16 thoughts on “Nutritional Mythology”

  1. Fact known for centuries (probably millennia): humans can survive indefinitely on a diet composed entirely of pemmican and water. Proper pemmican is 50% lean venison (so protein) and 50% bear fat (high energy food, rich in all necessary vitamins and minerals). The very best pemmican had ground berries in it, prefferably blueberries.

    If you live in the Arctic, a diet of whale, seal, and mackeral seems to do the job. You don’t need to eat polar bears because you can just eat what they eat (seals).

    1. As a (16+year old) kid, I used to make pemmican for extended hikes. I started with beef jerky made it an oven with the door ajar, set as low as possible. I then ground this in a blender, and put it in muffin pans. Then I filled the pans with melted lard. After the mix cooled, I’d pop each meat muffin out, and wrap it in plastic wrap, then aluminum foil. They kept very well for months, and when cooked with dehydrated potatoes and onion flakes, made a very nice stew that one could eat every night for months.

      That basic stew recipe was courtesy of Colin Fletcher, a “professional” hiker who wrote several books about his adventures. My favorite was The Man Who Walked Through Time, which told the story of Fletcher’s 1968 solo hike from end to end of Grand Canyon National Park. It was my ambition, as a teen, to replicate his feat. I corresponded with him at length, and he was most helpful. But my parents wouldn’t allow it, and when I was old enough that they couldn’t stop me, Park Service rules wouldn’t permit it.

      I should see if that has changed any, because I’d love to complete that part of my bucket list…

    1. The “U” has a lot of the “tree of many branches” from which the name Saskatoon is derived. I just call them “service berries.”

      I like to freak people out on campus by going up to one of the trees in season (late spring) and just start stuffing my face with the berries. They look at me like I am eating poison. East Asians on campus will come up to me asking me what this is, and I explain it to them, and they are intrigued by this.

      Maybe it is like the accounts of Japanese WW-II veterans whose logistical train left something to be desired. A veteran of jungle warfare in the South Pacific explained, “we eat what monkeys eat.” In the absence of a field guide to the local plants, I guess they figured that if another primate could eat it, they would not get sick from it. Or maybe it is curiosity of the kind of food plants that grow in America. The more courageous overseas visitors will eat the berries. Maybe it is “we eat what we see white-haired pink-faced man eat.”

      I rightly cannot remember how I decided it was OK to eat the service berries. I don’t know if someone told me about “tree blueberries and bush blueberries” or whether I looked it up on the Web. Someone may have told me that “the berries that have those flower petals on the bottom like a blueberry are OK to eat but the ones that are smooth are poison.” That I decided to eat something that looked like something I saw on the Web maybe was foolhardy, but hey, I’m still here!

      They are kind of an acquired taste, and that even though they are called “tree blueberries” or “Canadian blueberries”, they don’t taste anything like a proper blueberry. They are much sweeter, but then they have these fine seeds in them, but I guess the seeds are part of the nutritional package. Black raspberries also have seeds in them that you just swallow.

      The big problem with picking them besides you have to reach up, bend down without breaking the tree and hold the branch to pick is that it is really hard to pick them without collecting a lot of the stems, which you probably don’t want to swallow too many. Even with black raspberries, which are tiny compared to commercially grown red raspberries, in high season you can grab small handfuls and pull them off the plant without turning them to a juicy mess. With service berries, you are reaching up into the tree and craning your neck and back, and grabbing a fistful, which you have to do to have any kind of picking speed, and you get a fist of messy juice and stems.

      Each year a swear off that I am not picking service berries apart from the few I eat right off the tree, but ever year that is a good season, I end up filling half the freezer with those blighters. I have an engineering colleague who is “in to natural foods”, however, who I let in on the secret of the campus berry crop, and I suspect he is competition for this harvest.

      I think they freeze better than black raspberries — they are a welcome treat on top of oatmeal come late winter.

      1. One time I brought home a tree-finder book and my dad tried looking up “sarviceberry tree” (which produce sarvice berries).
        The closest it listed in the index was a “serviceberry tree.” I said “How’d you pronounce “goods and services” when you were growing up? He said “goods and sarvices. Oh…. Okay, that’s the tree then.”

        In Appalachia we kind a missed a few of the later vowel shifts. That particular missed-shift survives in the southern pronunciation of “wrestling” (rassling) and in varsity sports played at a university. They’re supposed to be the same vowel sound but sports didn’t get the update, perhaps due to the slower athletes.

        In any event, we’ve been eating our local serviceberries for a long time or we wouldn’t be mispronouncing them with an Elizabethan accent.

        1. In the Dark Ages before the Interwebs, Mom thought I should “get to know” a young woman she knew from a theatre group sponsored by the AAUW (American Association of University Women, and no, Mom was not a College Communist, just a “joiner” of social-service organizations).

          The woman in question “gave out her mailing address” to Mom (I am telling you this was a long time ago), with a snarky retort, “Where does this son live, in Vancouver?” (Mom was in the Detroit area and I was in New Jersey at the time).

          I received a letter back, “My name is Jan, not Jane!” I wrote back that when Mom asked me to write to her friend, I asked on the phone, “So her name is Jane?” and the response was, “Yes, Jehn.” Jan, who was familiar with Mom’s Old Country accent, an in-person version of the Gilda Radner character Rosanne on SNL who pronounced cast member Jane Curtin’s name that way, thought this was genuinely humorous.

          Jan, who bore a favorable resemblance to Joannie Cunningham on Happy Days (the young, cute-looking Erin Moran before Ms. Moran drank and smoked too much), had a boyfriend in Detroit that she had broken up with but then they got back together and eventually married, so I guess Mom’s Plans were not meant to be, but I still think it is a great story. I was invited to and attended their wedding because in Mom’s immortal words, “You never know if you meet somebody.”

  3. I don’t know if Rand find this nutritional mythology. I used to be “into” counting fat grams, following the advice that you shouldn’t eat bread without putting some peanut butter or olive oil on it because especially white bread will give you a blood-sugar jolt. Kind of the theory that eating bursts of carbs will stress your insulin-regulation system and also make you hungry and eat too much.

    I am now “into” counting protein grams. There is some controversy, with the claim that Americans eat enough “healthy” foods that protein isn’t a problem, but I read somewhere that an adult male may require as much as 70 protein grams a day, which you have to read nutrition labels to figure out if you are doing this, especially since we are guilted about “red meat consumption”, and even red meat isn’t pure protein.

    So I developed what I call the “protein purchasing power parity” index of how much protein do you get per dollar spent at the grocery store. I don’t know who hear is still able to drink milk, but in my part of ‘Sconsin I have been buying skim or 1% for less than two dollars a gallon. Let’s see, at 8 grams an 8-ounce serving, you are talking over half a gallon to get your adult male RDA of protein. The thing is that I am drinking that much, even if I water it down, in hot summer time weather I am doing serious outdoor projects of weed-wacking the garlic mustard and burdocks and cutting brush. I find I can skip lunch and dinner until I come inside after dark.

    So one is getting a day’s protein ration for around a dollar. I regard this as the benchmark of protein purchasing power parity — eggs are in that range, but you have to eat a whole carton of eggs, which also cost about a dollar around here, and we are guilted about eating that much dietary cholesterol. You have to eat 8 ounces of lean ground beef for the equivalent, that costs more than twice as much.

    There is protein in bread, and whole grains have a little bit more. Whole-grain bread as a source of protein, comes out almost as expensive as hamburger? Even peanut butter costs more than milk as a source of protein? Canned beans at a dollar a can cost more than ground beef?

      1. It is perhaps the richest source of potassium in a rehydration drink, and it doesn’t taste worse than Gatorade, that tastes like sweetened nasal secretions.

        1. The other day I wondered about another way to do a rehydration drink. Gatorade uses potassium citrate and I think sodium citrate to minimize the amount of KCl and NaCl which would make it taste way too salty. But why should the salts have to be dissolved in the drink when they could perhaps be little tiny capsules or tablets, perhaps embedded in something like little tapioca pearls, that wouldn’t dissolve until in your stomach? Heck, you could easily add other nutritional elements that way without affecting the flavor. The ad men could call them “little starbursts of energy” or something.

          1. Ah, there are salt tablets but no potassium tablets, or at least no potassium supplements in pill form with a meaningful amount of potassium.

            The best theory I can come up with is that potassium pills could be murder weapon — I think if you binge on potassium, it can throw your blood chemistry out-of-balance and stop your heart. Isn’t some kind of potassium infusion one of the phases of a legal execution-by-injection?

          2. Well, the potassium levels wouldn’t be any higher than in Gatorade, so I don’t think there would be any worries. NoSalt is KCl and LoSalt is a 50/50 mix of NaCl and KCl, so that’s a handy source at the grocery store. The question is what kind of non-soluble substance to encapsulate it in that wouldn’t let the salt get into the fluid but would dissolve very quickly in the stomach to maintain proper hydration. That’s a question for a food chemist.

            The trouble is that it would have little floaty things in the liquid and would be competing against other sports drinks that don’t, and which are already very cheap to manufacture.

    2. Low-fat milk is a nutritional abomination that no one should be drinking, and eating eggs (or any form of dietary cholesterol) will not increase your serum cholesterol. And there is not enough protein in bread to compensate for the high-glycemic carbs. Beans, including peanuts, have issues with Omega 6.

      2. I didn’t say you shouldn’t consume fats, but my theory is 1) protein is the limiting factor in food intake affecting long-term satiety affecting your weight balance-point, 2) protein is perhaps the costliest dietary element, with milk, whether you drink skim, full or something in-between being by far the lowest-cost source, or at least where I live in a dairy region. YMPMV (you milk price may vary)

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