Hunting wabbits

After months of succumbing to peer pressure I have finally managed to get myself back on track. I regained all the weight I lost during my previous experiment with pure carnivorism. But I expect to lose it again and then some this time.

Now that the trivial chat is done, on to the meat of the post.

One of the first things that people mention when I talk about my carnivore diet is "rabbit starvation". The idea being that eating a too much lean meat will lead to health issues because the body needs a lot of fat to survive. Frankly, I'm tired of old wive's tales being passed along as scientific fact.

Let me be clear about one thing right up front- you cannot exclusively eat one single food source and expect to be healthy. It doesn't matter if it's rabbit, spinach, grapefruit, olives, or pistachios. No single food has all the nutrients required by the human body. So, yes, if you eat just rabbit you will die of malnutrition at some point. Or you will at least suffer some clinical illness.

Now it seems that within the zero-carb community it is still considered heresy to suggest that you don't need as much fat as you need protein. This community insists that we should all eat like eskimos. They steadfastly insist that too a low, or even moderate, fat intake will lead to "rabbit starvation".

But the facts simply don't support this notion. First of all, all top athletes eat a low-fat diet. Yet these people manage to operate at the pinnacle of human physical prowess. Zero-carb zealots dismiss this fact by pointing out that these athletes eat a mixed diet of protein, carbs, and fat. They say the carbs get converted to fat and therefore take the place of the fat that is lacking in the diet. This may be true. But it ignores the fact that protein can also be converted to fat. So a high-protein/low-fat diet would be no different than a "balanced" diet.

What I consider the most glaring bit of ignorance within the zero-carb community, however, is the notion that fat is fat. It has been known since 1923 that certain fats are essential to human health and cannot be synhtesized by the human body. Since these fats cannot be synthesized they must come from the diet. If you don't get these fats in the right amounts or in the right proportions to each other you can experience health problems. This means you can eat a very high-fat diet and still be unhealthy because you are not getting the essential fats. Or you could eat a low-fat diet chock full of the essential fats and be in perfect health. The point being that the amount of fat is far less important than the quality of the fat.

All the documented cases of "rabbit starvation" can easily be explained as malnutrition or simple starvation. They have nothing to do with the overall fat content of the meat. Rather, they are the direct result of missing essential nutrients due to a limited food supply. Rabbit, for example, has no vitamin A or C. It hardly matters how much fat is on the bunny when two major vitamins are missing. How long can you survive without vitamins A and C? How long before you get sick on such a diet?

Anyhow, I thought I could turn to the zero-carb community for a bit of support and guidance on my quest to maintain my carnivore status. It seems I was mistaken. It's just another cult with its gurus and unsupported dogma. So I'm a lone wolf still. If anybody knows of a community of genuine carnivores, let me know. I'm not interested in living on whale blubber.