APPENDIX 1

THE ALL-MEAT DIET OF ARTIC ADVENTURER VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON

An experiment that was carried out in the early years of the twentieth century in New York City demonstrates the viability of an all-meat diet. It involves a character we have encountered previously in the pages of this book: the Arctic adventurer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. We now return to the geographical and gastronomic adventures of this particularly carnivorous early-twentieth-century man to see what he can teach us about traditional meat.

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON’S 1928 EXPERIMENT

In his Arctic explorations, Vilhjalmur Stefansson and his men succeeded in living for months at a time in good health, free of scurvy, on a diet of nothing but seal and occasionally polar bear. During many other extended visits to the Arctic between 1906 and 1918, Stefansson lived on nothing but fatty meat, fish, and water for an aggregate of more than five years. This diet is estimated to provide about 80 percent of its calories from fat.

The prevailing view then as now among dietitians and medical people is that a mixed diet of animal and vegetable foods is necessary for health. Stefansson’s revolutionary views and the narrative of his experience were viewed with skepticism. As he put it, many people expressed opinions amounting to “you are likelier to meet a thousand liars than one miracle.”

Stefansson was quite well known for his Arctic exploits, and when a group of doctors asked to examine him extensively for evidence of ill effects from his years of living on an all-meat and all-fish diet, he agreed. This committee failed to find any of the supposed harmful effects, and published its findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1926 under the title “The Effects of an Exclusive Long-Continued Meat Diet.”

An experiment was subsequently organized whereby Stefansson and a colleague from his Arctic days were to live exclusively on meat and fish for one year in New York City. The organization administering the experiment was the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology. The committee in charge included physicians, professors, and administrators from Harvard, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins Universities; from the American Museum of Natural History; and from several other institutions. The research work, including several weeks of full-time monitoring of the men in Bellevue Hospital (at the beginning and end of the year), was done by a team of physicians headed by the medical director of the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology. During the intervening months, Stefansson and his colleague came daily to the hospital for analysis of blood and excretions, ensuring that if the men cheated on the diet the physicians likely would detect it.

The experiment was concluded in January 1929. Both men came through the year in excellent health. All tests for any detrimental changes detectable by physical or laboratory examination were negative. The only problem Stefansson had was during the early days of the experiment, when physicians asked him to eat only completely lean meat (chopped fatless muscle). Within two days, he became ill with diarrhea and “a general feeling of baffling discomfort.”

This had also occurred in the Arctic once, when for three weeks he ate only caribou so thin there was no appreciable fat behind the eyes or in the marrow (caribou are normally about 5 percent fat). Still, he had consumed some fat then by eating tendons and the soft ends of bones, and he assumed that was why symptoms did not occur until the end of that three-week period. They appeared much sooner in New York because there was almost no measurable fat in the chopped fatless muscle. Noteworthy is the fact that Weston Price, Stefansson, and others had observed that native Alaskans typically preferred to eat the older, fattiest ruminants.

Stefansson’s symptoms disappeared within three days of introducing fats—the sirloin steaks, brains and other organs, fish, and other meats constituting the diet for the year. Fish bones and rib ends were eaten for calcium. This diet was not really high in protein, for just as Stefansson’s diet in the Arctic had provided some 80 percent of the calories from fat, so too did this diet.

Stefansson did not get scurvy, either in the Arctic or in New York. Confirmation of his explanation for this appeared in a 1977 article in American Anthropologist entitled “The Aboriginal Eskimo Diet in Modern Perspective.” The authors state that Stefansson’s appraisal, forty years earlier, of the vitamin C nutriture of those Eskimos living in the far north was accurate: “If you have some fresh meat in your diet every day, and don’t overcook it, there will be enough C from that source alone to prevent scurvy.” These Eskimos had no plant foods available most of the year.

One may surmise that Stefansson’s years in the Arctic led him to prefer much of his meat very rare; parts of many cuts may well have been essentially raw, as the center of a rare steak is. Raw food, particularly raw meat, contains enzymes, vitamin C, vitamin B₆, and perhaps other health-building elements not found in thoroughly cooked foods.

The 1977 article in American Anthropologist reported that after careful analysis, the aboriginal diet of Arctic Eskimos (consisting mainly of land and sea mammals and fish, and virtually lacking plant foods) was found “capable of furnishing all the essential nutritional elements when prepared and consumed according to traditional customs. . . . There is no history among Eskimos of the epidemic vitamin-deficiency diseases which afflicted some cereal-based food cultures.”

Stefansson wrote about the New York experiment and some of his Arctic experience in a three-part article called “Adventures in Diet” that appeared in Harper’s magazine in November and December 1935 and January 1936. This fascinating account provides a lucid example of the need to avoid preconceived notions about diet, and does much to dispel the idea that meat and animal fats are necessarily unhealthy.

These accounts of the adequacy of an all-meat-and-fish diet for Stefansson and for primitive Eskimo groups are not meant to suggest an all-meat-and-fish diet would be appropriate for the reader. Genetics undoubtedly play an important role in these accounts; some individuals are likely much more suited than others to metabolize large quantities of animal food. The point rather is that for some individuals, large quantities of meat and fish are compatible with excellent health.

Meat that Stefansson ate in New York City in the 1920s was in many respects more similar to the wild game he ate in the Arctic than to conventionally raised meat generally available today. Beef cattle were to a much greater extent grass-fed, hormones and pesticides were not used in animal production, and antibiotics were yet to be discovered. The innovations of modern meat production described earlier have since taken place. Most cuts of meat that Stefansson ate during the experiment were fatty, and the fats were of a different composition and quality than those in today’s conventional meats.