So I am reading Pterry’s Snuff. Don’t want to spoil since there might be people still reading it. I’m about halfway through it now, so I’d appreciate others not spoiling anything either.
Anyways, one character mentions that you can’t live on rabbit. The other says it leeches something from the body, something you need to live. You need to eat something else or you will not survive long on this diet.
I’ve not eaten rabbit before and don’t really know much about it. My first thought was you would get Scurvy eating meat but no fruit or veggies. But that doesn’t fit the passage in the book, which claims that rabbit “removes something” from one’s body. So what’s the Straight Dope? Does rabbit leech some essential vitamins or minerals from the body if it is eaten exclusively? What would you die from? How long would it take (approximately)? Does this imply that you can survive exclusively on beef or pork or chicken, or at least longer than you would on rabbit? Or is it any all-meat diet that’s not sustainable, and pterry was just putting it in the discworld vernacular?
It’s not the vitamins so much as the protein. Rabbit meat is really lean, so it’s almost all protein, and the human body can only digest so much protein. So, if you just eat rabbit meat or something else that’s just protein, you’re not going to be able to metabolize enough calories to survive.
The well-known sea kayaker John Dowd and his kayak mate experienced this off the coast of Patagonia, when they could not get to shore, and, moored precariously to the kelp beds, survived on a diet of raw sea duck. It weakened them so much that they could barely paddle in the freezing stormy waters, but once they got to their cache and added sweetened condensed milk to their raw sea duck diet, they revived.
Whenever I think of ocean-going adventures I always remember this, and stay home.
I find it surprising that a diet of duck would cause rabbit starvation, since duck is a fatty meat, unlike rabbit. Might it have been some other nutrient deficiency?
If you eat nothing but rabbit meat for a while, yes (according to the links).
Thanks to everyone for the info, I had no idea this was possible. Sorry for the leech/leach confusion.
