Facultative Carnivore

"Storkerson set out for his postponed exploration of the northeast part of Victoria Island and on April 12, I and my companions--Noice, Lorne Knight, and Emiu--started north again. As we proceeded over the ice of Hazen Straight and along the east coast of Borden Island, I discovered that Noice and Knight had joined the ranks of those who considered it unneccessary to obey orders. In winter quarters they had eaten only canned groceries and avoided underdone meat, with the result that they now developed symtoms of scurvy. This disobedience fortunately did not kill them, but it cut short our trip beyond the limits of discovered territory. At something short of 82 Degrees North, on April 26, it became obvious that we must turn back. Ice conditions now, however were so bad that we could not return to Borden but had to head for Cape Isachsen instead.

On May 11 we reached the cape and set up what was named, appropriately enough, "Camp Hospital." Here we remained while I hunted caribou with gratifying success. The fresh meat soon had the two invalids on the mend. It was not many days before they were able to travel. We crossed Lougheed Island for the second time, finding plenty of food and available native coal.

An Eskimo mother doesn't wean her baby until her next pregnancy sets in, however long that might be. If she does not become pregnant again, she often nurses her lastborn for many years. It is considered a sign of a woman's youth and agility that she still has a child to nurse and milk to give, and only when she had finished her usefulness to her children is she really old. I thus saw several times, both among the Hudson Bay and the Polar Eskimos, and even in southern Greenland, mothers giving the breast to fourteen-year-old boys who were already sporting in kayaks and taking part in the hunt.

"It was now Fry's opinion that I had had typhoid fever. When my friends thought of what they had been letting me eat, they were shocked and alarmed. During the first period of high fever I had been without appetite, but as soon as the fever dropped to 100 degrees, I had begun to eat steaks and fried potatoes or whatever else the police were having for their meals. An hour before my sudden relapse, I had eaten a large meal of macaroni and cheese. There were some who believed that this heavy food was responsible. The relapse, they felt, served me right. What eles could have been expected of a sick man who ate macaroni and cheese!"

page 208

"My convalescence was not going well. When it was decided that I must have had typhoid, I was put on the orthodox typhoid diet. Nothing but tinned and Argentitian powdered milk was available. My belief was that if I was allowed to eat the hearty foods for which I hungered I would probably have a better chance of getting well, and I used to reason elaborately and, it seemed to me, convincingly that I should be allowed a chance at a square meal. Arguments that seemed lucid to me were, unfortunately, considered the cunning of delirium."

page 209

"My condition kept growing worse. Finally, everyone agreed that I was going to die. At that point Police Inspector Phillips took the position that, if I was going to die, I might as well die as I wanted: in an effort to get to Fort Yukon. This did not meet the views of some of the others. There was at Herschel Island a very respectable graveyard where whalers and other white men had been buried with supposedly civilized pomp and circumstance. I felt sure that, if I died, there would be a thoroughly orthodox funeral. However, I preferred to die elsewhere and, if possible, later."

"It was in the first week of April, 1918, that I left Herschel Island in a sled equipped with springs from an old cot. Constable Brockie, Henry Fry, my Indian teen-ager, and two Eskimos accompanied me.

Fry, now that we were away from the settlement, was less inclined to insist on the orthodox liquid diet for a typhoid convalescent. I was allowed to eat one of my favorite foods, frozen raw fish. This seemed to do me good, and my second day out from Herschel saw me free of fever. It seemed unnecessary for Fry to continue with us. He said that, since I apparently got along better the more my conduct differed from what his medical books said it ought to be, I might as well take the entire responsibility for doing as I liked. Having come to this conclusion, he returned to his mission at Herschel Island. 

From then on, my breakfasts and suppers consisted of caribou and fish, sometimes frozen and raw, sometimes cooked. I felt better each day and regained weight until finally, when we arrived at the mouth of the Old Crow River, at the trading post of Schultz and Johnson, I was no longer in real need of the expert care that I could get from Mrs. Schultz, who before her marriage had been a trained nurse at Fort Yukon. While I did not need the care, I shall never forget the kindness of Mrs. Schultz and her husband." 

Page 210

On April 27th, when we arrived at St. Stephen's Hospital, Fort Yukon, I was so far recovered that I walked without assistance from the gate to the house. A month before, when I had been about to leave Herschel, Inspector Philips had had to guide my hand as I made the penciled cross by which I agreed that if I died on the journey the responsibility would be my own. Thus, my polar expedition came to an end." page 211

In 1920, while Vilhjalmur Stefansson was just beginning his campaign to convince nutritionists that an all-meat diet was a uniquely healthy diet, it was already making the transition into a reducing diet courtesy of a New York internist named Blake Donaldson. Donaldson, as he wrote in his 1962 memoirs, began treating obese patients in 1919, when he worked with the cardiologist Robert Halsey, one of four founding officers of the American Heart Association. After a year of futility in trying to reduce these patients ("fat cardiacs," he called them) with semi-starvation diets, he spoke with the resident anthropologists at the American Museum of Natural History, who told him that prehistoric humans lived almost exclusively on "the fattest meat they could kill," perhaps supplemented by roots and berries. This led Donaldson to conclude that fatty meat should be "the essential part of any reducing routine," and this is what he began prescribing to his obese patients. Through the 1920s, Donaldson honed his diet by trial and error, eventually settling on a half-pound of fatty meat-three parts fat to one part lean by calories, the same proportion used in Stefansson's Bellevue experiment-for each of three meals a day. After cooking, this works out to six ounces of lean meat with two ounces of attached fat at each meal. Donaldson's diet prohibited all sugar, flour, alcohol, and starches, with the exception of a "hotel portion" once a day of raw fruit or a potato, which substituted for the roots and berries that primitive man might have been eating as well. Donaldson also prescribed a half-hour walk before breakfast.

Over the course of four decades, as Donaldson told it, he treated seventeen thousand patients for their weight problems. Most of them lost two to three pounds a week on his diet, without experiencing hunger. Donaldson claimed that the only patients who didn't lose weight on the diet were those who cheated, a common assumption that physicians also make about calorie-restricted diets. These patients had a "bread addiction," Donaldson wrote, in that they could no more tolerate living without their starches, flour, and sugar than could a smoker without cigarettes. As a result, he spent considerable effort trying to persuade his patients to break their habit. "Remember that grapefruit and all other raw fruit is starch. You can't have any," he would tell them. "No breadstuff means any kind of bread…. They must go out of your life, now and forever." (His advice to diabetics was equally frank: "You are out of your mind when you take insulin in order to eat Danish pastry.")

Had Donaldson published details of his diet and its efficacy through the 1920s and 1930s, as Frank Evans did about his very low-calorie diet, he might have convinced mainstream investigators at least to consider the possibility that it is the quality of the nutrients in a diet and not the quantity of calories that causes obesity. As it is, he discussed his approach only at in-house conferences at New York Hospital. Among those who heard of his treatment, however, was Alfred Pennington, a local internist who tried the diet himself in 1944-and then began prescribing it to his patients.

 After a preliminary year at Cape Prince of Wales northwestern Alaska, the Greists reached the state's northern tip, Barrow, in 1921, and remained in charge of Farthest North Hospital and the mission till 1936. After their retirement they lived at Monticello, Indiana, where Dr. Greist wrote Seventeen Years with the Eskimos. He died in 1955 and in 1957 Mrs. Greist lent me the manuscript of the unpublished book. The Indiana physician found Alaska's most northern Eskimos no longer uncivilized, and no longer healthy. But from conversations with Charles DeWitt Brower, who had lived at Barrow since 1885, and with a few elderly Eskimos, some of whom still remembered Maguire and Simpson (and many of whom remembered Ray and Murdoch) — from conversations with these, and from other sources, the Greists became convinced that there had formerly been a high average of health and longevity among the northern Eskimos. With Mrs. Greist's permission I quote from Chapter 24 of Dr. Greist's manuscript:

“For untold centuries ... the Eskimo of the far north had solely a carnivorous diet ... He was healthy ... He suffered from neither tuberculosis nor any venereal disease; and had rheumatism, if at all, in a limited degree. Barring accidents, starvation during lean years, and epidemics of unknown character, he lived to a very great age with his teeth intact, but worn to the gums since he used his teeth as a third hand ... When starches and sugars were introduced by the whalers and the traders he at once began the development of carious teeth, something he never had previously.”