I watched short bits and pieces of different episodes this weekend, too. One thing that I was personally interested in were people's comments about how they felt. Most felt really crappy, beyond just hungry, due to lack of food.

I guess it's just on my mind because of those series of apparently shill posts recently about a certain product (Izzy's joke still rings in my ears, "IT'S PEOPLE! Lxxx xxxS ARE PEOPLE!"). I don't know if anyone else noticed, but putting aside the apparent product endorsement, the posts did also raise the issue of survival diets, which I have been thinking about recently anyway. The typical diet is high in refined carbs, including simple sugars, and most of us are accustomed to regular meals. Suddenly being put in a situation with little food, and pretty much no refined carbohydrates, can require a big adjustment. Until your body adjusts, you are going to feel awful or at least uncomfortable. Extreme fatigue, headaches, dizziness, are all things that the cast members were complaining about on the show. I didn't see the part where the guy faints, as Ken mentioned, but it's not surprising.

I personally have never seriously tried any of these diet plans, especially the hard core ones, so I'm not speaking from personal experience, but I was thinking as I watched these people on TV that in a survival situation, someone who is already on what could generically be referred to as a "ketogenic" diet might have a distinct advantage by being able to function at a higher level, particuarly in the early days of being stranded somewhere with little to no food. Ketogenic diets are diets that encourage a metabolic state that produces and primarily uses compounds called ketones rather than sugar (i.e. glucose) and this state is achieved by restricting your intake of carbohydrates or just food in general.

Ketosis is the state that your body naturally shifts towards when starving or fasting so it is a natural reaction to lack of food or diets mostly devoid of carbs. More hard core ketogenic diets include Atkins or Protein Power, while more moderate version would be South Beach. In addition, people who regularly fast, whether for health or spiritual reasons, would likely also be more accustomed to a lack of food in some survival situation and might function better if suddenly thrown into a survival situation with little to no food, or forced to rely on a survival diet skewed towards eating only game meat. You can feel pretty crappy when transitioning from a high carb diet to a state of ketosis, although some people make the switch more easily than others. But in the meantime, doing things like hiking 8 miles with a 50 pound load like on the show while going through this metabolic transition is going to be really rough on most people.

This will make benjammin happy, but this ketosis topic is why a survival food like Pemmican makes sense. If getting gobs of carbs, or even enough total calories, are going to be a problem, which is likely out in the wild, then your body is going to shift to a ketogenic state anyway, which can be an uncomfortable transition if you're not used to it. It can take weeks for some to fully make the transition and feel good again. But once in that state, you can do quite well on a high protein and fat food like Pemmican. Shorter term, even just the protein part could be sufficient for our bodies, I think, because our bodies can use the ample fat stores that most of us carry around. Longer term, though, getting sufficient calories from food becomes an issue if our love handles are no longer so full of loving anymore. That's when other topics like "rabbit starvation" start to become an issue.

It's a good idea to test out your survival/emergency food just so you know how you'll react. Can you personally function on just 1,600 calories of day from those 3-day lifeboat rations like Mainstay bars? Can you tolerate eating MRE's as your sole food source for days? Do you end up with diarrhea or constipation when eating your emergency supplies? It probably makes sense to encourage average people to store foods similar to what they are already accustomed to eating. Fewer surprises that way. An emergency is not the time to discover that your emergency food supply really does not agree with your gut or body or that you feel really, really awful if you're not eating your normal foods or eating as often as you're used to.

And, for the record, I'm not necessarily advocating ketogenic diets as a healthy everyday diet. No one really knows if they're healthy over the long term, like over decades, especially in our later years. I'm just saying that if I were going to be on this TV show, I think I might go on the Atkins diet diet in the weeks leading up to the show so I can look goooood on TV without fainting.