Don't put too much faith in Wiseman's book. I don't think it has anything to
do with vitamins and more to do with fat.  Speth and Spellman wrote a fair
bit about this but I don't have the reference to hand.  If you eat protein
but don't get enough fat (or carbohydrate) then the body needs to turn the
protein into energy.  I don't understand the exact mechanism but what
happens is that you keep increasing the amount of protein that you eat
because you don't feel satiated and eventually (after a week or two) you
die.  You will actually live longer if you fast.

Protein starvation appeared amongst early explorers who ate rabbits or bison
or any animal that was low in fat during the winter months.  Traditional
people would often walk away from animals that didn't have enough fat.
Inuit would eat about 50/50 fat/protein to prevent this.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Fredrik Murman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2003 11:49 PM
Subject: Re: coconut milk ... and cooking history


> Amadeus Schmidt <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> >The availability of fat (or carb) decides how much  meat
> >could be eaten by humans, without getting into protein toxicity (rabbit
> >starvation).
>
> Is protein toxicity really the same thing as rabbit starvation? It appears
> to me that this is not the case. There's a book called "The SAS survival
> handbook" written by John Wiseman (1986). I personally don't have the book
> but the main library here in town were I live has a swedish translation of
> it. The author describes a lot of different animals all over the world
> including the rabbit. Here's my translation from swedish of some of the
> text about these animals:
>
> DANGER!
> RABBIT STARVATION
> Rabbit can give an
>  easy catched meal, but their meat lacks certain vitamins
> which are necessary för humans. [...] Fur hunters ate themselves literally
> to death while a small quantity of green leaves would have saved them.
This
> can happen easily when the vegetatation is buried under the snow and
> rabbits are the only food that's available.
>
> Any comments?
>
> Fredrik