Primitive Diet Lessons

Dr Frederick Schwatka lived with the Inuit from 1878 to 1880, living off the land. Two Inuit families, Schwatka, and three others, lived almost entirely on reindeer meat, fat and offal. He wrote about this in a book called "The Long Search."

The Masai warriors of East Africa, avoided plant foods when they could. They lived on cattle and goats, eating the animals nose to tail, drinking milk and often the blood too. (The blood was their chief source of salt.)

1830s, in the USA, painter George Catin painted Native Americans, who lived on buffalo, who stood 6ft 6in and 7ft tall. Much taller than the European immigrants.

Prof. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Harvard trained anthropologist, lived and travelled among the Inuit, from 1905 to 1917. He wrote extensively but his work wasn't accepted, because the establishment refused to accept what he said about diet. In 1928, he was the subject of the Bellevue Experiment, where for a year, he lived on fat and meat under supervision. At the end of the experiment, they still refused to believe this was possible. They reported that, "The Bellevue Experiment Failed."

Steve Phinney reports that today his own diet is based on what Stefansson ate at Bellevue.

A Well Formulated Ketogenic Diet

The brain uses about 600 kcal/day. If your brain is not getting energy, the lights go out, you'll collapse into a coma.

When people start on a LFHC diet, most people were burning 2800 kcal/day. ON LCHF, they often drop back to 1800 kcal/d, and they lose weight quite rapidly. However, that doesn't last. In the long term you need a diet of about 2200 kcal/d which is 70% fats.

People often say that the LCHF diet, is expensive. It can be, but it need not be. For instance, Dr Phinney can buy two 3lt jars of olive oil for a food warehouse for US$23. That's 57c for each 1000 kcal. Of course we don't want to live on olive oil (or coconut oil); we love to eat a variety of foods.

Try to buy steak without the fat trimmed off. If you can't do that, put a tablespoon of butter on your steak, when you serve it.

There are many books and web sites, to give you help creating a wonderful selection of LCHF recipes. You just need to learn one or two new recipes every week, until you have enough variety to keep you happy.

After a while, you won't need to measure what you are eating, to maintain ketosis. You'll know just by looking at the plate that it's OK. But in the beginning, measuring what you are eating, and if possible measuring the ketones in your blood, is very helpful.

Science and Weight Loss

Gaining Weight is a Hormone Disorder

Prof. Tim Noakes says that obesity is a failure of the appestat in the brain to regulate food intake. This is a hormone disorder.

Steve Phinney says that by controlling the carbohydrate we eat, we can influence the way hormones behave in our body. It's possible to eat a diet that keeps insulin spikes very small, or perhaps have none at all. If we do that, our bodies will tell us when we are "full" and the appestat will start working again.

Seven Steps to a Sustainable Ketonic Lifestyle.

Eat moderate amounts of protein.

Eat enough fat to give you energy, 70% of total diet measured in kcal.

Eat the right fats, mono-unsaturated fats and saturated fats. Avoid seed oils.

Get enough minerals, you need sodium and magnesium. Drink juice from cooked vegetables, and the juices of cooked meat.

If in doubt eat more fat.

If in doubt, refuse to eat carbohydrates.

Seek to eat a diet that is both a pleasure to eat and highly is satisfying.

(16 minutes)

Published by: Diet Doctor - November, 2018

In 2014, Professor Tim Noakes was reported to the Health Professions Council of South Africa for giving unprofessional dietary advice. He was advocating a low-carb, high-fat diet… in a tweet. What followed was a four-year legal process of Kafkaesque proportions.