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How a Special Diet Kept the Knights Templar Fighting Fit
- sorokod 8y agoThe diet sounds similar to those of other monastic orders. Are monks in general where know for their comparative longevity?
- shams93 8y agoYes monks in general lived longer back then https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/science/want-to-live-longer-be-a-monk-5360664.html%3famp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/scie...
- sorokod 8y agoNot surprising,why then compare Templar lifespan to the average rather to the lifespan of some other monastic group?
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoI'd expect so, given how they generally live a quiet, secluded life without hard labor and away from conflicts, for the most part. (not so for the knights templar, who fought in the odd war, but even then I expect these wouldn't be deployed or expected to die like the common footsoldiers)
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago> they generally live a ... life without hard labor Monks work, a lot, both in order to maintain the monastery itself and to produce goods for the outside community. You can easily see this for yourself in Eastern Europe: except for a few highly touristic sites, you are generally welcome to stay at a monastery for a time without being asked to pay anything, but you will be expected to assist the monks in the work they do each day. The work – from chopping wood to weeding gardens – is exhausting. It is a mystery to me how the monks manage to keep up with everything and maintain a very positive attitude, all on 4 hours of sleep a night and diet that is fasting half the year.
- masklinn 8y ago> all on 4 hours of sleep a night and diet that is fasting half the year. not sure where you got 4 hours of sleep. Monks generally wake up early but they also retire early. For example: http://www.stmarysmonastery.org/daily_life.html http://www.stmarysmonastery.org/daily_life.html wake at 4:35, retire (though not necessarily sleep) at 20:15. The schedule has about 6~7h of work tops: * following Mass + Terce + community meeting of 0930 (so probably about 1000~1015) until 1300 * following the Office of Nones (which starts at 1500) until 1800, and that can also be studies
- Mediterraneo10 8y agoThe schedule you are describing is a Roman Catholic one. I am speaking about Orthodox monasteries. Often monks will be expected to attend one last hour of prayer around midnight. Following that, they retire, but then they will have to return to the church very early the next morning for matins, and apparently they wake up a couple of hours before that for personal devotions. As a guest at monasteries, I have been allowed slightly less than 6 hours of sleep because I am expected to attend all hours of prayer, so if the monks are waking up even earlier, then 4 hours for them sounds about right.
- pdfernhout 8y agoWondering if biphasic sleep was involved with those schedules -- but it is not obvious to us now? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_and_polyphasic_sleep#Historical_norm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_and_polyphasic_sleep#... "Historian A. Roger Ekirch has argued that before the Industrial Revolution, interrupted sleep was dominant in Western civilization. He draws evidence from documents from the ancient, medieval, and modern world. Other historians, such as Craig Koslofsky, have endorsed Ekirch's analysis. According to Ekirch's argument, adults typically slept in two distinct phases, bridged by an intervening period of wakefulness of approximately one hour. This time was used to pray and reflect, and to interpret dreams, which were more vivid at that hour than upon waking in the morning. This was also a favorite time for scholars and poets to write uninterrupted, whereas still others visited neighbors, engaged in sexual activity, or committed petty crime. The human circadian rhythm regulates the human sleep-wake cycle of wakefulness during the day and sleep at night. Ekirch suggests that it is due to the modern use of electric lighting that most modern humans do not practice interrupted sleep, which is a concern for some writers. Superimposed on this basic rhythm is a secondary one of light sleep in the early afternoon."
- zbentley 8y agoYep. Living a (relatively) hermetic/isolated/minimal-external-contact lifestyle while the rest of the world was getting ravaged by plagues probably got them a long way. To say nothing of being generally granted greater autonomy/self-sufficiency without invasion/domination by political orders, and living a lifestyle that emphasized self-sufficiency and discipline.
- eksemplar 8y agoHow can you publish historical articles without knowing people actually grew old? Sure life expectancy was low, but that’s mainly because people died young. Out of 14 children in a royal family you’d expect less than 5 to reach the age of 15, and that was for royalty. That doesn’t mean the people who didn’t die at birth or as young children died before they grew old. If you factor out all the child deaths, the average life expects wasn’t that much lower for a Knights Templar than it is for you. Hell, if you’re a poor 20+ American, you’ll probably live shorter, even with the help of modern medicine.
- peteretep 8y agoYou said: > Sure life expectancy was low, but that’s mainly because people died young ... If you factor out all the child deaths, the average life expects wasn’t that much lower for a Knights Templar than it is for you Where literally the second damn line of the article: > For even wealthy landholding males, average life expectancy was about 31 years, rising to 48 years for those who made it to their twenties.
- bryanrasmussen 8y agowhat was the median life expectancy? on edit: they said factor out all the early childhood deaths - which probably aren't factored out for 'average' life expectancy.
- yorwba 8y agoIf you condition the average on reaching at least the age of twenty, that does factor out childhood deaths.
- bryanrasmussen 8y agooops - reading fail.
- sitkack 8y agoRight, which puts the average at 48. A perfect time for wisdom teeth to take you out. The statistical language people use about talking about lifespan in before-times is rotten! That whole paragraph lays it out in its mathematical glory. > For even wealthy landholding males, average life expectancy was about 31 years, rising to 48 years for those who made it to their twenties. Even for wealthy families infant mortality was a problem. The AVERAGE is always the wrong metric!
- camillomiller 8y agoLooking forward to the Templar Knight Diet Program. Only 99.99$ a month! Approved by the Pope!
- peteretep 8y agoNow with a plenary indulgence for gluttony!
- perilunar 8y agoOnly on feast days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_of_saints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_of_saints
- some_random 8y agoI don't know, some Popes were more, uh, tolerant than others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexually_active_popes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexually_active_popes
- mhd 8y agoGiven the history of the templars, I'd rather sell this as "Secrets the Pope didn't want you to know!"
- artmageddon 8y ago"Keep your army fighting fit with this one simple trick!"
- dominotw 8y agoI read something about Met fashion show being pope approved. So perhaps this is not such a distant possibility.
- ghaff 8y agoPeople probably don't know what you're talking about. Happened to walk through it a couple of days ago on the way to something I wanted to see. It was... different and somewhat weird in the context of the medieval wing in general.
- beegeezuz 8y agoSpecial diet: * kill infidels three times a day for two hours each
- FrankyHollywood 8y agoThe 'vegetable fasting days' seem a lot like the popular 5-2 diet. Only difference is these knight didn't need years of medical research to discover this, perhaps just years of poor health :) https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2015/jan/27/fasting-facts-is-the-52-diet-too-good-to-be-true https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2015/ja... http://www.bbc.com/news/health-19112549 http://www.bbc.com/news/health-19112549
- castlecrasher2 8y agoThe article says the off-meat days included eggs and cheese, though, so not quite the same thing.
- AstralStorm 8y agoNot a lot though. These things were expensive even for knights. Similarly the usual days did not have as much animal produce as today. Remember that these people were professional soldiers with at least a few hours of strenuous exercise a day combined with relative leisure In prayer. (Compared to peasants or even modern day workers.)
- perl4ever 8y agoWere eggs expensive? I thought that eggs traditionally were the inexpensive alternative to meat, going back a long time.
- oh_sigh 8y agoDoubtful that eggs were expensive on terms of cost per calorie compared to chicken. A 4 pound chicken will get you about 2000 calories after it is cooked, whereas the same chicken would lay approx 5 eggs/week, each @ 75 calories, or 375 calories/week. So, it would only take 6 weeks for a chicken to output as many calories as exist within it, and chickens lay eggs productively for 4-5 years.
- jps359 8y agoDid they live longer because of their diet or because of their reliable access to food?
- some_random 8y agoThat's a great question, my understanding was that if one survived birth (infant mortality skews average lifespan quite a bit) and had food, one could live about as long as a modern human. From the sound of it, the knights certainly weren't going hungry. > One source suggests that cooks loaded enough meat onto their plates “to feed two poor men with the leftovers.”
- dragonwriter 8y ago> That's a great question, my understanding was that if one survived birth (infant mortality skews average lifespan quite a bit) Infant mortality does, but that's more than just surviving birth, but more like the first five years to get past the point where it skews results. > From the sound of it, the knights certainly weren't going hungry Well, sure, and you wouldn't expect knights—a narrow elite class—to be goings hungry even if food insecurity was common for the masses. But they probably lived longer mostly because the average expectancy for people who had survived to the age at which you become a knight of the order was much greater than the average population-wide life expectancy, because the large proportion that died very young did so earlier.
- dalore 8y agoThe article said that the average lifespan was 31 but if one lived to 20 then the average was 48.
- abritinthebay 8y agoWhich is misleading for a whole bunch of reasons as generally people were dying due to the incredibly dangerous life it was then plus lack of medical care. If you survived your 20s without being killed you were likely to live into your late 50s with little problem. Being young was dangerous. Being a religious knight meant you basically skipped all that until later (and then put yourself in less harm than the average peasant soldier did)
- 1024core 8y ago> They were not permitted even to speak to women. There's the secret. I'm kidding, non-male members of HN! On a more serious note: "even though it was “understood that the custom of eating flesh corrupts the body.” As a vegetarian, I find this intriguing. Why, if it was understood thus, did meat eating become so prevalent?
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- kevinconaway 8y ago> On a more serious note: "even though it was “understood that the custom of eating flesh corrupts the body.” The source material [0] that the quote is taken from has a footnote that says "The Cistercians held that rich food increases sexual appetite" It would seem that the "corruption" here is related to keeping ones libido in check. [0] https://books.google.com/books?id=cBqgOXfMxAoC&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=understood+that+the+custom+of+eating+flesh+corrupts+the+body&source=bl&ots=EyMRZ7TvRw&sig=6lDUnDCoK_K9vUUbn2Qzd3hnFak&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjEyvbHsIXbAhWJwVQKHdN8AWsQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=understood%20that%20the%20custom%20of%20eating%20flesh%20corrupts%20the%20body&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=cBqgOXfMxAoC&pg=PA26&lpg=P...
- danielharan 8y agoThat's also a notion in early vegetarians in the UK (a century ago, iirc), and part of the reason reformers like Kelogg wanted people to eat bland foods like corn flakes: http://mentalfloss.com/article/32042/corn-flakes-were-invented-part-anti-masturbation-crusade http://mentalfloss.com/article/32042/corn-flakes-were-invent...
- toyg 8y agoThe thing is, everyone always wanted to eat meat - it's good and filling. The problem is that, before modern refrigeration was introduced, it was very easy for meat to go bad and make people ill. This was very common in warm countries, and so it ended up codified in religious cultures from those areas. Around the Med, it was no biggie: vegetables were pretty easy to grow in large quantities. However, the type of doctrine that ended up as commonplace in Europe (because of military and economic developments) was a very Northern interpretation of Christianity, coming from places where people had to eat meat because vegetables were hard to grow in cold climates. A lot (or rather most) of the Templars themselves were French or German knights; they came from places were meat was a firm staple of rich diets. And so most of the warnings against meat went out of the window, never to return. It probably helped that "the Enemy" had gone the opposite way.
- b34r 8y agoOmg that article took so long to get to the point!
- loblollyboy 8y agoand what an underwhelming one - they ate meat, veg, bread and cheese! Sometimes even a lot, but usually not too much
- b34r 8y agoCurious why I’m getting downvotes for this
- sandworm101 8y agoSomething isn't right here. At the time of the Templars nobody ate like this. Nobody could. Rich or poor, holy or not, food changed according to the season. Vegetables were only available at certain times of the year. The rest of the time it would be a combination of bread (grain) and meat. The diet described in this article would only have been possible in relatively temperate climates with long growing seasons. But even so, there would have been seasons. The concept of a weekly diet, one that can be followed month after month, is a very modern thing. You ate what was in season. You didn't eat meat when there was plenty of vegetables available. You shoved the extra vegetables into animals, which you then ate during the seasons when the vegetables weren't available. This concept of a "balanced" diet between the two would have been impractical and extremely wasteful. Also, be careful with the word meat in old texts. The meaning changes depending on context. Western cultures generally don't count fish as meat but others do. Similarly, 'game' and even 'fowl' are sometimes not included, with 'meat' reserved for the slaughter of domesticated animals. So a text about people not eating meat at particular times doesn't necessarily mean they weren't getting a pile of fats and proteins from something that we today would consider meat.
- the_watcher 8y ago> Similarly, 'game' and even 'fowl' are sometimes not included, with 'meat' reserved for the slaughter of domesticated animals. The article explicitly discusses meat, fowl, flesh, fish etc as different things.
- jbattle 8y ago> Also, be careful with the word meat in old texts Reminds me of the barnacle goose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose#Folklore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose#Folklore Folks in the middle ages had some confused ideas about where the adult geese came from (thinking they started life as barnacles!) and thus meat from this one particular bird was approved to eat on fast days.
- zeveb 8y ago> Rich or poor, holy or not, food changed according to the season. Tha's true. > Vegetables were only available at certain times of the year. The rest of the time it would be a combination of bread (grain) and meat. That's not. Plenty of fruits & vegetables can be put up for quite a long time. Root vegetables can be stored for many months (almost a year) by digging them up and piling in 'silos,' which alternate layers of soil or sand & vegetables. Apples can be stored in barrels. Cabbages can be covered in leaves, or fermented. Beans & peas can be dried. Almonds can be used to make milk (in fact, in the middle ages almond milk was more common than cows' milk). Christians have been fasting on Wednesdays & Fridays, Lent & Advent for millennia, well before refrigeration and modern foodstuffs.
- didibus 8y agoAlso, fasting has many anti aging properties. And exercise, which I assume they got lots of.
- adamsea 8y ago“He chose ..... poorly.”
- lerie82 8y agoLest we forget that if you were carrying 50+ pounds of armor in the heat everyday you would be fit too. No matter what you ate.