Woodland Survival

[Prime-Evil]

I am curious about how much food you need to survive in the woods? What sources of food might be most useful? How many calories you might actually get from different sources such as bugs, bark tea, grasses, flowers, etc.?

 

Also, they say you cannot survive on lean meat like rabbits because they have no carbohydrates, except in the liver, and very little fat, like 5% maybe. Is this true? How long could you survive on a no carb diet?

 

I understand that all of the cells in your body can metabolize fatty acids except your brain cells, but that your body can make glycogen from protien.

 

My own feeling is that you have some fat and muscle on you to begin with and stay warm have enough water and move slowly and deliberately you can survive a long time on very little, like 100 calories a day just by chewing on this and that as you stay put or slowly trudge your way out of the woods.

 

Also, where did most indigenous peoples get there carbohydrates?

I think the Inuit might be the most extreme low-carb adaptation.

But where did they get their carbohydrates from?

 

Interesting read:

http://www.beyondveg.com/tu-j-l/raw-cooked/raw-cooked-3h.shtml

"My host was the seal-hunter whom we had first approached on the ice (...). [His wife] boiled some seal-meat for me, but she had not boiled any fat, for she did not know whether I preferred the blubber boiled or raw. They always cut it in small pieces and ate it raw themselves; but the pot still hung over the lamp, and anything she put into it would be cooked in a moment. When I told her that my tastes quite coincided with hers--as, in fact, they did--she was delighted. People were much alike, then, after all, though they came from a great distance. She would, accordingly, treat me exactly as if I were one of their own people come to visit them from afar...

When we had entered the house the boiled pieces of seal-meat had already been taken out of the pot and lay steaming on a side-board. On being assured that my tastes in food were not likely to differ from theirs, my hostess picked out for me the lower joint of a seal's fore leg, squeezed it firmly between her hands to make sure nothing should later drip from it, and handed it to me, along with her own copper-bladed knife; the next most desirable piece was similarly squeezed and handed to her husband, and others in turn to the rest of the family....

 

Our meal was of two courses: the first, meat; the second, soup. The soup is made by pouring cold seal blood into the boiling broth immediately after the cooked meat has been taken out of the pot, and stirring briskly until the whole comes nearly (but never quite) to a boil. This makes a soup of thickness comparable to our English pea-soups, but if the pot be allowed to come to a boil, the blood will coagulate and settle to the bottom..."

 

How much carbohydrates is contained in seal liver, seal blood?

Are there any other organs than might contain any carbohydrates?

 

How far north could you get berries and lichen?

Did the Inuit traditionally store any carbohydrates for the long winter?

 

What about pure carnivours like wolves?

Do they eat any carbohydrates other than blood and liver?

 

CATS:

http://www.tamu.edu/univrel/aggiedaily/news/stories/04/060304-2.html

"Cats utilize protein for energy, even in the face of large amounts of carbohydrates in the diet"

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit

"The great peril of our existence lies in the fact that our diet consists entirely of souls."

- Traditional Inuit saying

 

"We don't believe. We fear!"

- Knud Rasmussen

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[SkepticLance]

The biggest problem with woodland diets is simply to get enough calories to keep your body going. Large sources of complex carbohydrate are scarce. We need approx. 2000 kilocalories per day to maintain body weight, even with minimal exercise. Less and we begin the long, slow and painful process called starvation. If hunting is successful, fat can provide calories. One of the best sources of fat is brains!

 

It is possible to survive entirely on a meat / fat diet. The biggest problem is, ironically, the same as with a totally vegetarian diet - getting enough of all kinds of nutrients. Vitamin C, for example, is found in the meat of predatory and carnivorous animals, though not in the meat of herbivores. A variety of meats, and the associated fat, plus a variety of offals etc., is needed to stay healthy on a totally carnivorous diet. Even there, it is debatable whether long term health can be fully maintained without plant material.

[Prime-Evil]

Interesting.

 

So if I am 220# say, with a lean body mass of 150# say, how long would it take me to starve if I could only scavenge and average of say 100kcal/day of bugs and 100kcal/day from plant material. Let's assume 3200 kcal/day in staying warm and scavenging and learning to hunt (unsuccessfully).

 

I'm thinking I might lose a pound a day, but my energy level would probably drop within a few weeks so I would only burn 1700 kcal/day and lose maybe 1/2 pound a day. I would guess that I would lose muscle as well as fat, unless I learned to hunt more successfully. I'm guessing my weight might drop to 120# in about 200 days before I freeze to death as the days get colder and food more scarce. Is that more or less the way it works?

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So if I did learn to hunt and gather more successfully, what might it be?

We are talking Northern Boreal forest here.

 

What if I averaged 1 kill/day for 1500kcal of Grey Squirrels, Red Squirrels, Varying Hare, Seagulls, and got my Vitamin C from tea made from rose hips or Eastern White Cedar (Tree of Life). What else would I need, food and nutrition wise. This is still a very low carb diet. Would I eventually need to focus more on carbohyrates?

 

Traditional sources of carbohyrates here in New Brunswick:

Spring - Maple & Birch Syrup, Fiddleheads & other shoots

Summer - Shoots, Roots, Berries

Fall - Late Berries, Fruits, Nuts ( also harvest of Corn,Squash,Beans )

Winter - Hunting and living off stores and body fat

 

I think you might have to get up to the peoples of the Canadian Shield before you get away from some forms of agriculture as the primary means of sustenance, but of course isolated or uprooted individuals always had to do without now and then. Corn,Squash,Beans and other forms of agriculture provided most of the diet right up to the beginning of the Canadian Shield, where not just growing season but also soil conditions forced people to spread out more and depended more on berries, lichen, and of course the caribou, and geese. I think the reason that the caribou were not herded, as such, the way the Sammi and others do in Europe and Asia, is because the climate and soil conditions force the caribou to range over larger areas, and so it is better to wait for them than to keep them or follow them. Same with geese. The only place you need to raise fowl is in the south, since they naturally summer in the North.

 

But the Inuit, they ranged even farther North, and were as much a Maritime people as a Nomadic Herding people. I wonder just how little carbohydrates they lived on most of the time, and to what degree they were genetically adapted. I think it was more a matter of adaptation than evolution. I am guessing, but I think most populations would be able to adapt to a low carbodrate diet within a few generations. The cultural and technological aspects of adjusting to a new land and climate were probably always more limiting to people than genetics, and intermixing was probably always just as important for sharing and acquiring local knowledge as for acquiring and maintaining local genetic diversity and adaptability.

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[SkepticLance]

Prime Evil.

You see to have a fairly good handle on what is needed. Carbohydrate, strictly speaking, is not essential. If you get enough fat in your diet.

 

Vitamin C comes also from the flesh of carnivores. So if you kill and eat a few foxes etc., you are covered.

 

I would think that, for good health, it would be of value to eat a range of fruits, berries, and wild greens. However, Inuit do not, and they seem to have survived OK.

 

Multi-posting. Seems to me that this topic is one of great interest to Prime Evil.

[Prime-Evil]

Yeah. We have a lot of woods here and I like to do a lot of hiking. Most of New Brunsick has been logged several times over and is used mostly for cheap fibre, so I often wonder if there is still enough to live off compared to 200 years ago. Gone is the forest primaeval, but they still find a really old stunted tree here or there. The logging has greatly increased the white-tail deer population, but the woodland caribou went extinct about 100 years ago. The Moose population is still healthy as we are doing a better job of protecting wetlands. The Mi'kmaq were more of a Maritime people than the other Abenaki tribes. In the past 400 years there is much less marine life - walrus, seals, whales, cod, salmon. So it's hard to imagine what they lived on if you only look at what is left of our natural habitat. There is still some abundance, but it is different, and I think it is less in total. I am not sure how much less. Half maybe.

 

It is still very abundant however, even as it is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Brunswick

 

The Black Bear is an interesting example of how we might live if we were out there. In all of New Brunswick, (28,500 sq.mi.) we have about 25 people, 3 deer, 1 moose, and 0.5 bear per square mile. People are mostly in small cities of course. It is interesting when I go hiking to think that there are bears out there and they see or smell me, but I never see them. Of course many of them are fed donuts twice a year by 'guides' in preparation for the Spring and Fall bear hunt. I suspect we have two somewhat distinct bear populations now, those that still live in the wild, and those that are more or less 'farmed'. Anyhow, it might be a while before the Atlantic Salmon return to our rivers. They were coming back for a while after we fixed up a lot of their streams but aquaculture and overfishing here and off Greenland and Iceland seems to have taken its toll. They are 'farmed' now also. Doesn't seem right. Sure it still taste good, but that's not always the point is it? We start by taking natures abundance and then we are turning nature into farms, and then farms into factories. Where are we going with all this progress? How will we define 'nature' in 100 years?

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