In cleaning out my e-mail files, I ran across this:

On Tue, 12 Mar 2002, Barbara Sheppard wrote:
>Then there are the structures that are tougher than flesh, but softer than
>bone (I'm not sure what they're called). Do these also contain calcium in
>any significant amount that could be utilised by chewing them up?

   One thing that no one has thought of concerning the eating of
cartilaginous tissue is that it is a good source of silicon, which helps
form tendons, connective tissue, etc.
   Back in the 1970s, when my first husband was diagnosed with angina
pectoris. We were - in good faith - following the Pritikin diet, which
stresses extremely low fat (this despite the fact that I tended to follow
Carlton Fredericks's low-carb, high protein hypoglycemic diet). He died of
massive heart failure in the fall of 1977 - one month shy of his 42nd
birthday on Christmas Day.
   One thing that had always been of concern to me was that Curt utterly
refused to eat the gristly parts of meat - whether fatty or not. He
considered it to be garbage (which he sneeringly pronounced with a French
accent), although I did manage to make vegetable-beef soups with bones -
which he ate.
   He went along with the idea of increasing magnesium to provide that
balance between calcium and magnesium. I'm not sure when I did some reading
concerning the silicon found in gristle and cartilage (the silicon part
probably came after his demise), but I discovered that both magnesium and
silicon were needed to have a healthy heart.
   I thank God my son has followed in my footsteps concerning stripping
down bones so far you can't even give it to a dog to finish up. He's the
one that got me following the principles in Ray's book when we found the
book in - of all places - the Whole Foods market on Greenville in Dallas.
He runs marathons, and our first paleo race was in Houston in January of
1997 - where the temperature never went higher than 32 degrees F. He never
hit the wall, and tirelessly bounced back without a problem. He took
pemmican and ground-up dates/pecans with him, as well as a Camel-Back full
of spring water (it took us about 7-8 hours to make the 150-mile trip back
to Corsicana on I-45, due to the snow and ice on the roads). He recovered
so well he was able to run our traditional marathon in Amarillo in May -
less than half a year later.
   Unfortunately, he has backslid, as he is based on a Marine base in
California, forced to eat mostly the mess hall food, although I have
recently got slightly ahead financially to be able to dehydrate beef and
Barbados sheep (a gift to me from an avid hunter whose wife does not like
wild game) and mail it to him. Hopefully, this, too, shall improve.

Mary Anne Unger