3 ms·
From what I've read, protein poisoning is supposed to be a result of _exclusively_ eating exceptionally lean meats (e.g. rabbit) at the exclusion of everything
by lhorie 6y ago
From what I've read, protein poisoning is supposed to be a result of _exclusively_ eating exceptionally lean meats (e.g. rabbit) at the exclusion of everything else for prolonged periods of time (such that your body reserves get depleted). Beef and pork have relatively high fat content so you'd be unlikely to develop it from eating them in modern high protein diets, and even on a rabbit-only diet, it's supposedly possible to minimize the risk by also consuming the animal's organs.
For what it's worth, I first heard of protein poisoning from a survivalist, who was talking about extreme scenarios where there's very few calories available for consumption at all (e.g. winter survival in tundra)
There are certainly other well documented cases of nutritional deficiencies caused by lack of certain foodstuff (e.g. scurvy in ships in the 15th century, due to usage of copper ware, which denaturates vitamin c) so it wouldn't be strange to develop other nutritional deficiencies with a highly unbalanced diet.
- dan-robertson 6y agoI think scurvy in the 15th century was due to not including anything that might have vitamin C in the provisions. It was scurvy in the 19th and early 20th century that was due to copper pots (no one noticed because ships were much faster so sailors didn’t get scurvy), the wrong citrus juice (I don’t recall whether they had lemon or lime juice but they had the one with less vitamin C and called it by the name of the fruit with more), tinned food (babies on land were getting scurvy because the canning process destroyed vitamin C and they were only fed canned food), and contemporary doctors not really believing that scurvy was caused by the deficiency of anything.
- lhorie 6y agoYou may be right about the dates, I was going from memory so could be mixing up my sources. The part about doctors not being aware of vitamin c deficiency as a cause for scurvy definitely rings true for one story I read about a south pole expedition EDIT: found the story here https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm