Have you heard of this before?

[SarahMelisse]

I was reading random blogs this morning and came across a blog post titled "Why Rabbit Meat Is Not The Best Survival Food".... so of course I had to click on it. It was basically all about how rabbit meat is too lean to be a main meat source. I think maybe the author didn't take non-meat fat sources or a balanced diet into account, but here is the quote they included:

"Rabbit eaters, if they have no fat from another source- beaver, moose, fish (or chicken, pork, or beef)- will develop diarrhea in about a week, with headache, lassitude, a vague discomfort. If there are enough rabbits, the people eat till their stomachs are distended; but no matter how much they eat they feel unsatisfied.

Some think a man will die sooner if he eats continually of fat-free meat than if he eats nothing, but this is a belief on which sufficient evidence for a decision has not been gathered.
-Vilhjalmur Stefansson, The Fat of the Land featured in Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon"

The blog post was survival oriented, but the quote seems to be talking about everyday "rabbit eaters". I think if your whole diet consisted of one food, it would make anyone sick so this quote seems unrealistic. I almost bought this book awhile ago, but now I'm kind of glad I didn't.

Thoughts?

 

[UK-backyardbunnies]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC2RYiaM6WU



On a serious note, yes "rabbit starvation" can occur if you eat ONLY rabbit and therefore don't get enough fat/other nutrients. Rabbit as your main meat plus normal veg etc will be no problem

 

[mystang89]

I think if your whole diet consisted of one food, it would make anyone sick so this quote seems unrealistic.

I completely agree. Everyone should have a balanced diet or at least as close as they can get. If I were in a survival situation and had only rabbit to eat, I guess I would also try to find plants and grub. Not a meal of champions but I would be getting other nutrition I would need. TALL glass of water with that grub please.

 

[3mina]

It boggles me whenever I see this stuff. I mean is there anyone so stupid as to eat only ONE thing ever and if there is stupidity is its own reward IMO. Almost every time this is mentioned regarding rabbit meat the whole thing goes into this "See Martha, I told you that stuff wasn't good for you" flap.
People forget a survival situation and an everyday diet are two completely different things and I, for one, could probably use a little protein starvation since I'm pretty well insulated at the moment.

 

[coffeenutdesigns]

The same could be said for eating any lean meat as a total food source. The full feeling comes from your carbs anyway, not your protein source. Who eats just one food all the time??? In a survival situation, I would be eating anything and everything edible that I came across!

 

[SarahMelisse]

It just seemed out of context or put into the wrong context. The quote is talking about rabbit as a sole food source in everyday life and the blogger is talking about rabbit as a sole food for survival. The way I see it is if you are choosing to eat nothing but rabbit as opposed to a balanced diet... you're dumb. If you are raising rabbit as a food source for survival/prepping, you are most likely also canning veggies and fruits or storing grains to complete your diet.

So either way this whole blog post quoted this book out of context and isolated rabbit meat as "unhealthy". I'm sure a lot of people will just see the title and decide that rabbit meat is bad for you. :roll: oh well!

 

[MamaSheepdog]

The rabbits in question were also wild rabbits that have almost no fat at all. Depending on your feeding protocol, domestic rabbits can develop quite a lot of fat in the abdominal cavity. We just butchered nine yesterday that were roaster size, and some had a LOT of fat.

So much so, that I am rethinking my grain mix. :? I am either going to change the ratio or feed less grain and more hay.

 

[Zab]

In theory one could eat only eggs + something with vitamin C and live fine on that. So that's like.. almost only one source of food
I had a time when I would eat more or less only eggs. Maybe one fruit once in a while to go. I felt awesome that 1-2 months.. (did it because I just had no apetite or motivation to cook anything else. It was after I found out about my wheat allergy and just about everything felt off limits for a while after that)

To go back to the topic.. we need fat. Especially saturated fats (I know some dietists won't agree, but if we look at what sort of fat humans would eat naturally I bet that saturated fats are more common than.. that other types in vegetable oils. Mothers-milk, egg, meat and fish are all saturated as far as I remember..I think nuts are too? not sure..Who think we ate more meat and fish-fat than seed fat before we knew how to extract oils from seeds? There's reports and experiments saying both types are the good and the other type is the bad etc, but I doubt that they're not controled by outer factors like the industry.. we probably need all types of fat..)

Anyway.. where were I? The meat itself would still be a good source of nutrition and protein. And I imagine - if we were in a survival situation - we would eat the fat on the inside of the rabbit, which I think most people feed to dogs or garbage cans now (like I noticed MSD also suggested while I was writing this ). There might not be a whole lot, but there's some.

In any case.. I'd rather have rabbits and a bottle of veggie-oil to eat, than just the oil..

Just as a side note since we talk fat and protein..
People eating the LCHF (low carb high fat) diet don't eat carbs but are rarely very hungry. The hunger carbs fill, is the one from a drooping blood sugar.. if you don't eat carbs (for a few days) your bloodsugar will stay pretty even and the hunger you do feel will be filled with protein or fat. Most LCHF people I know only eat one big meal a day and they're good. Been on the diet too for some months and while I did feel great on it, lost weight and got an even, good mood, at some point my body just said ''stop now, this was good, but now you need more fresh fruit and roots again" so I converted completely to only eating fruits for a while... :lol:

Uh.. yeah, I'm bad with food. I need to go back to a lchf detox I think, not because of fruits and veggies but because I've eaten too much candy and regular sugar.. why do I never learn? *lol* If I'd kept it balanced between meat, fat and veggies + the occasional fruit, avoiding bad carbs (= processed carbs like sugar, white rice (bread, grain etc) or to some extent potatoes because they really mess with my blood sugar) I'd be slim, healthy and happy.. but I keep falling in the sugar trap. :lol:

 

[Dood]

It only pertains to a survival situation. Rabbits do not store fat in muscle and wild rabbits have almost no fat packets in their abdomen or around organs, domestic rabbits do, BUT if you trim it off, which is very easy to do, you could starve it the meat was all you ate. I feed rabbit to my dogs and purposely fatten them up, I can get over 1/2 a cup of fat in a 5 pound rabbit, as well as add fish oil and coconut oil to their meals to ensure they get enough lipids. If I fed trimmed store bought rabbit they would need even more fat added to their meals.

 

[akane]

The way I see it is if you are choosing to eat nothing but rabbit as opposed to a balanced diet... you're dumb.

The problem first came about with trappers in winter. There is no vegetation in some areas in winter and some thought they could just live on the rabbits they were catching for furs. Men would come back with tales of their partners dying from such a diet or no one would come back at all. In a survival situation you may not have any vegetables to make a balanced diet. Way up north the natural diet is all meat but it's very high fat meat with some variety and the people are some of the healthiest in the world.

 

[Miss M]

It is very true that modern dietary science is deeply flawed. I think that the diet many ate on family farms way back was probably rather good. Meats, eggs, dairy, vegetables, breads, saturated fats, mostly low sugar.

They said butter was bad, so we started toying with vegetable oil molecules to make margarine. Oh -- margarine's not good for you. Maybe butter's not so bad.

Eggs are bad for you! Oh, no -- just the yolks are bad! Wait, no, eggs are okay, just don't eat very many!

I don't believe anything they say. They haven't earned my trust. I don't believe the whole cholesterol thing either. It keeps changing. There's a surgeon who did thousands of heart surgeries who says he never saw a correlation between high cholesterol and clogged arteries. The one thing he saw every time was inflammation. There is so much they don't know, but they act like they know.

I've read about a man who ate nothing but eggs, and was in perfect health, and people in Alaska who have gone months on nothing but whale meat and blubber, and have been in perfect health.

There are some things we know, like there are very few foods that you can rely on for complete nutrition. Rabbit is not one of them, as it is very lean. We do know that if you eat a nice variety of foods, you will probably get the nutrients you need.

It is good to store up foods that contain not only the protein you will need in lean times, but the fats as well, and some carbs. Ditching rabbit as a survival food just because it isn't a single source of every nutrient we need is foolish.

 

[Mary Ann's Rabbitry]

I am either going to change the ratio or feed less grain and more hay.

stop giving oats in grain form.. that is what doing the fat in the rabbits. I stopped giving oats and the fat slowed right down. give more hay and less everything else is the key...I had the same problem... I had rabbits when i process them ,that had way to much fat... It was the oats that was doing it... Not the oatmeal.

 

[akane]

Oats are the highest fat grain often up around 7% while rabbit pellets are only 3-4%.

 

[Frosted Rabbits]

BAck during "The Great Depression" people were raising and using rabbits as their sole source of protein-- and yes, there were health issues associated with their diets-- but I feel, that the diets of the people,. overall, were lacking in other areas, as well. BigBrother kept throwing this 'rabbit starvation' in my face--- But with an abundance of wildlife around-- a person need not have just rabbit. It was the city folks during the depression that were suffering, not the farmers and the hunters who had other sources of animal fat.

Cholesterol is a vital nutrient-- it is incorporated into every single cell wall in our bodies--

Now , me, I have a Vitamin B, and D deficiency-- Anemia caused by the lack of B, etc-- and not because of my diet, but because of how my body absorbs nutrients-- And a bit of fat defieiency would not hurt me, either--