Going to post some awesome quotes from one of the best books I’ve ever read on the subject of ketosis why you do not want to eat a ton of carbohydrates, and why you do want to eat quite a bit of fat.
These are all from the book The art and science of low carbohydrate living.
But long before these last low carbohydrate cultures were finally suppressed by the agricultural imperative, much of the world’s populace subsisted (if not thrived) on continuous or intermittent carbohydrate restriction. For example, agricultural carbohydrates such as wheat and rye did not come north of the Alps until brought by the Romans after the time of Christ. The Irish, Scandinavians, and Russians had no agricultural carbohydrates suitable to their climate until the potato emigrated to Europe from the Andes in the 16th century AD. What this means is that many of our ancestors had little exposure to high proportions of dietary carbohydrate until 1-2 thousand years ago; and for many aboriginal cultures, their choice of a low carbohydrate lifestyle persisted to within the last few hundred years.
Among the Inuit, when a seal or caribou was killed, the fat was saved for human consumption (or lamp fuel) and the leaner parts were given to the dogs (or any gullible ‘white guys’ in the party). Farther to the south, when a spring buffalo (i.e., one that had yet to rebuild body fat reserves after the winter) was killed on the Great Plains, the humans ate the tongue, liver, and marrow. These tissues tended to retain their fat content even during periods of privation. The lean meat was either dried (to serve as an emergency food source) or fed to the dogs. This differential partitioning of the kill actually makes a lot of sense, as a dog’s metabolism is much more tolerant of a high protein intake than is that of a human. But how this was done in a quantitative sense cannot be divined by examining animal bones and sea shells in village trash heaps (i.e., ‘middens’). So how does one say in Latin “beware of garbage dump science”?
The two doctors that wrote this are pretty darn funny and smart. I’m working on trying to get an interview with one or both of them here in the next few weeks. Will keep you informed.
To all of my fellow IFers, continued 6th gear.
