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Comment by coward123 | Hacker News Reader

I still don't quite understand how their diet could have been this troublesome... frankly, when I backpack I have almost the opposite problem, as walking gets me going. I'm just an amateur woodsman, but when I'm in the woods I eat a variety of berries, greens, mushrooms, etc - one would think their native contacts and guides would have been a source for information if they didn't have this knowledge for themselves, IE: why was their diet quite so high in meat?

Separately - my understanding is that there were many native groups worldwide that ate a meat-heavy diet, so when we hear about native Alaskans (for example) eating an almost exclusive meat diet, why weren't they having those same issues? Maybe fish / whale / seal vs. bison and deer is the problem?

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> one would think their native contacts and guides would have been a source for information if they didn't have this knowledge for themselves, IE: why was their diet quite so high in meat?

They did eat plenty of local plants and likely would have starved without crops shared by local populations [1]. However, they were a large group with prodigious caloric requirements. The corps needed an epic amount of food -- roughly one buffalo worth of meat every 24 hours, likely in addition to foraging. (Buffalo, if you haven't seen any, are huge. Apparently the equivalent of 4 deer, or 9 lbs of meat per person.)

> Separately - my understanding is that there were many native groups worldwide that ate a meat-heavy diet, so when we hear about native Alaskans (for example) eating an almost exclusive meat diet, why weren't they having those same issues? Maybe fish / whale / seal vs. bison and deer is the problem?

Chronic dehydration likely caused by a combination of insufficient water intake, excessive exertion, and prolonged periods of high sodium diets (their emergency rations were, essentially, boullion and jerky).

In a healthy person, constipation is almost always ultimately an issue of under hydration. Fiber can help, because it pulls water in the digestive tract, but the best solution is staying well-hydrated. Hard to do when you're 30 men eating jerky and working so hard that the camp eats an entire buffalo each day.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/what-lewis-and-...

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