I know a vegan who doesn’t look sick—of course he just started…
Vegan Diets are the healthiest, according to new study
That’s news to me. I’ve never before heard of a culture that “abhorred” salt. I’d like to read that in context, to be sure I understand what he said.
I seem to remember reading, however, that the Maasai warriors drank the blood of their cattle as a source of salt, so I suppose it might be possible to get enough salt from the flesh and blood of the animals the Inuit ate.
The hunters will drink some blood after a fresh kill but this isn’t a daily affair and the women and children do not.
The section is long but here is a chunk where he says that a distaste for salt was actually common in pre Columbian America.
***Roxy is an Inuit who was arguing that the white man’s liking of salt was cultural rather than necessary for health. He compared it to their own incorrect belief that tobbaco is healthful.
Roxy did not know, but I did as an anthropologist, that in pre-Columbian times salt was unknown or the taste of it disliked and the use of it avoided through much of North and South America. It may possibly be true that the carnivorous Eskimos in whose language the word salty, mamaitok, is synonymous with with evil-tasting, disliked salt more intensely than those Indians who were partly herbivorous. Nevertheless, it is clear that the salt habit spread more slowly through the New World from the Europeans than the tobacco habit through Europe from the Indians. Even today there are considerable areas, for instance in the Amazon basin, where the natives still abhor salt.
http://www.comby.org/documents/documents_in_english/stefansson-diet-adventures.htm
Huh! Fascinating. You learn something every day. Many thanks for taking the trouble to post that.
Your welcome! I find it all super interesting but don’t really know what to make of it.
Except for the meat part it is close to a ketogenic diet but it would still be difficult to maintain (without meat) and also because of the lack of enough exogenous fat (cholesterol; HMG-CoA Reductase) and too much sugar in the diet leading to future cardiovascular, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease etc? (biomarkers look good now but what is the efficacy with that long-term?)
Here is the problem though, and most important thing to remember and that is the biomarkers or benchmarkers that are being used as the quotients idea of “healthiest diets*” are being compared to a healthy sugar burner (lean mass or highly muscular) and therein lies the problem and we all know what happens in that case long-term as you can see above?
The ketogenic dieting community should have a different set of biomarkers* so our physicians could have something like a physicians desk reference and laboratories should also have a different set of testing benchmarkers* to make a clear distinction between exclusive sugar burners and glucose/ketone burners?
As Dr. Boz and Hyperlipid point out just carb up 3 days before your phlebotomy lab tests or OGGT and you will look “normal?” To me that is scary??? This whole “healthiest” vegan looks like a Wolf in Sheep’s clothing?
*See Also: Low carb diets could shorten life (really?!) - Dr. Zoe Harcombie PhD
I keep hearing “keto is not sustainable”, “we don’t know the long term health impacts of keto”, and “keto is a fad”. I think these comments confuse keto with veganism. I say “please, pass me the butter”.
Oh cool! Good to know. Thanks!
What I’d read was that traditionally the hunters would drink the blood and eat the liver and the women and children more generally got other parts. But that was talking about seal hunting. Maybe in larger animals there is enough blood to go around.
It is probably helpful to realize that it’s not ‘salt’ per se that is really relevant. It is the overall balance of sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium and a few other lesser minerals that’s important. As long as one gets these important nutrients it doesn’t matter whether by eating them or adding them to food. My guess would be that those cultures who ‘abhorred salt’ got the necessary minerals in their food.
Oh, I absolutely agree. It may even be the case that in a physiological milieu where you eat nothing but meat and fat from infancy the requirements for salts are different. This is part of my interest. I find it hard to fathom that native carnivores were able to supplement salts at the level many people find necessary on a ketogenic diet.
A few friends and family members who know I am LCHF would keep asking me “Are you still doing keto?” with that expectation that I would return to all the things I used to be addicted to (and they still are). Seven months later… they stopped asking.
I’m picturing all the picky american kids who won’t eat this or won’t eat that, juxtaposed with the kids in this photo. I imagine the average kid around here would faint if they were told this is what’s for dinner.
Being that the traditional Inuit diet was high in sea salt found in fish and raw blood, along with seaweed in some locations - that would make sense. That’s salty food! Unlike in other cultures in different climates and food traditions.
However, the fact that salt extends hydration when on long walkabouts or during drought or migration is also part of ancient histories.
Thank you! I love these photos, especially the second one one with the bloody teacup and smiling child. I first saw that one about 5 years ago, and it really impacted me. You can practically feel the cold breeze and the wide open spaces in it.
You forgot that it’s also going to kill us, lol!
#STILLDOINGKETO #NOTDEADYET
You’re absolutely right. I’ve been thinking about this since @atomicspacebunny shared her pictures too. We tend to think of meat the way we eat it, but when you kill an animal everything is awash in their blood. We drain the blood out for preservation and now we’d be disgusted by a super bloody piece of meat. But that’s how it would have been mostly eaten traditionally and I bet it tasted great. So there would have been far more salt in all their meat then we get from ours.
Love this forum. So thought provoking.
My husband follows a bunch of YouTubers for various topics (not diet related). He said that more and more YouTubers he watches who were strict vegans have stopped eating vegan for health reasons.