About 100 years ago a Canadian ethnologist, Vilhjallmur
Stefansson, spent 11 years living among the Inuit in the frozen North. For 9 of
those years he ate substantially a diet composed of meat (including fish), some
organ meats, and fat with just a little carbohydrate (glycogen contained in the
muscle tissue and liver). In the summer months he ate a few berries. Upon his
return to ‘civilization,’ from his observations of the Inuit with whom he had lived
and of his own health, he postulated that such a diet was sufficient for good
health. It was, he averred, a complete diet.
Stefansson’s lectures on his experience with an all
meat diet drew derision and cries of charlatan from the scientific and medical
community. So, to ‘prove’ his hypothesis, he proposed a daring experiment. He
offered himself and a colleague, Karsen Andersen, with whom he had shared his
experience in the Arctic, as an in vivo
experiment (n=2). In 1928, under supervision of doctors at New York’s Bellevue
Hospital, they volunteered to live for 1 year on meat and fat alone. The
results, which I first read in Gary Taubes’s "Good Calories -- Bad
Calories," were fascinating.
Stefansson’s own account of his Arctic adventures
was published, for popular consumption, in Harper’s Monthly in November and
December 1935. The balance of this blog post will be the report of W. S.
McClellan and E. F. Du Bois, the lead investigators of the Bellevue study. Their
paper was brought to my attention by Ginny L who was, in 2012 when this was
written, a frequent poster and valued resource on Dr. Richard K. Bernstein’s
Diabetes Forum.
The paper, “Prolonged Meat Diets with a Study of
Kidney Function and Ketosis,” was published July 1, 1930, in the Journal of
Biological Chemistry. Herewith, in their entirety, are the conclusions of the previously
skeptical doctors:
1. Two men
lived on an exclusive meat diet for 1 year and a third man for 10 days. The relative
amounts of lean and fat meat ingested were left to the instinctive choice of
the individuals.
2. The
protein content varied from 100 to 140 gm., the fat from 200 to 300 gm., the
carbohydrate, derived entirely from the meat, from 7 to 12 gm., and the fuel
value from 2000 to 3100 calories.
3. At the
end of the year, the subjects were mentally alert, physically active, and
showed no specific physical changes in any system of the body.
4. During
the 1st week, all three men lost weight, due to a shift in the water content of
the body while adjusting itself to the low carbohydrate diet. Thereafter, their
weights remained practically constant.
5. In the
prolonged test, the blood pressure of one man remained constant; the systolic
pressure of the other decreased 20 mm. and the diastolic pressure remained
uniform.
6. The
control of the bowels was not disturbed while the subjects were on prescribed
meat diet. In one instance, when the proportion of protein calories in the diet
exceeded 40 per cent, a diarrhea developed.
7. Vitamin
deficiencies did not appear.
8. The
total acidity of the urine during the meat diet was increased to 2 or 3 times
that of the acidity on mixed diets and acetonuria was present throughout the
periods of exclusive meat.
9. Urine
examinations, determinations of the nitrogenous constituents of the blood, and
kidney function tests revealed no evidence of kidney damage.
10. While
on the meat diet, the men metabolized foodstuffs with FA: G ratios between 1.9
and 3.0 and excreted from 0.4 to 7.2 gm. of acetone bodies per day.
11. In these trained subjects, the
clinical observations and laboratory studies gave no evidence that any ill
effects had occurred from the prolonged use of the exclusive meat diet.
Stefansson was a very
colorful character. He was twice president of the prestigious Explorers Club.
He lectured in anthropology at Harvard and was Director of Polar Studies at
Dartmouth College. His Wikipedia entry concludes: “Stefansson is also a figure
of considerable interest in dietary circles, especially those with an interest
in very low-carbohydrate diets. Stefansson documented the fact that the Inuit
diet consisted of about 90% meat and fish; Inuit would often go 6 to 9 months a
year eating nothing but meat and fish—essentially, a no-carbohydrate diet. He
found that he and his fellow European-descent explorers were also perfectly
healthy on such a diet. When medical authorities questioned him on this, he and
a fellow explorer agreed to undertake a study under the auspices of the Journal
of the American Medical Association to demonstrate that they could eat a
100% meat diet in a closely observed laboratory setting for the first several
weeks, with paid observers for the rest of [the] year. The results were
published in the Journal, and both men were perfectly healthy on such a
diet, without vitamin supplementation...."
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