Loss of fat mass and lean mass

[Robson Valley]

Imagine sea levels about 300 feet lower than they are now. Between the UK and Europe lies Doggerland, since flooded.

Look at NE Asia into Siberia. Beringia was a continental-sized land mass that joined North America.
It is proposed that Beringia was colonized but because of the ice cap, simple overland travel was impossible
for thousands of years. That means that humans looked to the sea for both food and transportation.

OK, jack up the sea levels and flood all of human coastal habitation. We will never find much evidence, anywhere.
Even with the ice retreat, nothing greened up for the next 500-1000 years. Why go there? Barren stone and gravel.
No plants and no animals. Brutal climate = stay on the coast.

Even as the paleo people began to explore the interior of the continent, fish was the staple.
The weirs at the outlet of Loon Lake, BC have been there for a thousand+ years.

I'll bet that those paleo people had many more edible resources than we give them credit for.
Here, dried and pulverized cattail and lilypad roots are excellent starch sources.
Anybody with a digging stick that can hold their breath can harvest all they want as the water
is usually no more than 6' deep and glass-clear.

I'll bet that cultivation of nut-trees was not lost on them, either. eg hazel nuts.

The Inuk still use blubber as their Vitamin C source. They have no need of oranges.

If you visit Haida Gwaii, try to go when the big salmon spawning runs are on.
The Haida build stone weirs along the river edges, maybe knee deep, to spear salmon by the hundreds
as they have always done. The smoke houses (alder wood) all over the islands and the coast creak under the load.
Also, they have constructed and continue to manage their own clam and oyster beds.

Just 2(?) years ago, a couple of scuba diving archaeologists decided to swim out and down along the river courses into the sea.
What they saw, to 70' and deeper, were stone weirs identical to the ones that the Haida are fishing in today.

The biochemistry of fat metabolism yields a great deal of energy.
That's why car engines run on hydrocarbons and not maple syrup.
The real downside is that the metabolic intermediates
are not commonly useful as the frames for building other essential biomolecules.

 

[Robson Valley]

I suppose meats. Diversity helps. There's such a buffet every time the tide goes out.
In any case, meat fat is critical in the caloric balance of food intake.
Paleos seem to have understood this. Pretty good nest robbers for eggs, too.

Muktuk is a very important source of Vitamin C for the Inuk. They don't need oranges.
On the UK and North Sea coast, is there not "sea beet" which is also a perennial?

Here in the interior, away from tide water, I can harvest all the lilypad root I want.
Dried and pounded, excellent starchy flour but it's a lot of work. Cattail roots not so much.
There's phytolithic evidence from grind stones that the First Nations did exactly that.

We have Corylus cornuta, the wild hazel nut ( you too?).
We have wild crab apple and many kinds of berries.
Apples are as old as the Silk Road, from Kazakhstan.

I think that we've been discouraged from keeping so many of these things in our diet
as artificial selection and cross breeding have given us so many more attractive plants & animals to eat.
Have you got wild strawberries? The size of peas? Then those 'things' in the stores. . . . .

Select a few, transplant them or collect seed and cultivate. See what you get.
I know that Tombear of this parish has done a number of experimental plantings.

 

[Janne]

Remember, during the Ice Age, people did not live ON the ice, but away from it. The coldest condition they lived in would bu todays northern Siberia, Yakutia and Finno-Scandinavia.

Herds of animals for the protein, lemmings and fish if those herds are away from you.
Plenty of berries, roots, leafs to satisfy your carbs and vitamins.

The people that live in the most inhospitable area are the nirthern greenlanders. They used to get the vit C from eating the content of spcertsin seals intestines, plus the mentioned blubber.

Today they reach for the can of veg. Easier, less dangerous.

 

[Robson Valley]

That's the really hard part = to find elders even willing to talk about the old days for food.
I think that the reason they don't is because of the near starvation hardship that they endured for many decades.

Everybody in the UK and Europe went through stone ages, chalcolithic and bronze age into iron.
Wave after wave of invaders both local and from the middle east. Like the tides.

The Americas is a very different story. Stone Age. Almost overnight into the iron age with European contact.
Smallpox was the weapon of cultural suppression.

It's now considered probably that there were 2 or more gradual floods of people from asia.
By the last one, chances are extremely good that the Vikings were smelting bog iron on Canada's east coast.
The Japan Current in the Pacific Ocean delivers Asian garbage every day to Canada's west coast.

 

[Janne]

True.
Lot of people today would start heaving and feeling sick if my parents told them about their diet before and during WW2 on mainland Europe.

Liver, kidneys and tripe were never rationed in UK during the war.
Rice was never rationed.

 

[Robson Valley]

I frightened my parents. From time to time, they made what they called "olden days" food.
From the Great Depression of the 1930's I suppose.
Things like bread slices fried in bacon fat. Brown sugar and cinnamon on buttered toast.
Liver and onions or bacon. Gravy on toast. I ate it all and wanted more!
Funny: we never ate fried eggs. Hard boiled, poached, yes.

A lot of it is caloric demand and simple crap foods like chips and burgers do it so well.
Salads just don't cut it with me when I've come in from a -20C windy day.

 

[Janne]

Rye bread fried in bacon fat, a garlic clove rubbed in on both sides, a sprinkling of salt...

Fine cuisine....

 

[Robson Valley]

Fats, triglycerides and other lipids are essential parts of the human diet.
Not very tricky to trace the biochemical facts. Read Lehninger for the summary.
Most fats that I eat are plant based, some from meats including fish and eggs.
Might have bacon and eggs tomorrow, about once every 6+ weeks or so.

 

[Joe tahkahikew]

Innuit, you call inland innuit were starving to death in the 1950s. My grandmother can remember coming across their tents with dead bodies inside way further north in Canada. This land we call the barren lands.

Regarding vitamins. Up here we have few wild greens. There are lakes where we can gather lilly roots, catails and other such foods. There are very, very few root vegetables as we have large areas of perma frost. Also berries when they are out.

One form of greens we ate were moose and caribou stomach contents Moose stomach food is fine, but we cook it too.. Hot raw liver is real nice and contains vitamin C I've been told.!! We still catch and eat fish, mainly lake trout and white fish. Both of which we can catch and store in large quantities by freezing or air drying and also by smoking.

We made tea from Labrador tea plant, and still do. Also from some spruce trees.

When we got european food we used flour to make bannock, cooked on a stick over fire. This we still do now. Dried fruit such as raisens and currents can be added to it for other things and so can our native berries.

 

[Janne]

We used to make tea from the tips shoots of various fir trees too. Plus the young leaves from Birch.

Never tried boiled stomach & content. I guess a similar taste to Saurkraut?

We were boiling the same moss (english name?) the reindeer eat to add a bit fibre to the concentrated freeze dried stuff we had.
You get used to it.

 

[Joe tahkahikew]

The taste & texture depends on how long its been in the stomach and what the animal has been eating. Can't think of anything you might have eaten which I can compare with. I've never tasted Saurkraut but I guess it could be similiar. I saw that same moss the Caribou up north eat in tEngland. My friend told me it is called Reindeer moss there too.

 

[Janne]

Yes, it is a Lichen. Greyish, tastes a bit mushroomy. Chewy.

I prefer the tea from conifers to get Vit. C.