The Arctic Explorer and the Carnivore Diet

****My apologies but I think this will be my last Friday email for a while. I just have too much going on. I’ll still do my best to write at least two emails a week on Monday and Wednesday. Thanks for understanding.****

Hardly anyone has heard of Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Vilhjalmur spent a pretty significant chunk of his life exploring the coastline and land of northern Canada, Alaska and as far west as Siberia in Russia.

He did a lot of his exploring at the beginning of the 20th Century. You can imagine what the clothing and outdoor technology they had in the early 1900’s.  Not to mention their supply lines and what they had to haul into the arctic.

Due to the harsh climate, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to plant vegetables or pick up produce from local farmers.

Instead Vilhjalmur and his explorers had to live off what they could hunt. Caribou, seals and fish were on the menu. Same as the Inuit people who had lived there for thousands of years. After eating this way for a while, he started to notice something in himself and his men.

They were feeling good. Really good. They were not getting sick or having other health problems. Even in the harsh environment of the arctic.

Fast forward to Vilhjalmur’s return to civilization.  In 1928 he walked into the Bellevue Hospital in New York City and told a group of physicians that he and his colleague Karsten Anderson wanted to run an experiment.

The two men would eat only eat meat for the next year. They requested the doctors provide medical supervision for the duration, take whatever lab tests they wanted and document their state of health.

The doctors were interested. They thought the two men may very well be dead in a year.  If scurvy didn’t kill them, their kidneys would probably shut down.

They let the experiment progress. I guess this was before all the medical ethics rules were put in place for scientific studies.

You can probably guess the ending.

The two men felt fantastic throughout the experiment. They had a little lower blood pressure and weighed a little less. Otherwise they were in good shape.

They did have a brief period where they were given very lean meat with little to no fat. Both men quickly developed a condition that affected other explorers when they cut out fat. The plains Indians called it ‘Rabbit Starvation’ because people who ate just rabbit (very little fat) would have nausea, fatigue and severe diarrhea.

When the two men started eating more fat, their symptoms quickly resolved.

Today we don’t hear of Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Either for his arctic explorations or his advocacy of the meat-based diet.

It must have been working well for him. Around 1940 at the age of 62 he married his 28 year-old secretary. Not bad for a man who was supposed to die of scurvy over a decade prior.

Sure this is an experiment with only two test subjects. Yet the results are pretty impressive. And as you look around the internet, you will see more and more testimonials of what a carnivore diet can do for people.

Care to give it a try?