Hi all,
Let’s try that again.
Hi all,
I’ve heard that digesting rabbit meat consumes more energy than the rabbit meat provides. Does anyone know if this is true?
It’s not true of the old standby for this meme, celery, so I’m certain it’s not true of any meat.
You’re probably thinking of “rabbit starvation,” which, from what I’ve heard (wikipedia aside) is caused by eating a diet of exclusively wild rabbit. You start suffering from severe malnutrition caused by the lack of fat in your diet.
I imagine this would not apply to the kind of fatty rabbits you can buy in meat stores. Also, I don’t think it’s really the reasoning behind celery–“eating it burns more calories than are in the food”–but rather that the abundance of protein and lack of fat causes bad things to happen to your metabolism that are unrelated to the number of calories you’re consuming.
This site states: “Rabbit eaters, if they have no fat from another source—beaver, moose, fish—will develop diarrhoea in about a week, with headache, lassitude and vague discomfort. If there are enough rabbits, the people eat till their stomachs are distended; but no matter how much they eat they feel unsatisfied. Some think a man will die sooner if he eats continually of fat-free meat than if he eats nothing, but this is a belief on which sufficient evidence for a decision has not been gathered in the North. Deaths from rabbit-starvation, or from the eating of other skinny meat, are rare; for everyone understands the principle, and any possible preventive steps are naturally taken.”
I don’t know, maybe if you count digestion only, but getting up, going to the fridge, getting some celery, going back to the couch, and chewing it up really well should pretty much put you into the negative. Any cites on this?
There are certain meats, namely lean buffalo steak, that if that was the only thing you ate, you would find it difficult to overeat. You’d need pounds to get to your required daily caloric intake.
Think about it for a while… it would be pretty bad news for foxes and raptors if this were true.
OK, they don’t cook the meat like we do, and they probably eat some of the bits we throw away, but it’s still false - the calorie content in rabbit meat is comparable to that in lean venison or beef.
BTW, rabbit is usually pretty lean wherever you get it; in recipes, it is often cooked with streaky bacon or just chunks of pork belly fat to compensate.
Hmmm, Snopes claims it’s true:
http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/celery.asp
Hunter-gatherers were probably well aware of the issue, but nowadays many people aren’t - for instance I don’t think Christoperh McCandless was fully up to speed on the idea.
I assume foxes and raptors probably eat other (fatty) things too, as well as being physiologically adapted to their diet.
The last half-dozen paragraphs of this page seem to suggest that “Rabbit Starvation” is an effect of the relative size and oxygenation of the human liver, making it impossible to get enough energy from eating only lean meat. If this explanation is true then it would suggest predators subsisting on a lean-meat diet would have (relatively) much larger livers, so someone with a decent knowledge of animal anatomy should be able to comment on how it stacks up against reality.
The moral of the story being always take some kendal mint cake and a block of lard with you when venturing into the wilderness…
Rabbit, mmm…
My dad used to put lots of celery in his rabbit stew.
Good thing mom fed us so much chiken fried bacon.
Only in that they say “Its ingestion can result in negative calories”. Oddly, while they give the amount of calories per stick they don’t give the other side of the equation, the amount of calories burned by digesting it.
Also oddly, they say “Celery has about 6 calories per 8-inch stalk … Although it’s loaded with latent energy …”; I’d hardly call 6 calories “loaded”.
Cecil essentially says yes and no - if you only count outgoing calories used in digesting it, no, but if you include calories your body burns just to stay alive (85 per hour while eating) then yes.
I’m sure they do; foxes will eat invertebrates, which are often very fatty, and the rabbit’s brain (a part that we choose not to eat) will be mostly composed of fatty tissue.
So yes, a diet unreasonably biased toward any lean meat can result in malnutrition (I believe that was part of the problem that these folks had), but that doesn’t necessarily mean the items being consumed have ‘negative calories’ - only that something else in the diet is lacking.
I wonder if they’re talking about energy that isn’t available to (i.e. stored in chemical bonds not crackable by) the human digestion; wood is loaded with stored energy, but it isn’t released when humans eat it.
A movie with Amanda Donahoe and Oliver Frickin Reed?! Any woman stranded on a desert island with Oliver would fall victim to either malnutrition or dehydration, because she’d never stop throwing up.
The ideal outcome would have been to kill and eat Oliver, who surely had enough fat on him.
The underlying true story, I meant; not the movie. They’ve both written books and it’s interesting to read both and try to interpolate the truth between the two.
The link I provided claims that energy generation from pure protein is limited to 1600Kcal per day for humans, and that this is about that needed by a bedridden person. If those claims are true, and one is performing any activity to obtain the protein-only diet (i.e. rabbit-hunting), then one would presumably end up with net negative calories overall, which is a bit different from the OP. It seems a bit odd that one could eat kilos and kilos of lean meat and only end up with a max of 1600kcal no matter what, but I’m not a biochemist - it might be true. I’m sure it would produce some very odd-coloured urine though.
And I think you are spot on regarding the ‘latent energy’ bit - I’m sure there’s lots of carbohydrate energy in the cellulose, which notoriously passes straight through humans (second half of post).
I suppose that might simply be the limit of production of protein-handling enzymes, or the limit at which protein digestion starts to get dangerously toxic. This too is likely to be different for dedicated carnivorous organisms.
Hombre, I know what I’m having for dinner!
DAMN if Chichen Fried Bacon doesn’t sound good!
Oh and BTW - band name!
This thread seems to cover a similar topic, and links to this post which mentions toxic byproducts (lactic acid and ketone), and the fact that other complementary compounds may also be needed to perform the protein digestion efficiently. It sounds like Stranger on a Train knows what he’s on about, but it’s all beyond my vague recollections of biochemistry.
Indeed, although this still isn’t quite the same issue as the OP mentions; a diet exclusively composed of rabbit meat may not be sufficient to sustain an active life, but you’re still better off eating it than not, because 1600 calories is an energy input.
Besides which, rabbits deserve to be eaten anyway. Too cute to live. 
Come heeeeeeeeeewe wittle wabbit…