Reading about Amundsen's expedition, I've found out that the daily rations were: Men:
* Biscuits (40 biscuits): 380 g (13.4 ounces) * Men's pemmican: 350 g (12.34 ounces) * Chocolate: 40 g (1.4 ounces) * Milk powder: 60 g (2.1 ounces)
Dogs:
* Dogs' pemmican: 500 g (1.1 pounds)
They were on this diet for 99 days, while driving sledges through 1860 miles.
I wonder, how adecuate was this diet? Approximately, how many calories did they ingest daily? I cannont find info on the kind of biscuits and pemmican they ate, but I think that there are ways of guesstimate, aren't they? Also, the men did not get scurvy; where was the C vitamin, maybe in the pemmican?
If they boiled an animal down to make pemmican and it was a healthy animal this is probably decent food, but the powdered milk would be too rich in oxidized cholesterol, and the chocolate may have been made with it too. No way to know what was in the biscuit, aside from some sort of flour and probably a lot of sugar. Remember that if they were healthy to begin with, the body can deal with a lousy diet for a while, but it's not necessarily something you want to do for many years.
Remember that if they were healthy to begin with, the body can deal with a lousy diet for a while, but it's not necessarily something you want to do for many years.
Yeah! Monty is speaking from experience.
Monty started out sick. And, has followed a Pacific Coconut Oil vegetable free diet for many years. Now, he is just mentally deficient.
If they boiled an animal down to make pemmican and it was a healthy animal this is probably decent food,
Pemmican is basically buffalo or beef jerky (smoked and/or dried meat) pounded to a pulp and mixed with loads of added fat and some dried and pounded berries. All dependent on availability and season. No boiling involved.
This mixture, pretty much by itself, helped open up the entire Canadian Central, North and West regions by nourishing the Coureurs de Bois, the frenchmen who paddled large 10 or 12 person canoes up and down every river in central and western Canada to trade for furs. No scurvy was ever reported by these people who were on the road for much of the year when the rivers were not frozen.
I know that some early settlers boiled down an entire animal and cut the pieces up as a sort of "energy bar," but I don't remember the name they called this. I though it was what some called pemmican. The good thing about boiling the animal down is that the amino acid profile is not skewered, as it is for those who only eat muscle meats - you also don't oxidize the cholesterol and unsaturated fatty acids.
