How long can you live w/o veggies?

V. Stephansson and friend proved they could live a full year w/o vegetables. By his own admission, however, most of his crew members could not when needs must. Most started missing their "normal" diets within 2 weeks. Fasters can forego all foods for the duration of the fast, but most break their fasts with vegetable soups as being easier on the stomach. What's the longest you have gone w/o vegetables?

I'm not sure that in my adult life I have ever gone a day without veggies - unless I was throwing up or something. I crave veggies.

Veggies are a constant in my diet. I don't eat a lot of them, but they are always there. In my pre-primal days I think I'd fairly often go a couple of days eating fast foods, no veggie except french fries and an occasional bit of lettuce, which don't really count, do they?

Minimal veggies but I rarely go over a day or 2 without em.
BTW "veggies" is really vague. Random example, ketchup. tabasco sauce, mustard, etc etc are basically veggie products.
Do they mean leafy greens  ?

I should read it more thoroughly. But its from 1928/29. They did have condiments (because they have a few gm carbs in the tables) so its not pure meat. So no veggies otherwise.
No my bad - carbs entirely from the meat. 7-12 gm worth.

Didn't we just go over this at the forum that shall not be named? I remember pointing out the Zero Carbers and Bear, only meat for some 50'ish years.

Of course we did, OTB,  but as this is a new forum, it's good to start afresh as well. Condiments are a tricky issue. Although mostly made from veggies, they are not eaten as a significant part of any meal, ketchup lovers to the contrary. Bear was in a class by himself, but even keto diets can restrict access to sugary condiments due to calorie content. So, I'd keep condiments as non-veggies for standard low carbers, but class them as veggies for keto and all-meat and fat diets.

Aren't pre-western contact Eskimos the classic example? As long as one is eating quality animal product that is eating greens, then one can get the essentials from that meat. I must admit, I've often wondered if that population had troubles with constipation...

From my point of view, I'd say quality of life and yumminess demand lots of veggies and some fruit (I'd class veggies as the product of plants be that leaves, roots, flowers (broccoli for example) or fruits (cuke, zuke, peppers, and things more commonly thought of as fruit - berries, apples, etc.)) but then, meat is a small part of my diet by preference.

I really doubt if populations eating the major part of their diet as meat and fat ever suffered from constipation on a regular basis. The very survival of the "uncivilized" Eskimos depended on their ability to thrive and bear young at an early age, and digestive troubles didn't  seem to appear. The biggest killers of the Eskimos were periodic bouts of famine when seals and their predators weren't available.
I think Stephansson's crew and you would have seen eye to eye about veggies and fruit.

Paysan wrote:Fasters can forego all foods for the duration of the fast, but most break their fasts with vegetable soups as being easier on the stomach. What's the longest you have gone w/o vegetables?

I've experimented with a couple of short water fasts (usually ranging from 84 to 108 hours), and so far I've found that breaking my fast with meat is actually the easiest on my stomach, as long as I don't eat too much. The easiest fast-breaking experience I had was when I ate about 4oz of lamb ribs every 2 hours for 6 hours, then had a normal meal. Absolutely no issues at all, digestion felt completely on the level.

Next time I tried to push it and gorged on an entire mackerel (roughly 16oz) in one sitting, which gave me the runs, but not too bad. Around 4/10 in terms of severity.

The worst was when I tried to eat a bigass salad, and that was a 9/10 bathroom disaster that lasted 24 hours or more. I haven't tried cooked vegetables or veggie soup yet, but seeing as how small quantities of meat seem to work out well, I'll probably stick with that in the future.

Anyway, to answer the question, I've gone without fruit or vegetables for 5 days, which included several days of fasting. While eating normally, I don't recall ever going without vegetables for longer than one day. There's always something, like a few olives or a bite of sauerkraut.

That sort of begs the question -are high fat fruits such as avocados and nuts such as macadamias considered veggies on a keto diet? Still wondering.

One can live indefinitely without veggies. They are unnecessary. Stephansson spent years on an all-meat diet. He found that he felt healthier on that diet than any other.

Regarding this quote:
'By his own admission, however, most of his crew members could not when needs must. Most started missing their "normal" diets within 2 weeks.'

I feel this misrepresents his writing. He said his crew members would dislike the all-meat diet initially, because it is not as palatable, but after about 6 months on it, people would come to appreciate it. He said health was always fine on the all-meat diet.

I don't think vegetables deserve the status of being "superfoods" that our culture gives them.

Stephansson is the poster boy for a meat and fat exclusive diet. Most of his crew members abandoned such restrictive practices ASAP, and never looked back. HE expected that 6 months would mark the turning point in adaptation, but many never did. To them, it was strictly a survival diet, period.
But Stephansson was a different breed of explorer, and drew conclusions that led to his famous NYC hospital trial, which validated his resuming a mostly meat diet in spite of his new bride's cooking skills.
"Our culture's" insistence on vegetable superfoods is being backed by governments, nutritionists, grandparents, and the guys next door. It's a hard sell to replace cheaper, easily grown foodstuffs with meat and fat. Especially after a generation has been brainwashed into demonizing fats of all kinds, and red meat equating to heart attacks.
However, there are enough studies showing that veggie intake is beneficial to humans as a whole that we can't discount them entirely. But at this point in time, they cannot replace meat entirely, vegans to the contrary.

Paysan wrote:Most of his crew members abandoned such restrictive practices ASAP, and never looked back

Not sure what you mean by this. Those who traveled with him multiple times adopted the diet on subsequent adventures. I believe Stefansson himself noted that those who had been on the diet for more than 6 months went back to it without a problem at later instances.

Paysan wrote:To them, it was strictly a survival diet, period.

Do you have a quote from them in which they say this?

Paysan wrote:However, there are enough studies showing that veggie intake is beneficial to humans as a whole that we can't discount them entirely.

I've tried to collect all of these kinds of studies and they did not seem to produce the outcomes you're suggesting. Most experimental trials end up with results like this one:

"Lack of improvement in vitamin A status with increased consumption of dark-green leafy vegetables"

I would post a link to the study but apparently new members are not allowed to post external links. Can you show me the experiments in which vegetables are definitely beneficial to humans?

A post on PaleoMom site has some interesting information:

The Link Between Meat and Cancer
thepaleomom.com/the-link-between-meat-and-cancer

The main point is that eating vegetables with meat is protective against many of the established mechanisms of meat carcinogens.

Many foods (mostly plants) contain substances that may be useful in inhibiting angiogenesis. Angiogenesis is the formation of new blood vessels. It is an important part of the growth of cancer tumors. To grow beyond a small size, tumors create new blood vessels. Limiting new blood vessels without damaging the blood vessels necessary for normal body functions is a challenge. William Li and colleagues suggest that including anti-angiogenic foods in the diet could be a useful part of both prevention and treatment.

Tumor Angiogenesis as a Target for Dietary Cancer Prevention
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3184418/

Li has a TED talk for general audiences:
youtube.com/watch?v=OjkzfeJz66o

And yet, when vegetables (or fruits) are tested directly, they seem to have little effect. I can't yet post links, but you can search for these trials by title:

"Influence of a diet very high in vegetables, fruit, and fiber and low in fat on prognosis following treatment for breast cancer: the Women's Healthy Eating and Living (WHEL) randomized trial."

"The Polyp Prevention Trial-Continued Follow-up Study: no effect of a low-fat, high-fiber, high-fruit, and-vegetable diet on adenoma recurrence eight years after randomization."

On the topic of Stephansson-Quote" . Through circumstances
and  accidents which  are  not a  pan  of this
 story,
 I  found  my-
self  that  autumn  separated  from  the
 rest
 of  the  expedition
and living  as  a  guest  of  the  Mackenzie  River
 Eskimos.*"
 None of his men accompanied him for the duration of this expedition.

Also, "  when  my
companions ate  the
putrescent
red meat only for a few meals
or at most a few days.  I probably owe my conversion to gamy
fish  to  the  circumstance  that during my  first  northern  winter" he was eating gamey fish, his crewmates were not, as they were separated from him.

More from "Not By Bread Alone" Pg 59: "
Still,  as  just  implied,  the  verdict  depends  on  how  long
one  has  been  on  the  diet.  If  at  the  end  of  the  first  five  or
ten days our men could have been miraculously rescued  from
the  exclusive  seal  and  brought  back  to  their  varied
 foods,
most of them would  have  sworn  forever after  that  they  were
about to die when rescued, and they would have vowed never
to  taste  seal
 again—vows
 which  would  have  been  easy
 to
keep,  for  no  doubt  in  such  cases  the  thought  of  seal,  even
years  later,  would  have  been  accompanied  by  a  feeling
 of
revulsion.  If  a  man  has  been  on  meat  exclusively  for  only
two or three months  he  may  or may  not be  reluctant  to  go
back  to  it  again.  But when  the  period  has  been  six  months
or  over,  I  remember  no one  who  was  unwilling  to  go  back
to meat.  Moreover,  those who  have done without
 vegetables-
for  an  aggregate  of  several  years  usually  thereafter  eat  a
larger  percentage  of  meat  than  the  average  citizen.'
So we are both right...and wrong.
He vetted his men fairly strictly - any who would not give up their tobacco, bread or salt habits were dropped from consideration for crew, since there was no room to haul 6 month supplies of such.

BTW, the title of the book is "Fat of the Land" and I think "Not by bread Alone" is a chapter.

Nightly Orange wrote:

Paysan wrote:Fasters can forego all foods for the duration of the fast, but most break their fasts with vegetable soups as being easier on the stomach. What's the longest you have gone w/o vegetables?

I've experimented with a couple of short water fasts (usually ranging from 84 to 108 hours), and so far I've found that breaking my fast with meat is actually the easiest on my stomach, as long as I don't eat too much. The easiest fast-breaking experience I had was when I ate about 4oz of lamb ribs every 2 hours for 6 hours, then had a normal meal. Absolutely no issues at all, digestion felt completely on the level.

Next time I tried to push it and gorged on an entire mackerel (roughly 16oz) in one sitting, which gave me the runs, but not too bad. Around 4/10 in terms of severity.

The worst was when I tried to eat a bigass salad, and that was a 9/10 bathroom disaster that lasted 24 hours or more. I haven't tried cooked vegetables or veggie soup yet, but seeing as how small quantities of meat seem to work out well, I'll probably stick with that in the future.

Anyway, to answer the question, I've gone without fruit or vegetables for 5 days, which included several days of fasting. While eating normally, I don't recall ever going without vegetables for longer than one day. There's always something, like a few olives or a bite of sauerkraut.

Any fast I have done, I have always over eaten on anything I break it with. And the only difference I can see is that - over eating veggies - broccoli especially and a lot of wild green salad, I tend to wake up feeling like a balloon, and over a few hrs I "deflate" and feel fantastic. In fact I even love that bloating and the subsequent "deflating".

I'm under the belief that you can live without veggies indefinitely, it basically just comes down to personal preference and whether one would get bored with meat or not.

I posted this in the other thread on the old forum how humans are not Ruminants.  Ruminants have a special compartment in their stomach meant to ferment "plants".  Often they will regurgitate these plants back up, chew them then swallow them again to allow for more fermentation.  Sometimes animals do something called coprophagia to further ferment down plants to get the nutrients from them.  I won't go into that here but if people are curious about it, look up what it is.

If you look at a Carnivores digestive system and a Herbivores digestive system, then a humans digestive system, you'll see ours is nearly identical to a carnivore.  There is really nothing herbivore about humans, this should tell us that we simply do not need veggies in the diet at all.  Ruminants specifically break down fiber into short chain fatty acids (showing their actual energy source is fat), then in turn unlock the nutrients hiding behind the fiber.  This is something humans can't do.  Fiber goes in one end and out the other.  That means all those nutrients we see locked up in vegetables remain locked up and for the most part untouchable by humans.  The bioavailability of them is something like 10% or less.

We are basically built to live and survive out in nature.  There simply isn't many vegetables in the wild, and most fruits/vegetables found in the wild resemble nothing of what we see in stores today.  An avocado for example, out in the wild has a much larger seed taking up nearly the whole fruit.  There is barely any "meat" inside the avocado meaning it really couldn't be used as something to live on in nature.

This is not to say that veggies are completely useless, they are not.  What humans can do is extract some manner of glucose from them to add to our glycogen stores.  It seems to me the purpose behind this is to give humans enough energy to go out and sprint to catch their dinner if need be.

WCF, I'm sure you meant humans are NOT ruminants.

I've read in many places that our digestive system is between herbivores and carnivores. Not all vegetation eaters are ruminants. Rabbits? But we most definitely do not have the system of a ruminant.

OnTheBayou wrote:WCF, I'm sure you meant humans are NOT ruminants.

I've read in many places that our digestive system is between herbivores and carnivores.  Not all vegetation eaters are ruminants.  Rabbits?  But we most definitely do not have the system of a ruminant.

Ya I realized that and changed it

How would you say that Stefannson rates as an expedition leader? Would you have wanted to be under his command? Do you think the accounts of his expeditions give you confidence in his mastery of what people need to eat? What would you say to someone who claimed that he was one of the worst leaders, in terms of food preparation as well as other details?

I've read that there was quite a bit of lying in his book.