Artric Diet: Fish Washed Down With Water
	This was a rich research plum for a young scientist to chew on, but after a few days Stefansson began to fear that he might not live long enough to take advantage of it. His charming, cheerful, and hospitable hosts lived entirely on a diet of fish, washed down with water in which the gobbets of fish were briefly stewed. Stefansson's twentieth-century stomach rebelled at this primitive fare. He tried to improve it by broiling the fish, but this swiftly resulted in weakness, dizziness, and symptoms of malnutrition, and he deduced that on this highly restricted diet the body had to have not only the protein in the fish but the fat and other nutrient materials that were leached out into the water. Thus presented with a life-and-death reason for forcing down both fish and broth, Stefansson tried harder. Eventually he adjusted both physically and psychologically, and at the end of his time with the Eskimos, he had managed as well as any of them. In addition he felt fine and seemed in excellent condition. He had also become exceedingly interested in the possibility that a diet high in proteins and fats and low in carbohydrates might serve all men better than the civilized diet of the world from which he had come. 'Balanced' meals in which relatively small amounts of meat or other protein were garlanded with rice, potatoes, or other starches, accompanied by bread and high-carbohydrate vegetables, followed by sweet desserts and sugared coffee . . . were these perhaps balanced in the wrong direction? Like Banting, Stefansson began to hammer at the fortress of established nutritional thinking. He had about the same success. As the years went by his stature as anthropologist-explorer became enormous and unassailable, but his ideas about nutrition were simply bypassed. Some time after his first experience with the Eskimo diet, Stefansson and a companion were sent to the Arctic by the American Museuro of Natural History for a year of research. They were handsomely equipped with every necessity, including full stores for the year of 'civilized' food. But Stefansson and his companion, Dr. Anderson, elected to live in a fashion indigenous to the land they were studying. This meant a 'hunter's diet'-the fish they could catch, the meat they could kill, the water they could find-a way of life by which men had nourished themselves in the ages before they learned to plant and reap. The one-year project stretched into four, during which the two young men ranged over the Canadian Arctic, living entirely on their primitive diet. They found that when any component of it became scarce-as during one period when they had difficulty obtaining seal oil and had to eat lean caribou meat without additional fat -they became ill. As soon as the oil was restored, they recovered. As in Stefansson's earlier experience, he suffered no ill effects whatsoever, nor did Anderson, on what most nutritionists and certainly the ordinary civiIized man would have considered a deprivation diet. Next: Healthy On A 'Deprivation Diet'