat/fat mixture. The resulting mixture was then packed into rawhide bags for storage. It can be stored for a maximum of 10 years.[citation needed]
A bag of buffalo pemmican weighing about 90 lb (41 kg) was called a taureau (French for "bull") by the Métis of Red River. These bags of taureaux (lit. "bulls"), when mixed with fat from the udder, were known as taureaux fins, when mixed with bone marrow, as taureaux grand, and when mixed with berries, as taureaux à grains.[6] It generally took the meat of one buffalo to fill a taureau.[7]
Serving[edit]
In his notes of 1874, North-West Mounted Police Sergent-Major Sam Steele records three ways of serving pemmican: raw; boiled in a stew called "rubaboo"; or fried, known in the West as a "rechaud":[1]
The pemmican was cooked in two ways in the west; one a stew of pemmican, water, flour and, if they could be secured, wild onions or preserved potatoes. This was called "rubaboo"; the other was called by the plains hunters a "rechaud". It was cooked in a frying pan with onions and potatoes or alone. Some persons ate pemmican raw, but I must say I never had a taste for it that way.[8]
History[edit]
See also: Métis buffalo hunt § Pemmican trade
The voyageurs of the Canadian fur trade had no time to live off the land during the short season when the lakes and rivers were free of ice. They had to carry their food with them if the distance traveled was too great to be resupplied along the way.[9] A north canoe (canot du nord) with six men and 25 standard 90-pound (41 kg) packs required about four packs of food per 500 miles (800 km). Montreal-based canoemen could be supplied by sea or with locally grown food. Their main food was dried peas or beans, sea biscuit, and salt pork. (Western canoemen called their Montreal-based fellows mangeurs de lard or "pork-eaters".) In the Great Lakes, some maize and wild rice could be obtained locally. By the time trade reached the Winnipeg area, the pemmican trade was developed.[9]
Metis drying buffalo meat at St. François Xavier, Manitoba, Canada.
Métis would go southwest onto the prairie in Red River carts, slaughter buffalo, convert it into pemmican, and carry it north to trade at the North West Company posts. For these people on the edge of the prairie, the pemmican trade was as important a source of trade goods as was the beaver trade for the Indians farther north. This trade was a major factor in the emergence of a distinct Métis society. Packs of pemmican would be shipped north and stored at the major fur posts: Fort Alexander, Cumberland House, Île-à-la-Crosse, Fort Garry, Norway House, and Edmonton House. So important was pemmican that, in 1814, governor Miles Macdonell started the Pemmican War with the Métis when he passed the short-lived Pemmican Proclamation, which forbade the export of pemmican from the Red River Colony.[10]
Alexander Mackenzie relied on pemmican on his 1793 expedition across Canada to the Pacific.[11]
North Pole explorer Robert Peary used pemmican on all three of his expeditions, from 1886 to 1909, for both his men and his dogs. In his 1917 book Secrets of Polar Travel, he devoted several pages to the food, stating, "Too much cannot be said of the importance of pemmican to a polar expedition. It is an absolute sine qua non. Without it a sledge-party cannot compact its supplies within a limit of weight to make a serious polar journey successful."[12]
British polar expeditions fed a type of pemmican to their dogs as "sledging rations". Called "Bovril pemmican" or simply "dog pemmican", it was a beef product consisting, by volume, of 2/3 protein and 1/3 fat (i.e., a 2:1 ratio of protein to fat), without carbohydrate. It was later ascertained that although the dogs survived on it, this was not a nutritious and healthy diet for them, being too high in protein.[13] Members of Ernest Shackleton's 1914–1916 expedition to the Antarctic resorted to eating dog pemmican when they were stranded on ice for the winter.[14]
During the Second Boer War (1899–1902), British troops were given an iron ration made of four ounces of pemmican and four ounces of chocolate and sugar. The pemmican would keep in perfect condition for decades.[15] It was considered much superior to biltong, a form of cured game meats commonly used in Africa. This iron ration was prepared in two small tins (soldered together) which were fastened inside the soldiers' belts. It was the last ration used and it was used only as a last resort—when ordered by the commanding officer. A man could march on this for 36 hours before he began to drop from hunger.[16]
American adventurer Frederick Russell Burnham, while serving as Chief of Scouts for the British Army in South Africa, required pemmican to be carried by every scout.[17]
A 1945 scientific study of Pemmican criticized using it exclusively as a survival food because of the low levels of certain vitamins.[18]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pemmican
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit
