Rose Rimler

And they were saying, like, you can't do that.

You're going to have some kind of nutritional deficit or something terrible will happen to you.

And so he and this other guy, they offered to be guinea pigs.

So in the late 1920s, while they were in New York City, they started eating an all-meat diet.

It was a lot like what you see people on TikTok showing us that they're eating.

It was literally just meat, fish, chicken.

And at first, it didn't actually go so well.

And that was because the researchers wanted to know what would happen if these guys ate only very lean meat, so very little fat.

And one of them, Stephenson, he agreed to do that.

And when he ate that diet, he developed a lot of diarrhea.

Yeah, I was reading about this.

He felt awful.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Well, it's interesting because Stefansson actually knew in advance.

He was pretty sure this was going to happen to him.

He told the researchers about it, but he was like, all right, I'll try it anyway.

Because he knew about something that's sometimes called rabbit starvation.

It's also called protein poisoning.

And that's basically when your diet is made up primarily of lean meat, like rabbit, you can actually get really sick.

And we think that's because when someone is eating mostly protein, their body may not be able to convert that much protein into urine fast enough.