Horsemeat

It isn't hard to strike a balance! It's never been easier! Good grief!!!!!!

We were not 'designed' for any diet. We evolved by adapting to what was available.

But raw carrots are sooooo nice Bags. Anyway, back to horsemeat ....

I know you were Jess and both extremes bring their own challenges. I was only debating one small point with Bags - it's not a big issue. I guess we evolved to eat a bit of everything. It's just that we have come so far from the life/ diet we are designed to have that it's hard to strike a balance. I'll carry on with my grass and leave you and Bags to your raw steaks. None of us will have any teeth left

I didn't know that about guinea pigs.

Grit from stoneground flour wore out teeth as well (modern flours are better sifted so notnsuch a problem nowadays), and foods high in carbohydrates cause more dental caries than meat.

Cooking doesn't destroy all the vitamin C in meat and it does make the food easier to digest. That's why it caught on . Cooked carrots are better for you than raw ones – heat gives you access to nutrients more easily sometimes.

And I did not disagree with you about there being more to nutrition than meat, nightowl. I only pointed out that it was possible to live healthily on mainly meat (when I say meat, I include fish). And jess pointed out that although it is possible to live on a vegetarian diet, it's harder (less efficient) to get all the nutrients one needs.

I was just talking about the extremes nightowl and yes, raw meat has some advantages I think in terms of vitamins. Not much vitamin c in dried meat probably. But on the other hand it wears out your teeth
I went to an interesting talk on scott and vitamin c. Apparently while Nelson knew that citrus juice prevented scurvy and used it to great effect, Scott believed that it did not and rations contained only cereals, fats, dried meat.
Apparently at some stage post nelson the british navy changed its supply of lime juice to the west indies and the limes were not high in vitamin c. So they thought the theory was wrong. Not long after ascorbic acid was isolated as a chemical and its scurvy preventing qualities nailed down, using experiments on guinea pigs - fortunately because guinea pigs are like us and don't make their own. Most mammals do.

You are quite right Nightowl.

I'm not an expert on the Inuit or the Sami Bags but I believe they do eat some vegetable based food when it is available. They also eat raw meat and I believe this is a much better provider than cooked meat of certain vitamins (including vitamin c). I also believe there is a school of thought that suggests their digestive systems (liver in particular) may have developed to cope with such large quantities of proteins and fats.

In any event, I wasn't arguing for a vegan diet, just saying that there's more to nutrition than meat and that many cultures across the world live a healthy life on a meat-free diet (which may or may not be vegan).

Jess is right about vitamin C from fresh meat. One of the reasons Amundsen's Antarctic team survived when Scott's didn't is because when Amundsen's team ran out of fresh food and were at risk of developing scurvy, they ate their dogs which, by then, were no more use to the expedition anyway. Scott's lot didn't do that and scurvy is one of the things that depleted their precious energy, which in turn, killed them off.

One of the things, please note. But in such a hostile environment, a little thing like that is a killer.

Jess said: "the Inuit probably did not live very long lives".
Neither did the rest of humanity until the introduction of modern sanitation. In areas of the world where people still live in dire poverty, human life spans are still very short. It's not the diet that was/is the problem but disease control, not to mention infant and maternal mortality.

Saba D-H talked about the constipation problem she was having. Apparently the Sami assured her she'd adjust to the diet if she lived with them all the time. Constipation wasn't a problem for them.

Can't agree, Gracesmum, about quality of food in France being better. Lots of TV coverage of frozen meals being taken off the shelves here. Supermarket food is often at or even past sell-by date and rotten fruit and vegetables are left on shelves. We shop carefully at markets and local shops, but the freshest food is often Lidl's. We buy Irish beef and New Zealand lamb when we see it, because the beef is mostly of pathetic quality since it is never hung for long enough and local lamb is twice the price and generally not as good.
Of course, horse meat is still easily and openly available.

I guess they might have been constipated bags but living in that climate and having to "go" outside would make me constipated.
I'm afraid I have to agree with bags, nightowl it is really quite hard for a vegan to get the fat soluble vitamins and iron that they need. There is though enough vitamin C in meat to prevent scurvy. Many carnivores eat pure meat diets but in order to be a really happy herbivore we would require a much more complex digestive system and cellulose digesting bacteria to match. Meat is a doddle to digest compared to plants.
Mind you the Inuit probably did not live very long lives, but then neither would someone who had to grow enough vegetation to keep them going. (assuming no eggs, dairy, meat).
(and no I have not read the whole thread )

Inuit managed to live on a meat only diet for thousands of years, nightowl, so it can't be that bad. Did you see that series of prgrammes that Saba Douglas-Hamilton made with the Sami of northern Finland? Same there – they lived almost entirely on reindeer meat. There's a lot of misinformation about meat around nowadays.

Not that I'd want to live on meat alone, but saying it can't be done or that it's unhealthy is simply wrong as these two examples (and there'll be others) show.

I'm not sure I agree with you Bags that meat is much more nutritious than anything vegetable. Meat is of course an excellent source of protein, but there's far more to nutrition than protein. I think that anyone living on meat alone would be pretty unhealthy, whereas it's very easy to be healthy on a diet which contains no meat whatsoever.

If we're eating horsemeat it makes you wonder what is actually in dog/cat food ....

But grazing land, such as is used for a lot of animal feeding, is often not suitable for grain production. Not all farmed meat is produced the intensive way. Where I live the fields are full of sheep and cattle. Fewer cattle at this time of year but still some. We also see pigs outdoors, and llamas!

And, after all, meat (including fish) is still a much more nutritious food than anything vegetable. It packs a much greater nutritional punch for its weight.

Especially if you're not fussed about fat (also good food), which I'm not, and which early humans weren't.

Latest horsemeat joke from Twitter: The reason we didn't all die of BSE – it was horsemeat all along

Not to mention quite a lot of drugs.

I suppose the problem with meat now is that instead of hunting and eating animals [and therefore helping to keep them healthier in the way that other predators do] it takes vast amounts of grain etc to produce meat from beef etc.

So I would continue to argue for a high animal food diet at least up to Neolithic times. A lot of it would have sea food, which had the double bonus of being high in protein and high in omega-3 fatty acids, both essential for the development of a large brain, which humans have.

Flick, we are co-operative animals, not single hunters like cheetahs, so hunting does not use a great deal more energy over and above our basal metabolic rate of energy use. Capturing a large animal would have provided food for a whole tribe so everyone benefits – great enrgy input, well spread, for relatively
little extra outlay of energy. Butchering would not have been too much of a problem with those bloody sharp flint tools. As for primitive cooking, well what more do you need than a fire to roast some meat? Have you never made a basic camping spit out of green sticks?

Traditional Inuit diets were almost, if not completely, animal products. Seals, walruses, whales – large animals! Plus fish of course.

Modern hunter-gatherers have been pushed into marginalised territories and so they are not really representative of earlier hunter-gatherers, who would also have had the advantage of much more game being available.

Apparently they are saying that Romania has lots of horse and donkey meat because they have banned horsedrawn transport in towns. If this is true it does suggest6 that the quality of the horsemeat may not be great - or even horse! Even so it might be more appetising than some of the "mechanically recovered meat products" my daughter had to work with when she was doing research for the FSA!

Mesolithic people were hunter gatherers and I think, the effort expended on trapping and butchering larger animals probably exceeded their food value. Small animals and seafoods were found extensively in their diets but cooking methods were primitive so most of their food was plant based.

The Neolithic was characterised by the introduction of arable farming and domestication of animals so again I think their diet was again mainly plant based.

As a child, even in a comfortably off home, we only had meat at our main meal, and not always even then I can remember quite a number of meat free main meals in my mothers repertoire, cheese potato pie, baked beans, fried onion, boiled potatoes and gravy. Breakfast was usually something on toast and tea was bread, spread and one slice of cake.

When I started cooking 4ozs was a standard portion per person for meat ,but now I do not even do that much as I cook mainly casseroles and similar dishes and tend to pack them with lots of vegetables, so without consciously intending it the portion of meat per serving has fallen.

And donkeys too, it seems.