Olympus-OM
[Top] [All Lists]

[OM] Re: Continuing Saga of the 1DMkIII

Subject: [OM] Re: Continuing Saga of the 1DMkIII
From: Garth Wood <garth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2007 12:05:37 -0700
IanG wrote:

[snip]

 > Did you know, it is supposedly true
> that if you eat rabbit and only rabbit, you'll die of malnutrition.


Yep.  Known popularly as "rabbit starvation," it was a serious problem 
for the first European explorers/mappers (such as David Thompson) who 
were mapping Western Canada and the Northwestern U.S. back in the late 
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  It's the result of far too 
little dietary fat in wild rabbits.  Without a reasonable supply of such 
fat, certain metabolic operations go haywire, you get a hugely swollen 
stomach, and eventually you sicken and die.

The explorers knew the effects and how to prevent them, but of course 
they had no idea why it happened.  Sometimes, though, wild rabbit was 
the *only* thing available.  In some of their diaries, they noted the 
lack of availability of fatter animals with rising concern, as well as 
their relief when they bagged something that had some fat on it.

Pemmican was a popular survival food for many of these guys, to 
supplement their diets with a store of fat and protein they could carry 
with them.  There's at least one story of David Thompson, where 
voyageurs from the Northwest Company who were accompanying him had 
managed to gorge themselves on pemmican for several days at the rate of 
4.67 *pounds* per guide per day, as well as other food stores they had 
with them.  Thompson, reporting this in his diary, was obviously pissed 
off.  I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation on the calorie 
intake of the voyageurs at this time -- assuming Thompson's reporting to 
be anywhere near accurate, they were each consuming about *20,000* 
calories/day.


Garth

==============================================
List usage info:     http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies:        olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
Sponsored by Tako
Impressum | Datenschutz