From: "Steve Harris" <sbharris@ix.RETICULATEDOBJECTcom.com>
Newsgroups: sci.med.nutrition
Subject: Re: Trekking Diet - Comments Invited
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 11:51:11 -0800
Message-ID: <a5gott$1g2$1@slb0.atl.mindspring.net>

Paul Rogers wrote in message
<9Dce8.7587$RV3.25928@news-server.bigpond.net.au>...
>"CWLee" <cdubyalee@post.harvard.edu> wrote in message
>news:a5b8d8$2gqbg$1@hades.csu.net...
>> From time to time I spend a few weeks traveling alone in the jungle or
>> forest, with a minimal pack.  For food and drink I use my "trekking
>> diet", described below, and I wonder if any of the professional
>> nutritionists here would comment on it for me.  It has served me well,
>> but I do welcome constructive criticism.
>> 
>> The diet has 3 elements:  (1) I take a cheap, generic, multi-vitamin
>> pill every day.  (2) I eat only roasted and salted cashew nuts.  (3) I
>> drink only Gatorade, which I prepare from powder and water found along
>> the way and first processed through my small water purification pump.
>> 
>> I'm an adult, white, male and in good health, slender build.
>> 
>> What are the short-term, long-term, and possibly permanent
>> disadvantages of that diet for, let's say, 10-day, 20-day, and 30-day
>> trips?
>
>The most popular food for this sort of activity in Australia is what we
>call scroggin or trail mix. This is a mix of seeds, nuts and dried fruit.
>What you are eating at the moment is probably okay though.


If you're going to make an all purpose heavy duty trail mix, you may as well
vary it a bit. Use some other nuts as well (not just cashews-- splurge and
get a fancy mix), and also use a variety of dried fruit. And yes, with a
good vitamin you can live on this safely for a long time indeed. Note
however that despite the Gatorade, potassium is likely to be low in a mix
without dried fruit, so don't run out of Gatorade powder, and use if very
freely, if you're going to do this. Not only does it supply your potassium,
but also because the sugar in it supplies the bit of carbohydrate (which
otherwise you'll need from the dried fruit) which makes high fat/protein
diets (e.g. nuts) much more efficient. If you have to make the sugar for
your brain out of the protein in the nuts, you're wasting a lot of it.  The
old time Arctic explorers having to live on a very high fat diet (eg fish,
blubber, etc) reported that just a few crackers a day maked a noticeable
difference in how they felt. That was doubtless the carbo content.

SBH

From: "Steve Harris" <sbharris@ix.RETICULATEDOBJECTcom.com>
Newsgroups: sci.med.nutrition
Subject: Re: Trekking Diet - Comments Invited
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 16:04:52 -0800
Message-ID: <a5h7tr$eg0$1@slb5.atl.mindspring.net>

Bruce Bowen wrote in message ...

>  Here's what not to do.  One hot summer day I went on a 15 hour round
>trip hike to the top of Half Dome from the Yosemite Valley floor.  I
>had on a "Camel Back" water pack lightly spiked with some "oral
>rehydration formula" (glucose, salt, potasium chloride), packs of
>trail mix, and bags of dried fruit.  The bags of dried fruit turned
>out to be my undoing!!!  Picture being on the top of Half Dome, a flat
>100 acre granite table top, with hundreds of people around, and not a
>PRIVY IN SITE!!!!!   NOT A PRETTY SITUATION!!!!  I had a very focussed
>descent  'till I could get to the forest to find a tree!


I've seen that happen more with "rehydration solutions", if you must know.
Fruit generally takes longer to act-- even prunes. Osmotic diarrhea,
however, is pretty fast.

From: "Steve Harris" <sbharris@ix.RETICULATEDOBJECTcom.com>
Newsgroups: sci.med.nutrition
Subject: Re: Trekking Diet - Comments Invited
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 12:51:04 -0800
Message-ID: <a5jh4b$7b9$1@slb3.atl.mindspring.net>

Alex wrote in message <4f17fab7.0202270738.5a4b6b46@posting.google.com>...
>"Steve Harris" <sbharris@ix.RETICULATEDOBJECTcom.com> wrote
>
>> Use some other nuts as well (not just cashews-- splurge and get a fancy
>> mix),
>
>Even then, he should still take *salted* nuts, shouldn't he?
>Particularly if it's hot in the jungle.  Because the sodium in
>Gatorade would not be enough for replenishing the amount lost in
>sweat.


Absolutely. Salted nuts and high potassium/magnesium dried fruits are a
suspenders&belt approach to the electrolyte problem. Don't rely on Gatorade
alone.

Other classic solutions to this problem historically have been "pemmican,"
which has various recipies, but which was most often something like dry,
salted jerky (a lot of protein, with too little water to decay), which is
protected from water by a layer of fat (beef tallow), which also supplies
calories, along with some dry berries for carbos and plant minerals. Nuts
are probably a better answer to the protein/fat/sodium problem than jerky.

Travelers also used something called "rockihomminey" which was essentially
dried corn (hominy) with some molasses or brown rock-sugar. This would have
been a bit short of protein, but with some jerky or lean game supplement,
could also serve to let people travel a long time, on a small food weight.

From: Steve Harris <sbharris@ix.netcom.com>
Newsgroups: misc.kids.health,sci.med,misc.health.alternative,misc.kids,
	uk.people.health
Subject: Re: Rumsfeld To Profit From Avian Flu Hoax
Date: 23 Oct 2005 16:39:16 -0700
Message-ID: <1130110756.738922.142960@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>

David Wright wrote:
> >Even if you grant that vaccination and / or some toxic agent took this huge
> >chunk out of the earth's population, the believers in that have to explain
> >why the deaths suddenly stopped.  So far, even whale.to doesn't seem to have
> >an explanation for this.
>
> Exactly.  It's not as though they suddenly stopped giving vaccinations
> in 1919 or 1920.  So much of this anti-medical stuff is so insane that
> you wonder how anyone could believe it.  We can get into some
> perfectly reasonable debates about whether a given drug or medical
> treatment is better or worse than the disease, but the really looney
> stuff just overwhelms the senses.


COMMENT:

Which is why it's well worth coming to the web to see certain kinds of
insane people in action. You just wouldn't believe it, if you hadn't
seen it. You really had to be a shrink in former times to get this kind
of exposure to the kind of nuttiness that shows up in a paranoid of
otherwise normal intelligence.

Personally, I've begun to give a certain amount of credence to Dr.
Szasz' idea that much of what we think of as "mental illness" has
nothing really to distinguish it from conduct disorder or other
ordinary psychopathologies we put people in jail for. Except that it's
not violent.  What it is, is terminally dishonest. These people lie to
themselves and others, and they do know the difference between truth
and fiction. We know this, because they do manage their lives. They
drive cars and don't die. They manage their money and don't lose it
all. They operate computers, which is how they get to the web. Often
they are employed, and married. So their dishonesty in the kind of
craziness what they put forward here, is selective. And therefore, it's
very hard not to see it as volitional. And the matter of volition is
one of the test we use in law to decide to incarcerate people (vs.
institutionalizing them for only as long as they are under the
influence of whatever it is that has deranged them).

Yes, there are raving loons out there, who are completely out of
contact with ALL reality. They aren't employed, or married, and they
don't drive. They stand on street corners looking ragged and out of
touch, and statistically, they don't survive long. That kind of madness
doesn't appear to have a volitional component. Which is why it's easier
to be compassionate about it.

As for this other stuff, it looks like sheer bloody-mindedness to me.

SBH