I was reading about all things poopwhen this claim popped up. I thought the body got fat and protein from meat not just fat.
Is this claim true or false?
"Your body does not really digest meat. It only uses the fat & the meat rots in your system" T or F?
False. Fat contains no protein.
you really have to ask? this is the same trash that led people to believe we all have 5-10-20 pounds of “undigested meat” in our intestines. just a bunch of bossy vegans who have to lie to try to scare people into thinking like them.
Here is the full assertion.
It’s false - proteins are broken down into amino acids by your own digestive enzymes - these amino acids are then absorbed and used by your body for repair, growth, replenishment of cells, etc.
The bit about rabbit starvation is kinda true, but not for the stated reason - it’s not because meat rots - it’s because protein provides less energy than fats or carbohydrates when digested, and you need fats in your diet anyway, for a variety of reasons.
It was going along pretty reasonably and seemed fairly authoritative when this weirdness came out of nowhere. I didn’t know if there was some odd technical angle by which you could view the assertion as a valid statement.
“rabbit starvation” is about trying to subsist on protein only. as is depressingly common, some idiots misinterpreted it and decided they knew enough to go around trying to tell other people what to do.
You digest the protein in meat, not just the fat. “Rabbit starvation” is due to the absence of essential fatty acids in lean rabbit. If you ate a balanced diet an maintained your weight, then added 500 calories a day of lean meat, you’d gain weight.
How exactly is your body supposed to differentiate between the proteins in meat (which it supposedly cannot digest) and the proteins in plant foods?
This is on the level of insisting that the sky is blue because it reflects the sea.
Ouch, vegans are scarily stupid
Checks All-meat sites “Carbs are a poison”
Ouch! extremists are scarily stupid
They can’t even weasel out by saying meat is processed by your gut flora (as opposed to you personally) - proteins are digested by enzymes secreted by your body, in your saliva, pancreatic juice and intestines themselves.
If the rabbit starvation thing worked, it’d be the greatest boon to diet woo since celery. Mmm, tasty rabbit!
Utter bullshit.
In fact, you can eat a 100% animal diet and get along fine, which is what the Eskimo used to do. Mind you, you will need to eat some of the meat raw to get vitamin C, or eat stomach contents..
You need proteins , fats, and to a lesser extent fiber, minerals, and vitamins. Rabbit meat has almost no fat, thus you will get a EFA and fat deficiency. This is pretty rare.
Rabbit starvation is a real phenomenon, but it doesn’t just cause weight loss. It really should be called rabbit malnutrition
Well I know what my next crash diet will be 
The Hasenpfeffer Diet
It looks like a quack website. (The web design itself sucks) That and it’s an advertisement for something called Medifast. That alone should tell you something.
Yup.
Nope. As above, it is about a ceiling for protein intake. The essence is that the liver can only process so much protein without enough fat or carbs to help it out. That ceiling is felt to be about 35% of daily energy intake. Without that liver processing ammonia builds up from the protein and that can kill you. I think the rabbit starvation bit though is restricted to eating only lean rabbit meat … eat well fed winter rabbits, and make sure to eat the marrow, brain, and other organs, and you should get enough fat to get by on. How much it ever actually happened is unclear.
Cordain, in a classic article surveying the nutrition of extant hunter gatherers, that became the basis for much of what gets called the Paleo nutrition movement, put it like this:
On a related note, the early protein sparing fasts ended up killing people not because of excess protein apparently but because they used collagen, which is not a complete protein, as its protein source.
:smack:
isn’t this why things like pork rinds- even though they have 7-11g of protein per serving- aren’t considered to be a “significant source of protein?”
Wouldn’t the “rabbit starvation” thing hold true for any all-meat diet, especially in the American sense of only eating muscle for the most part? Maybe it would take a little longer with the fat content of cow, but you would still end up malnutritioned and deathly ill.
The essence of the “Eskimo” diet is not just meat, but raw meat, and fat, and brains, and guts, and the whole animal. Plus, largely fish and oceanic animals, full of omega-3 fatty acids and largely consumed without cooking. I watched a show with two brother doctors (British, I think) who spent some time living and eating with different cultures, and their exams found the Pacific/Arctic northeastern Russian indigenous people who ate their traditional diet to be very healthy. Those of the region who started incorporating Western type food into their regular diet were starting to have Western type disease problems, too.
Utter Woo rubbish.