Meat Paradox and The Eskimos

This section of the blog is one I have been unwilling to post to because of the already established ideas about certain diets. 

One of these diets is "MEAT".

The belief is that man cannot live on meat alone. You can hardly see a doctor or dietitian telling you to live on eating meat alone. Such professional will be considered unorthodox or quack. The arguments  are that; 

1. Man was not created carnivorous - that is confirmed by our teeth and stomach systems. 

2. Also it is believed that taking meat without vegetables causes:

      a. Scurvy - a disease caused by insufficient vitamin C.

      b. Destruction of kidneys from overworking.

      c. Protein poisoning.

3. The idea is that we have good health eating:

      a. Fruits and vegetables.

      b. Nuts and coarse grains. 

4. The less meat we eat the better our health becomes. 

5. That if we eat a good deal of meat, we would pick up:

     a. Rheumatism.

     b. High blood pressure.

     c. Hardening of the arteries.

     d. As a result, premature old age. 

6. That we would live more healthy, happily, and longer if we become vegetarians.

Our dietetic beliefs is that: You need varieties of diets to live healthy. That our diets must comprise stuffs from both plants and animals. Eating one particular food for so long a time leads to monotous, bored taste.

But the carnivorous Eskimos have prove these wrong. They live on "meat diet". Diet in which anything vegetable is absent. And they have none of the meat-causing problems mentioned above.

This exposition about meat and its paradoxes is given by Vilhjalmur Stefansson in Harper's Monthly Magazine, November 1935. 

Vilhjalmur Stefansson, an anthropologist, in 1906 went to the Arctic - the habitat of Eskimos, with the food tastes and mindset of average American. By 1918, after about 11 years, he had learned a lot which made him to shed most of these beliefs. 

His finding was confirmed by the confirmatory experiments done on him and his colleague at Bellevue Hospital, New York City, under the supervision of a committee representing several organizations and universities.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson argues that you would suffer no ill result beyond the mental discomfort of the first few days or weeks of living on monotonous diet.

He said a person could be healthy on a diet of meat and water. The longer you followed it the better you liked it, which meant that you never become fed up of your food if you have only one diet to eat. 

Stefansson said did not get scurvy on the meat diet nor learn that any of my meat-eating colleague ever had it. There were certainly no signs of high blood pressure, of hardening of the arteries, of rheumatism or of breakdown of the kidneys.

To the best of his knowledge, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the professor of Anthropology at the Unversity of Harvard, said he lived in the Arctic for more than 5 years wholly on meat and water. One of the members of his expeditions, Storker Storkersen, lived on meat diet only for about the same number of years.

There are several others who lived on it from 1 to 3 years. These were many nationalities and of three races - natives of the South Sea Islands; ordinary European whites; and natives of the Cape Verde Islands, who were more of Negro.

But one thing you should know about Eskimos and health paradox of meat is that all the side effect of living wholly on meat were unable to manifest in

I want you to think of this health paradox of meat and the lifestyle of the then Eskimos compared to the sedentary lifestyle of the modern day Americans.  

Please share with your friends and don't forget to make your opinion known in the comment below.

Tag:
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