Post
by gofanu » Mon May 16, 2011 10:29 pm
Sorry, I can't let this go. It is an excellent example of nonsense that proliferates into crazy thinking.
"the Intuit eskimos which eat pure blubber and have been found to be free of cardiovascular disease, even though their vitamin C intake is obviously very limited."
Inuit, not Intuit.
"Obviously"???
The Inuit also eat a lot of seal and walrus, as it is available fresh year round. And gather all sorts of growing stuff in season, seaweeds, birds & eggs, fish etc. Whale skin (muktuk) is said to be high in vitamin C. Most of this stuff is eaten fresh or frozen, rarely cooked, and like aboriginal folk everywhere, the internal organs are eaten first and preferentially.
In my reading, I understand that it was precisely the fact that seal meat contains very large amounts of vitamin C that led to much of the modern understanding of scurvy and vitamin C. This on the Antarctic expeditions, where sled dogs were fed dried meat, but became weak and sick; but recovered immediately when they got to where fresh seal was available. This led to analysis to figure out why, and it turned out that fresh seal is loaded with vitamin C.
"A paleolithic diet apparently allows much smaller amounts of vitamin C to be effective,"
"Paleolithic diet" is an academic construct, which mostly makes no sense, like many academic constructs, including the so called "Mediterranean diet". The Inuit diet IS a paleolithic diet, and in common with others, consists of what is available and is mostly raw. One such diet is used in Pauling's analysis of how much vitamin C we might have gotten eating a lot of fresh leaves etc. Lots of vitamin C there too. None of this to be confused with Euro-paleo people often on the edge of starvation.
FRM