Irish Mudder retweetledi
You are standing in a forest.
The forest is full of rabbits. Hundreds of them. You have a reliable means of catching them. You are catching and eating them every day, as many as you need, as many as you can consume. You are eating nothing but rabbit. Protein in every meal. More protein than most people eat in a month.
You are dying.
Not from starvation in the conventional sense. Not from lack of food. From a specific and documented metabolic failure that the Arctic explorers who encountered it called rabbit starvation, and that the Plains Indians who had encountered it long before any European arrived had understood well enough to have a practical rule about it: you do not eat lean meat alone. If the animal is too lean, you do not eat it at all until you find fat.
What happens: the liver can only process a certain amount of protein per day. Pure lean protein, consumed in large quantities with insufficient fat, overwhelms that capacity.
The body has no mechanism for storing excess protein; it attempts to process all of it, and the processing consumes B vitamins, generates ammonia as a metabolic byproduct, and eventually produces a cluster of symptoms: nausea, diarrhoea, headache, increasing weakness, that worsen rather than improve the more you eat.
The brain interprets this as starvation because at the cellular level it functionally is, regardless of the volume of food being consumed.
Lewis and Clark documented it. In their journals. The passages describing the periods when they were subsisting primarily on lean game: deer that were too thin, lean season meat, describe increasing weakness and what they called a gnawing hunger that eating more did not resolve. The men ate and were still hungry because the hunger was not for protein. It was for fat.
The Plains Indians would not eat lean animals. Full stop. If a buffalo was killed and found to be too thin: late in the hard season, insufficient body fat, the meat would be given to the dogs. A practical policy based on generations of observational data about what happens when you eat lean meat without fat, and the answer is that you decline rather than improve.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who spent years living on Arctic meat diets, documented the same thing. The Inuit would not eat lean meat alone. The fat was not a luxury component of the meal. The fat was the point. The meat without the fat was not food in any functional sense.
Two to three pounds of properly fatted meat per day.
That's it. That's enough. That's more than enough.
The hunger disappears. The energy is stable. The body doesn't ask for anything else.
The idea that you need more protein, that you should strip the fat for leanness, that a chicken breast is the optimal form of animal food: that idea is so recently constructed, so perfectly inverted from everything the humans who ate animal food for 2.5 million years understood, that I genuinely don't know whether to be impressed by the achievement or depressed by the scale of it.
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