The people I know who eat only meat eat about 1400-2000 kcal worth per day. They naturally eat less - it’s tough to overeat on meat-only - and tend to lose body fat and build muscle easily. Calorie content depends on whether it is fowl, pork, or ruminent and what cut it is…
Most of them are not as extreme as the beef-only crowd I mentioned before. In general they prefer organic and ‘pastured’ animal products and they eat a variety of animals and include some liver, kidneys and sometimes sweetbreads (all cooked). Most also eat eggs and use additional fat (lard, etc) for preparing meat.
That may be true when you can only afford as much as a 19th-century Irish peasant, but that still left them eating a heck of a lot less meat than modern Americans do.
For that matter, it’s been true for almost all of human evolution that “as much as you can get” was a good amount for meat (as well as for other fats and for sugar), which is why meat, fat, and sugar taste so good. We didn’t need to evolve a sense for when something tasted “too fatty” or “too sugary”, because for the vast majority of our evolution, it was just never an issue: You’d never manage to get that much, as a practical matter, anyway.
Well, I would disagree with half your point. In the beginning of time sweet came only in the form of honey and fruit (and some tubers), and was seasonal and more rare than the savory foods high in fat and protien that were a diet staple- in the form of coconut, insects, small animals, and shore seafood (gathered) and large animals and fish (hunted - and every last bit consumed with the fat prized above all).
This was still largely true with the advent of agriculture. When we made the switch from hunting and gathering to farming and herding, staples were grains and full-fat animal products. Average people had no access to fruit orchards.
When I asked how much meat, I was asking if you might wind up overdosing on some nutrient in order to get enough of another.
Also, the poster who cited wolfberries (aka goji berries) should note that that section’s cites regarding the berry’s purported nutritional content were flagged as unreliable. I guess that was probably a whoosh.
Also, I don’t believe buttermilk is especially fatty since it is the stuff left over after churning the butter (in the old days anyway).
On a hillside you could alternate large breadfruit trees for wood and fruit, with similarily ancient and sustaining olives, Inbetween the rows you could stake out the wolfberries, maybe a ground cover of melons and cukes to be hyper efficient. Be an excellent soil and ground conserve for tropical and subitropical areas. Could probably grow all of those outside my door, here on the suncoast.
rhubarbarin, these folks you mention who eat only meat: How do they get their vitamin C? If you have to pop a multivitamin with your meal, then that doesn’t really count as “living on a single food”.
You get the vitamin C you need from the meat itself. The animal has eaten it for you. Evidently you don’t need very much if you are eating only meat. Gary Taubes, science writer for the NYTimes and Science magazine, has postulated that perhaps digesting carbs uses vitamin C, so if you don’t eat much or any carbs, you don’t need more than you take in from the meat. Or some other unknown reason. But he has documented that populations eating only meat suffer no vitamin deficiencies, in particular vitamin C. See this link: Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of ... - Gary Taubes - Google Books
I really love frozen blueberries with milk poured on top. It is my guilt free ice cream.
I’ve sometimes wondered how long I could survive on this alone. Between milk and blueberries it seems I got all the nutrients covers as well as protein/fat/carbs. It would take a long time for me to grow tired of it. I do realize it probably counts as two foods - but then again answers like ‘cow’ should count as multiple items as well.
There aren’t populations that eat only meat - just modern, hardcore zero carb dieters who communicate with each other mostly through the internet.
Some take supplements, some take none. This is a very small subset of the people like me who believe eating a fat-rich diet composed of mostly animal products is optimal for human health. Eating muscle meat only is IMO a bad idea, but you could do much worse to yourself (go vegan, say).
LOL! I haven’t had rhubarb since I was wee. My mom used to make a mean stewed rhubarb we would put over vanilla ice cream. I wonder if I could eat it now… I think it might be too sour unsugared.
I only supplement with D3 and calcium (only because I’m female and very thin, my bones are in excellent shape so far), and I don’t eat a lot of vegetables, and fruit very rarely. I feel like I’m thriving… and if I do the math I exceed my RDA of nearly every vitamin, some by several times over.
I remember there was a special on the Discovery channel about the human body and that there was a man who survived stranded out at sea by eating nothing but the fish he could catch. He said he instinctively began having a taste for parts of the fish you wouldn’t ordinarily eat (including eyes - which apparently contain some sort of vitamin.
Like others have said in order to get all the needed nutrition out of meat though it needs to be eaten raw. I think you could survive off raw fish if you ate the whole thing.
They naturally eat less - it’s tough to overeat on meat-only - and tend to lose body fat and build muscle easily. Calorie content depends on whether it is fowl, pork, or ruminent and what cut it is…