Nutrition by-the-numbers

Three economists with twelve Ivy-League University degrees between them went hunting Cape Buffalo in Botswana one fine day. An enormous bull charged the group.

Two of the economists raised their .460 Weatherby Magnums and fired, one missing to the right of the animal and the other missing to the left.

"Cheers, gentlemen! We got him" crowed the third economist seconds before the bull gored the thee of them to a frothy, pink paste.

Many useful statistical concepts die an ugly death on the shoals of multi-modal processes.

One of those multi-modal processes involves the caloric requirements of human adults.

Source

 In 2015, a 5th% US woman weighed about 110 pounds. A 95th% man weighed about 285 pounds or about 2.6 times more than the 5th% woman. The amount of energy required for "maintenance" is closely related to body-weight.

Source

Along another axis, a sedentary woman of sixty might walk 800 steps in a typical day while an active man of the same age might walk 15,000 steps.

In one study of Amish farmers in Ontario, a male was recorded having 51,514 steps in one day (the equivalent of 26 miles of walking). When the researchers asked him what he had done on that day he told them he had been plowing behind his horses.

Think about this for a second. He was guiding a plow through damp ground and redirecting it after it hits clods, clumps of grass or rocks. He was walking on soft, slippery, ground while wearing clod-hoppers, ground that had no "spring" to it so his foot sank into it with each step. And he walked 26 freaking miles in a day.

Or think of it this way, a 16" wide furrow must be 262 miles long for it to cover 40 acres. If the farmer plows that field with a single-bottom, walk-behind, 16" plow over 10 days, that means he AVERAGED 26 miles per day.

Boats on canals were typically drawn by horses or mules before IC motors were common. Horses would not fit in the tunnels. The boats were propelled through those tunnels via human power. It was called "Legging it". It was not a glamorous job. Hat-tip to Lucas Machias for the photo.

If you look at older Industrial Engineering data (1930 vintage) they had a job classification called "Shunters". A "Shunter" was a human fork-truck. He manually moved material from storage areas to the production area and back, typically in steel-wheeled carts over wooden-block floors. His Calorie-burn was 500 Calories per hour. Men shoveling coal or working as lumberjacks have similar energy demands.

Now compare that to the idealized-to-the-point-of-useless number of 2000 Calories per day that we often see.

Two-thousand Calories a day is sufficient to keep MOST people from dying in a concentration camp from lack of calories as long as they spend 95% of their waking hours sitting motionlessly...about like most office workers.

That 2000 Calories includes roughly 65 grams of fat (about 2.5 ounces or two McDonald McDoubles and a large fries), the same amount of protein and about 300 grams of carbs. This is perfectly appropriate for a 150 pound woman who parks 50 yards away from her desk or works from home and who stares at a computer all day and vacuums the floors of her apartment once-a-week.

4500 Calories a day looks entirely different. The major difference is that the 30% calories from fat gets thrown out the window. It really needs to be 40% or more calories from fat or you just cannot get enough food down-the-hatch.

He needs at least 200 grams of fat, 140 grams of protein and 550 grams of carbs.

In English units, that is almost a half-pound of fats/oils and over a pound of carbs.

On a per-year basis, that is 160 pounds of fat/oils. That is 22 gallons of melted lard.

Carbs

Larry Dean Olsen, dean of low-tech survival techniques in American is credited with saying that it is impossible for modern men to survive in the wilderness without some animal-based foods.

Humans have "plastic" bodies. We adapt to the stresses of our environment. We are MUCH more plastic when we are younger and much LESS plastic after we hit adulthood.

That is why somebody who spends their childhood at high elevation has more efficient lungs and vascular system.

Cavemen probably had enormous "beer bellies" because they were eating huge volumes of foods with low calorie densities. Foods like ground-up Acer negundo and Rumex and Polygonum and Setaria seeds are almost 50% fiber and they were as good-as-it-got for vegetable based foods except for some nuts and acorns.

Modern humans who grew-up consuming Hot Pockets, Tombstone pizzas and McD value meals do not have the volumetric capacity in their digestive systems to survive on prehistoric uber-high-fiber, very-low-fat diets. An analogy would be to compare a high-output motorcycle engine's displacement (small) to a steam-engine's (enormous). Apples and orangutans.

It is questionable if modern humans can consume 4500 Calories a day of pure carbs. That is three-and-a-half pounds of tortilla wraps (with no filling) or more than two, 24 ounce loaves of white-bread or ten pounds of potatoes.

You can make it as complicated as you want. Or as simple.

The bottom line is that if you are going to ask modern men to  burn 4500 Calories a day (on average) then you better find a way to supply them with 200-to-300 grams of fat per day.

Dairy/butter

Data from New Zealand where seasonal, pasture-based dairy is practiced.

In an austere environment, dairy is seasonal. In Michigan it can start in late-April as the grass just starts to grow and "dried off" in November. The cow will coast along on low-quality forage/hay and still pick-up body-weight until it drops her calf and when she will need large volumes of high-quality food again. That means there will be a gap in fat production from late-Fall until mid-Spring.

When she IS producing milk, even a mediocre dairy-cow (or even a beef/dairy cross) has the ability to produce 50 pounds of butter-fat per month. In the Copperhead Cove story, Sarah had a 1/3 share in the cow which was fine when it was just her, Lliam and Mary. Adding Blain to the dining-room table threw it out of balance especially since the cow was nearing the end of her lactation-cycle.

Wild sources of fats

Very few wild animals are high in fat. In late-Fall, the exceptions might include raccoons, waterfowl, salmon and carp. Domestic animals can include slaughter cattle, cull-sheep, hogs and geese.

Nuts like walnuts, hickory, hazelnuts, (and further south) pecans are high in fats.

Oil producing seeds like soybeans, canola and sunflowers (and others) merit discussion. Objections about the health consequences of those kinds of oils are dwarfed by the impact of not-enough-calories-to-maintain-98.6F-body-temperature.