"One morning at breakfast, the autumn of 1955, my explorer-anthropologist husband, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, asked me if he might return to the Stone Age Eskimo sort of all-meat diet he had thrived on during the most active part of his arctic work. Two years before, he had suffered a mild cerebral thrombosis, from which he had practically recovered. But he had not yet succeeded in losing the ten pounds of overweight his doctor wanted him to be rid of. By will power and near starvation, he had now and then lost a few of them; but the pounds always cme back when his will power broke down. Doubtless partly through these failures, Stef had grown a bit unhappy, at times grouchy."
"My first reaction to his Stone Age diet proposal was dismay. I have three jobs. ..." (She didn't want to prepare two menus.)
"But aloud I said: "Of course, dear." And we began to plan. To my astonished delight, contrary to all my previous thinking, the Stone Age diet not only proved effective in getting rid of Stef's overweight, but was also cheaper, and easier to prepare than our regular mixed diet had been. Far from requiring more time, it took less. Instead of adding housekeeping burdens, it relieved me of them. Almost imperceptibly Stef's diet became my diet. Time was saved in not shopping for, not preparing, not cooking, and not washing up after unrequired dishes, among them vegetables, salads, and desserts."
"Some of our friends say: "We would go on a meat diet, but we couldn't possibly afford it." That started me investigating the actual cost of the diet. Unlike salads and desserts, which often do not keep, meat is as good several days later as the day it was cooked. There is no waste. I found our food bills were lower than they had been. But I attribute this to our fondness for utton. Fortunately for us it is an unfashionable mat, which means it is cheap. We both like itk, and thanks to our deep freeze, we buy fat old sheep at anything from twenty-two to thirty-three cents a pound and proceed to live on the fat of the land. We also buy beef, and wonderful beef marrow. European cooks appreciate marrow, but most people in our country have never even tasted it, poor things.
When you eat as a primitive Eskimo does, you live on lean and fat meats. A typical Stefansson dinner is a rare or medium sirloin steak and coffee. The coffee is freshly ground. If there is enough fat on the steak we take our coffee black, otherwise heavy cream is added. Sometimes we have a bottle of wine. We have no bread, no starchy vegetables, no desserts. Rather often we eat half a grapefruit. We eat eggs for breakfast, two for Stef, one for me, with lots of butter.
Startling improvements in health came to Stef after several weeks on the new diet. He began to lose his overweight almost at once, and lost steadily, eating as much as he pleased and feeling satisfied the while. He lost seventeen pounds; then his weight remained stationary although the amount he ate was the same. From being slightly irritable and depressed, he became once more his old ebullient, optimistic self. By eating mutton he became a lamb.
An unlooked-for and remarkable change was the disappearance of his arthritis, which had troubled him for years and which he thought of as a natural result of aging. One of his knees was so stiff he walked up and down stairs a step at a time, and he always sat on the aisle in a theater so he could extend his stiff leg comfortably. Several times a night he would be awakened by pain in his hip and shoulder when he lay too long on one side; then he had to turn over and lie on the other side. Without noticing the change at first, Stef was one day startled to find himself walking up and down starirs using both legs equally. He stopped in the middle of our stairs; then walked down again and up again. He could not remember which knee had been stiff!
Conclusion: The Stone Ate all-meat diet is wholesome. It is an eat-all-you-want reducing diet that permits you to forget you are dieting - no hunger pains remind you. It saves time and money. Best of all, it improves the temperatment. It somehow makes one feel opitimistic, mildly euphoric.
Epilogue: Stef used to love his role of being a thorn in the flesh of nutritionists. But in 1957 an article appeared in the august journal of the American Medical Association confirming what Stef had known for years from his anthropology and his own experience. The author of this book has also popularized Stef's diet in England, with the blessing of staid British medical folk.
Was it with the faintest trace of disappointment in his voice that Stef turned to me, after a strenuous nutrition discussion, and said: "I have always been right. But now I am becoming orthodox! I shall have to find myself a new heresy."
.....Evelyn Stefansson April 22, 1959"
Chapter 47 of Discovery by Vilghalmur Stefansson:
"At the age of seventy-six, I entered the third Stone Age era of my life as far as diet was concerned. I am still in it as I approach my eighty-third year. Somewhere around my sixty-fifth birthday I began to notice a stiffening in my right knee. By the time I was seventy, the stiffness had begun to spread to other joints. Evidently the exclusively meat diet I had been on for twelve years between 1906 and 1918 and for a year around 1930 had not saved me from the deleterious effects of the carbohydrates I had eaten since 1931. I had been loudly proclaiming the bad effects of "sugar and spice and everything nice," but I had been somewhat lax in practice. I had been so healthy from the time I recovered from typhoid in 1918 that I paid no attention to nutritional rules, including my own, until I had a warning paralytic stroke in 1952."
He went on:
"Ralph, more a neurologist than nutritionist, pooh-poohed my idea that I ought to cut out carbohydrates in order to lose weight, and directed me to count my calories, as well as my blessings, in that the stroke had not been more serious. I cut down on eating and felt headachy and out of sorts, but I did lose weight until I was below 180. Then my will power broke down, and I began a seesaw of gains and losses...."
"One day we were listening to radio bulletins from Denver about President Eisenhower's heart attack. We were espeially interested in those which expressed the opinions of my friend Paul Dudley White, of the Harvard Medical Shcool. Every now and then someone other than Dr. White would remark that the President was another victim of the deplorable modern habit of eating too much fat. Most to be avoided, the radio voices said, were animal fats, and especially the hard ones such as mutton. In spite of my sympathy for the President, I began to feel annoyed with this railing against fat mutton, my favorite of all domestic meats. Having lived my healthiest year on a diet that gave me 80 per cent of my calories from animal fats, I became the more restive the more the radio harped on this theme.
My annoyace finally spilled over, and as usual my wife suffered from the spilling. I reminded her that we had a freezer that was only half full, that she knew my favorite food was fat mutton, and that she had often said that in our market this was the cheapest meat. If she herself ate whatever she liked, would she mind if I lived for a few weeks as Charlie Andersen and I had in 1930, wholly on meat and chiefly on mutton? For one thing, I would then have no trouble, on this diet, losing the excess wight that continued to worry Dr. Hunter. I had not thus far succeeded in losing permanently more than five of my 18p4 pounds. With real or well-simulated cheer, Evelyn agreed.
I loved the fat mutton. As the English do, I like it boiled. We were alone on the farm just then and sometimes I did my own cooking. When I did, I cooked mutton the way I like it best. I boiled it the way the Eskimos boil caribou or moutain sheep, putting the cold fresh meat into cold water, bringing it to a slow boil, and then setting the pot aside to cool. Then as Charlie Andersen and I used to do during our Bellevue year, I would skim the fat off and drink the broth.
As I have mentioned several times I do not think it fattening to take in added calories if they consist of fat meat, provided that you do your best to avoid carbohydrates and too much lean meat. As far as I know, the slimming effect of eating fat meat was first explained by an accredited physician in print through a "Blue Book" the British Admiralty's account of the first wintering of Europeans on the north coast of Alaska. The author was naval surgeon John Simpson and the publication was an installment of the British government's account of the search for Sir John Franklin. That account I quote and paraphrase in my 1946 Not by Bread Alone. When I republished this slightly augmented, in 1956 as The Fat of the Land, I received a flattering letter from Dr. Richard Mackaress, a writer on nutrition for British publications who later wrote a book called Eat Fat and Grow Slim. When an American edition was published later, my wife wrote an introduction to it. The magazine Coronet liked this piece so well that they asked her for a slight rewriting, which would adapt it to their audience. ..."
