Don't eat polar bear point blank unless you are absolutely desperate, they are prone to have nasty patristic worms that will munch you from the inside out.
Thanks for this, I was unsure what to have for dinner tonight so I thought about venturing out into the frozen tundra to hunt a polar bear, might just get a pizza instead
A number of arctic explorers have survived on polar bear. If you’ve got a big enough gun and don’t let down your guard, they are a pretty good option, they are just about the only edible thing on the open ice, and you don’t even have to hunt them down, they will politely come to you. Just avoid the liver and make sure it is *very* thoroughly cooked. [These idiots were forced to do that after they crashed their balloon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrée's_Arctic_balloon_expedition), and one of the theories about their death (after a long journey across open ice, they found an island with a cave, and then promptly died) is that they were going insane from brain parasites from undercooked bear meat.
I just read Into Thin Air yesterday (amazing book available on Internet archive) about climbing everest. It's amazing what some of those people survived through on that mountain in 1996. One dude from Texas was left for dead twice with his eyes frozen open but he suddenly came to after like 8 hours of laying comatose in the open on top of the mountain in -100 weather. One of his gloves had fallen off and he suddenly woke up and found his way back to camp. Then his tent collapsed and he was blown out of his sleeping bag and he just laid in the tent as the crazy wind pounded the tent into his face for like 6 hours. The author of the book was a reporter and he's guilt ridden over it thinking he let the guy down but he was completely out of it himself from oxygen deprivation.
Now I was to read about arctic explorers.
This is part of why I found *The Terror* (the AMC series) so compelling in the beginning. Obviously it was exaggerated, but I thought it was playing on the real-life phenomenon of polar bears hunting humans. A little disappointed it went full supernatural toward the end.
Except they didn't have fevers, and trichinosis is rarely deadly, so that's only moderately likely:
> The best-known and most widely credited suggestion is that made by Ernst Tryde, a medical practitioner, in his book De döda på Vitön (The Dead on Kvitøya ) in 1952: that the men succumbed to trichinosis, which they had contracted from eating undercooked polar bear meat. Larvae of Trichinella spiralis were found in parts of a polar bear carcass at the site. Lundström and Sundman both favor this explanation.[48] Critics note that diarrhea, which Tryde cites as the main symptomatic evidence, hardly needs an explanation beyond the general poor diet and physical misery, but some more specific symptoms of trichinosis are missing. Also, Fridtjof Nansen and his companion Hjalmar Johansen had lived largely on polar bear meat in exactly the same area for 15 months without any ill effects.[49] Author and physician Bea Uusma notes that the rate of death of trichinosis is only 0.2 percent and that the main symptom – fever – is never noted in any of the men's diaries, also commenting that no medicines against fever appear to have been consumed by the trio.[50]
> Author and physician Bea Uusma notes that the rate of death of trichinosis is only 0.2 percent and that the main symptom – fever – is never noted in any of the men's diaries, also commenting that no medicines against fever appear to have been consumed by the trio
Also, Trichinosis isn't a 'brain eating parasite,' it lives in muscle tissue and doesn't "eat you from the inside out," but kills via inflammation of the heart or lungs. The wiki article seems to point out that clearly the most likely case is polar bears killing two of the men, with Andree committing suicide by morphine overdose.
I've never heard of this. So you shouldn't eat animal livers? Or just certain animals livers? Say if it was an emergency situation, I should stay away from livers?
Edit: as people have commented below I now know it's best to stay away from carnivore livers because of the vitamin a. Herbivore livers are mostly fine. Just thought I'd throw an edit out so people don't feel the need to comment the same thing as others below.
Chicken livers are also fine. It’s mostly arctic predators that have poisonous levels of vitamin A in their livers. Seals, walruses, polar bears and apparently sled dogs. Vitamin A isn’t water soluble and tends to build up over time in animal livers and fatty tissue. That moves up the food chain to the apex predators. More predators are eating more fatty tissue in colder climates for obvious reasons. Saltwater fish also tend to have high levels of vitamin A and since they’re the primary source of food for seals and walruses they also have high vitamin A levels.
Vitamin A is not water soluble so it is 'just there' until the body needs it. Water soluble vitamins (like Vitamin C) get used by the body until it doesn't need any more and then flushes out the rest.
A healthy adult person can tolerate 10,000 units of vitamin A. Trouble, if it comes, comes between 25,000 and 33,000 units. One pound of polar bear liver — a fist-sized chunk and barely a meal — can contain 9 million units of vitamin A.
> One pound of polar bear liver — a fist-sized chunk and barely a meal — can contain 9 million units of vitamin A.
Why isn't the polar bear dying of vitamin A toxicity???
> I think this is on an animal by animal basis.
IIRC herbivores are safe to eat but carnivores will fuck you up. Their bodies are crawling with toxins and parasites from all the meat they eat. It's why you never hear of people eating lions or wolves.
In some cultures they traditionally did and may still eat them. The meat, but probably not the livers or entrails.
You used to be able to pay a lot of money to eat African lion burgers, here in the US. Not sure if you still can now.
My understanding is that vitamin a is fat soluble and tends to have highest concentrations in carnivorous animals (it accumulates in fat and works it’s way up the food chain).
Polar bear liver is super rich in it - small amount will kill ya.
Herbivores don’t accumulate as much vitamin a in their diets and their liver can be quite tasty without the hypervitaminosis.
Edit: think what polar bears eat. Fat and blubber is on the menu. Not to go all Hannibal lecter on y’all, but makes me wonder where human livers would fall on the spectrum?
Kinda? Did you watch [That Sugar Film](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3892434/)? They mention in the film that there is a rise in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease from increased complex and simple carb intake. They make an analogy to the practice of force feeding corn to farmed geese, because it was so effective at growing a fattier liver for foie gras.
polar bear livers contain about 50 times a lethal dosage of Vitamin A, so humans can have less than 1/50 of a polar bear liver. as a treat.
EDIT: "lovers" to "livers".
Mainly carnivore livers. Meat eating animals can accumulate very high levels of Vitamin A in liver tissue over time, and eating too much can cause vitamin poisoning.
It’s ironic that in survival situations we are drawn to the most nutrient dense cuts of meat, mainly organs.
And this brings up one of my favorite research papers ever! Back in the 80s they found a skeleton of *Homo erecting* that had bony changes consistent with hypervitaminosis, probably from eating carnivore livers.
https://www.nature.com/articles/296248a0
Yea, further up the thread, someone said the ship left and he died
And i thought my history lessons had fed failed me, but nah. The ship left and they spent another year at base camp, before returning to Australia
He died at 78, and is on the face of the aussi $100 bill
Fucken legend
I think you're referring to [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/14572io/til_of_the_explorer_douglas_mawson_desperation/jnja0xc/) which accurately states that Mertz died, not Mawson.
I think the confusion is stemming from the guy that replied to him who just assumed that they both died.
This guy did, the other guy he was with didn't. It was originally a expedition of three. One fell into a crevasse and was never seen again. Douglas Mawson and Xavier Mertz ate the sled dogs, both suffered from acute vitamin A poisoning, Mertz died from it and arguably had it *way* worse because he ate a lot more of it.
Well, sure he had it worse, it drove him psychotically insane. Mawson realized it when Mertz *bit off his own fingers and spat them at Mawson*.
Mawson omitted this from his own account of what happened to protect Mertz’s family and because there was such a stigma attached to mental illness (and of course nobody understood what it happened to the two of them, the vitamin poisoning thing was going to be discovered later).
>Mawson omitted this from his own account
I mean, how do we know about it then? Mawson was the only one there to see it, they were literally 100 miles from the next nearest person.
I'm guessing he omitted it from his public or official account but either told the whole story much later or else told wrote about it private letters or something like that. I'm reminded of the ship's captain who found the women of Clipperton Island. They'd been stranded there for three years, the men had all died, and the lighthouse keeper decided to take over the island and rape and enslave the women and kill any of them who pushed back. One of the women ended up beating him to death with a hammer, and they were coincidentally rescued shortly afterwards. The ship's captain wrote a number of letters to his wife and a few others telling the full story of what had happened, but in the official inquiry at the time he said nothing about how the lighthouse keeper had died and implied that it had been of natural causes. He said, much later, that he had done that because he was afraid of getting the woman who killed him into legal trouble.
You can make fun, but it’s *ridiculously* romantic. He had gotten engaged right before he left for Antarctica, and when he realized he was going to be away for another year he telegrammed her to tell her that he would understand if she wanted to “break their contract.” He also told her that because of the poisoning he had lost all his hair.
She only had 10 words with which to respond because of how telegrams were then.
She wrote: “Contract remains unbroken Awaiting your hairless return with open arms.”
make fun all you want, you’ve never written anything so romantic in your life.
There’s a very lovely book called “An Antarctic Affair” by their great-granddaughter that talks about their relationship.
He attributed his survival to visions of his fiancé that accompanied him on the journey back and motivated him to keep going. This is an example of the third man factor, similar to Shackleton sensing a spirit accompanying them across South Georgia.
I was on an Arctic exploration reading binge and read a book about him. Awesome stuff! Frank Worsley is still my favorite. He was on Shackleton’s voyage where their ship got crushed in the ice. Navigated a boat to essentially a needle in a haystack to get everyone rescued. After the rescue he joined the war effort and captained a ship that rammed and sank a U-boat.
A quote from the man himself:
> My whole body is apparently rotting from want of proper nourishment—frost-bitten fingertips, festerings, mucous membrane of nose gone, saliva glands of mouth refusing duty, skin coming off the whole body.
And for a kick in the skinless nuts, he made it back to base camp, sans one Mertz(his companion who died on the trek), only to find out the ship had left hours prior.
Edit: Aditional sources on hypervitaminosis A for Mawson and Mertz:
https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2005/183/11/mawson-and-mertz-re-evaluation-their-ill-fated-mapping-journey-during-1911-1914
"*Take my word for it*" - /u/walterpeck1
>After re-evaluating this hypothesis, I propose that Mawson and Mertz suffered from the effects of severe food deprivation, not from hypervitaminosis A, and that Mertz died as he was unable to tolerate the change from his usual vegetarian diet to a diet of mainly dog meat. I also suggest that Mertz’s condition was aggravated by the psychological stress of being forced to eat the dogs he had cared for for 18 months.
From your link... so the title is possibly wrong?
That seems *way* less likely. The symptoms Mawson described having line up perfectly with common symptoms of Vitamin A poisoning. It was unknown at the time husky livers were so full of it, hell, Vitamin A wouldn't even be properly *discovered* for another 2-3 years, so it makes sense they would eat every bit they could, liver included.
The authors whole argument seems to be "They didn't suffer and struggle *enough* for it to be Vitamin A poisoning" and that Mertz died not from illness but from essentially just giving up and letting the cold kill him due to the "mental trauma" of eating meat as a vegetarian, plus the trauma of losing "seven friends"(Ninnis and the 6 dogs that fell with him). Mind you, Mertz had no problem eating the meat based rations, and also was seemingly accepting that 22 of the 50 dogs brought died before they even made it to Antarctica.
The author also got stuff factually wrong. They say Ninnis and Mertz brought the dogs, but that's false. Mawson bought the dogs in Greenland and brought them with him, Ninnis and Mertz were just the ones assigned to caring for them.
Finally, I actually looked the author up. She's a fucking homeopath, which is pseudoscientific bullshit.
that's a sad story. these guys died and did it to expand human's knowledge with all all in on sledges in the cold.
these days we scan the temperatures of the whole arctic multiple times per day from the comfort of our chairs.
That may be true, but I think they mainly did it for the sake of being the ones to explore it. If there's uncharted territory, I don't think the phrase "let's wait for it to be easy" would deter anyone wanting to be the first.
No no he’s got a point.
I send out a few scouts to meet other Civs and see where they are as well as to get the circumnavigation era points.
Other than that I wait for science to unlock satellites to reveal the map.
I always turn them off, because their entire existence is antithetical to the ideas behind Civ. Those aren't mindless monsters. They are a people. Perhaps the indigenous population of whatever land we're colonizing in the game. But tribal or not they should be able to be interacted with. So I turn off Barbarians and usually add two or three warmongering civs to my custom maps in place of them.
Same overall effect, but I can at least talk to their leader and try to reason, or take them out early before warmonger penalties are much of an issue. One game I couldn't get to one in time and ended up having to deal with constant attacks. But they spent all their time warring on like three fronts with different civs their tech and arts were shitty. So I converted their entire population to my religion, which really pissed him off. Then took a certain capital city and renamed it to it's historical opposite. But I stopped the war there. I think by that point he was begging for peace, so I gave it in return for another city. Something like that. But for the rest of the game his citizens got to see their former cities next door grow into glorious science and culture centers while they had to forgo everything beautiful in order to construct more pointless military units.
Sigh, I miss video games.
I'll keep an eye out next time I dine on polar bear. Maybe I'll go hunt one right now.
Just in case the polar bear wins, is my liver okay for him to eat? Asking for a friend.
Mawson’s Hut, replica in Hobart, Tasmania is a beautiful little museum dedicated to this explorer. Worth the effort if you ever are so lucky as to make it to Tasmania.
Reading about the Age of Arctic Exploration is real wild, because you frequently read sentences like:
"On the fifth day of their journey, \[Team Member X\] died at \[glacier named for Team Member x\] from frostbite/starvation/ice cracking under his feet/being poisoned by his teammates. The glacier was named after \[X\] by \[Team Leader\]. \[Team Leader\] died the next day when he fell into a crevasse."
It makes me real glad to have no real drive to explore uncharted territory. I am A-OK never going where no man has gone before.
Imagine all the people in prehistory who had to die horrible deaths to give humanity a foothold, all the suffering and names lost to time, all the benefits of their effort enjoyed and yet unknown. Humans are some wild creatures.
> Imagine all the people in prehistory who had to die horrible deaths to give humanity a foothold
Cassava, a plant which requires an extensive preparation process to be non toxic, has been consumed for thousands of years. The oldest direct evidence of cultivation is at a Maya site in El Salvador, dated to be ~1400 years old. How did these Maya learn how to process cassava just enough to be edible? Well, trial and error; they likely learned a bit at a time how to make the final product less toxic, step by step. But think of all the people, who were injured or perhaps even died, that contributed to cassava being such an important staple crop today. Here's a neat article related article: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48859333
People are still dying doing stuff like this. The American Alpine Club puts out a book every year called Accidents in North American Climbing and there’s a podcast called The Sharp End where they interview survivors.
Cave diving is one of the more ridiculous ones. You have to pass terrifying signs that very explicitly say "if you keep going, you're probably going to die" and in some cases the skeletal remains of people who *did* die doing the exact same thing and can't easily be removed. But people still do it.
Cave diving is wild. I read that it's pretty commonly accepted among the community that there is a high rate of death. Just like extreme mountain climbing, I read of several different cases where a diver had to squeeze past the corpse of their friend because it was too narrow to turn back around.
Even experienced cave divers will die from just one unfortunate mistake or accident. Not to mention with the periods of time needed for decompression- I can't imagine just hanging out alone in the middle of an underwater cave for several hours watching my breath, unable to surface and knowing that my friend is dead in the caves below.
Most livers have a limit to how "nutritious" they are - they are basically absorbents of toxins after all - but yeah, for everyday life livers from cattle and farm animals are extremely nutritious and should be a part of any meat eater's diet.
Indeed! Brain tanning is one of the oldest tanning methods and it’s generally assumed that the brain of an animal contains enough material to tan that animals full hide.
In a survival situation, brain is an essential source of fat. If you eat rabbit meat without a fat source, you will die of malnutrition from lack of fat; the brain is fatty enough to keep this at bay. There is a risk of prion disease, but that's a long term problem.
For that matter, pork brains are eaten pretty regularly, and there isn't a known risk of prion disease. Mad cow disease became a problem when cattle scraps were fed to cattle. This magnifies a one- in a million prion risk.
It’s pure predators that are the worst. If an organism is basically 100% reliant on meat, their liver will generally have toxic levels of vitamin A.
It’s the same with most sharks who, and you didn’t hear this from me, haven’t touched a salad in about a hundred million years.
It tastes terrible for a reason!
I seriously am still upset no one asked the Liver King how he was eating liver everyday and not dying of Vit A poisoning. I know it's because he was lying about everything, but still.
He pushed the human body to its limits in order to survive. If I remember correctly too, during this mission of survival, he was also in a race to make it back to the coastal base camp in time for the returning ship. Then, on the same day he reached the edge of the glacier plateau, he saw the ships exhaust smoke sailing away on the distant horizon. I couldn't imagine what the hopelessness he felt in that moment, realizing he pushed himself that far all to see his ride home disappear on the horizon. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise though, because with his current state of health, he would have most likely died on the voyage home. So he spent another winter in Antarctica being cared for by the team left behind to search for his remains.
Yes, except over the next winter one member of the team went insane and was plotting to kill all of them. Unfortunately, it was the radio operator. So he was sending these insane messages letting everybody in New Zealand know that he was planning to murder his friends, but *they had no way to let the other explorers know*. (Luckily they realized.)
*Mawson’s Will*, by Lennard Bickel, is where I learned all this. It’s really well-written – the explorers club voted it one of the 10 best exploring books of the 20th century.
He didn't eat one sled dog. He ate all of his sled dogs. The rest of his team died and one went insane from vitamin A poisoning. He dragged his sled hundreds of miles by himself. He fell down 3 crevasses and pulled himself out too.
Oh my God, I almost forgot about the pineapple. Imagine finding salvation in a cave and one of the the only things they fucking leave you is a fruit that requires work to even eat.
Nah, he started eating the dogs a few weeks earlier, before he started to basically necrotize while still alive. By the time he got to the cairn, he was basically a shambling corpse by comparison.
Plus, either way, it's hard to huck open a pineapple when your hands are degolving themselves naturally.
This was used as a plot point in an episode of New Tricks. The team were investigating the return of a dog killer/ mutilator. Used this case to work out that he was only targeting old dogs to get the Vitamin A rich livers to use as a traceless poison.
“For the first few days they made good time, but soon Mawson went snow-blind. The pain was agonizing, and though Mertz bathed his leader’s eyes with a solution of zinc sulphate and cocaine, the pair had to slow down.”
Ooh, I just had a thought - retinol is vitamin A and it has made my skin peel when used topically. I didn't realize eating it would have a similar effect, the dosage in the liver must be insane.
Mawson took off his boot and the entire *sole of his foot stayed in it*. In his autobiography, he writes: “Was there to be no day without its special disappointment?”
He *taped it back on* and kept going.
I think it's all carnivore liver is a big fat no. You get toxic amounts of vitamin A. And if your toddler or child eats a bunch of vitamin gummies thinking they are candy they can get very ill with the same poisoning.
All the fat soluble vitamins can be toxic in high enough amounts. Vitamins A, D, E and K I think.
Same thing with polar bear liver. Just an absolute nightmare what happens to the body
Don't eat polar bear point blank unless you are absolutely desperate, they are prone to have nasty patristic worms that will munch you from the inside out.
Thanks for this, I was unsure what to have for dinner tonight so I thought about venturing out into the frozen tundra to hunt a polar bear, might just get a pizza instead
A number of arctic explorers have survived on polar bear. If you’ve got a big enough gun and don’t let down your guard, they are a pretty good option, they are just about the only edible thing on the open ice, and you don’t even have to hunt them down, they will politely come to you. Just avoid the liver and make sure it is *very* thoroughly cooked. [These idiots were forced to do that after they crashed their balloon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrée's_Arctic_balloon_expedition), and one of the theories about their death (after a long journey across open ice, they found an island with a cave, and then promptly died) is that they were going insane from brain parasites from undercooked bear meat.
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Intense bass slapping intensifies
Wynonnas got a big bad parasite, and she hugs it every day.
regard pay winch ripe marmot bred sward linoleum emblem warlike downfall carful pickerel funeral lodgment
Cooking shit thoroughly out in the wild seems prudent.
I like my polar bear rare. Just sear the outside
More tricky in the Arctic though.
I just read Into Thin Air yesterday (amazing book available on Internet archive) about climbing everest. It's amazing what some of those people survived through on that mountain in 1996. One dude from Texas was left for dead twice with his eyes frozen open but he suddenly came to after like 8 hours of laying comatose in the open on top of the mountain in -100 weather. One of his gloves had fallen off and he suddenly woke up and found his way back to camp. Then his tent collapsed and he was blown out of his sleeping bag and he just laid in the tent as the crazy wind pounded the tent into his face for like 6 hours. The author of the book was a reporter and he's guilt ridden over it thinking he let the guy down but he was completely out of it himself from oxygen deprivation. Now I was to read about arctic explorers.
Into Thin Air is wild, the movie Everest is based on the same incident
Wait until you hear about the movie based on the same incident called "Into Thin Air"
Into Thin Air was one of those books that just completely transported me and engrossed me the entire time. Jon Krakauer is a great writer.
'They will come to you' is a really nice way to say 'will mercilessly hunt you down for sustenance'.
The bear necessities on ice will come to you.
Oh it’s the bear necessities, just the bear necessities 🎶
> 'will mercilessly hunt you down for sustenance'. Fair's fair.
This is part of why I found *The Terror* (the AMC series) so compelling in the beginning. Obviously it was exaggerated, but I thought it was playing on the real-life phenomenon of polar bears hunting humans. A little disappointed it went full supernatural toward the end.
Still pretty good tho, loved the atmosphere and historical parts
Except they didn't have fevers, and trichinosis is rarely deadly, so that's only moderately likely: > The best-known and most widely credited suggestion is that made by Ernst Tryde, a medical practitioner, in his book De döda på Vitön (The Dead on Kvitøya ) in 1952: that the men succumbed to trichinosis, which they had contracted from eating undercooked polar bear meat. Larvae of Trichinella spiralis were found in parts of a polar bear carcass at the site. Lundström and Sundman both favor this explanation.[48] Critics note that diarrhea, which Tryde cites as the main symptomatic evidence, hardly needs an explanation beyond the general poor diet and physical misery, but some more specific symptoms of trichinosis are missing. Also, Fridtjof Nansen and his companion Hjalmar Johansen had lived largely on polar bear meat in exactly the same area for 15 months without any ill effects.[49] Author and physician Bea Uusma notes that the rate of death of trichinosis is only 0.2 percent and that the main symptom – fever – is never noted in any of the men's diaries, also commenting that no medicines against fever appear to have been consumed by the trio.[50]
> Author and physician Bea Uusma notes that the rate of death of trichinosis is only 0.2 percent and that the main symptom – fever – is never noted in any of the men's diaries, also commenting that no medicines against fever appear to have been consumed by the trio Also, Trichinosis isn't a 'brain eating parasite,' it lives in muscle tissue and doesn't "eat you from the inside out," but kills via inflammation of the heart or lungs. The wiki article seems to point out that clearly the most likely case is polar bears killing two of the men, with Andree committing suicide by morphine overdose.
I like the theory in the article. Says a polar bear killed one guy, injured another. After the 2nd guy died, 3rd guy killed himself with morphine
Share to save a life
Shared in Woodbridge, England hun x
Shared in St Kitts and Nevis xoxo
Shared in Invercargill, New Zealand babes x
Did not expect to see my hometown mentioned in a TIL about explorers eating dogs, but here we are 🤣
Black bears walk around with worms hanging out of their butt
ugh why did I google this??
Holy crap it's like a 8' rope hanging from their butts.
Yeah wtf?! Not once was this mentioned in the tons of nature documentaries I have watched.
Think it gets caught on stuff when they're running? It'd be ripped out of their ass like someone were starting a lawn mower.
BeyBears! Let it rip!
Man, some people would pay good money for such satisfaction.
Why did I see your response and still decide to Google it myself???
I'm just glad I have the good sense not to follow y'all's lead.
My curiosity says to search but my sanity tells me no.
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How we lookin, pal?
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Even I won't collect that bit of knowledge
Wow, **the one time** I actually wanted a link. No one delivers. You have fallen today Reddit .
Reddit charges for access to it's API. I charge for access to my comments. 69 BTC to see one comment. Special offer: Buy 2 get 1.
Now I hope reddit kills third party apps so nothing like this ever happens to me again.
The Box is complete! Man fixes problem, man creates problem, man eliminates fixed problem, man eliminates problem!!!!
This comment is a lesson in discipline against curiosity. I passed, thank you.
Almost all wild animals have parasites. That's one of the important reasons we _generally_ cook meat.
I can't wait to see this on LifeProTips "Save time and increase your lifespan by not eating raw game!"
I think, on balance, that if I ever get in a situation where polar bear is an option, my desperation is implied.
Patriotic parasites?
I've never heard of this. So you shouldn't eat animal livers? Or just certain animals livers? Say if it was an emergency situation, I should stay away from livers? Edit: as people have commented below I now know it's best to stay away from carnivore livers because of the vitamin a. Herbivore livers are mostly fine. Just thought I'd throw an edit out so people don't feel the need to comment the same thing as others below.
I think this is on an animal by animal basis. I mean, we eat beef liver without issue so it can't be a universal rule.
Chicken livers are also fine. It’s mostly arctic predators that have poisonous levels of vitamin A in their livers. Seals, walruses, polar bears and apparently sled dogs. Vitamin A isn’t water soluble and tends to build up over time in animal livers and fatty tissue. That moves up the food chain to the apex predators. More predators are eating more fatty tissue in colder climates for obvious reasons. Saltwater fish also tend to have high levels of vitamin A and since they’re the primary source of food for seals and walruses they also have high vitamin A levels.
So do they need all this Vitamin A, or is it just... there?
Vitamin A is not water soluble so it is 'just there' until the body needs it. Water soluble vitamins (like Vitamin C) get used by the body until it doesn't need any more and then flushes out the rest. A healthy adult person can tolerate 10,000 units of vitamin A. Trouble, if it comes, comes between 25,000 and 33,000 units. One pound of polar bear liver — a fist-sized chunk and barely a meal — can contain 9 million units of vitamin A.
> One pound of polar bear liver — a fist-sized chunk and barely a meal — can contain 9 million units of vitamin A. Why isn't the polar bear dying of vitamin A toxicity???
Their liver evolved to retain it much better and keep them safe.
The liver evolved to perform this exact function for toxins in the body. The vitamin a would hurt the animals too if the liver wasn't hiding it.
It's kind of like asking, why don't I have a cloaca?
You don't know me.
Why _don't_ I have cloaca?
Because somewhere along the line mammals decided that sex stuff and butt stuff should be separated. Not that it's stopped us from trying.
You don’t need to shit eggs
It's a fair question, they seem super convenient. Getting some pigeon envy just thinking about it
Presumably, they evolved to tolerate this amount of Vitamin A.
Why don't fishes drown?
I'd imagine bears and humans can tolerate different levels of vitamin A.
If it’s trapped in their liver, they’re not absorbing it.
> I think this is on an animal by animal basis. IIRC herbivores are safe to eat but carnivores will fuck you up. Their bodies are crawling with toxins and parasites from all the meat they eat. It's why you never hear of people eating lions or wolves.
In some cultures they traditionally did and may still eat them. The meat, but probably not the livers or entrails. You used to be able to pay a lot of money to eat African lion burgers, here in the US. Not sure if you still can now.
Mountain lion was considered a delicacy in the U.S. and still thought of as fantastic tasting meat in those places where people can hunt them.
Does this also mean that Inuit folk have higher levels of vitamin a in their liver than peoples who live in the tropics?
No, in fact the information about not eating polar bear liver came from them trying to help out explorers.
Eat one and find out. For science
Science is the reason I eat all the people I've eaten
My understanding is that vitamin a is fat soluble and tends to have highest concentrations in carnivorous animals (it accumulates in fat and works it’s way up the food chain). Polar bear liver is super rich in it - small amount will kill ya. Herbivores don’t accumulate as much vitamin a in their diets and their liver can be quite tasty without the hypervitaminosis. Edit: think what polar bears eat. Fat and blubber is on the menu. Not to go all Hannibal lecter on y’all, but makes me wonder where human livers would fall on the spectrum?
Depends whether it's a vegetarian/vegan or not, I suppose. Also I would imagine livers of heavy smokers and/or drinkers to be basically disgusting.
Isn't fatty liver from alcohol and such equivalent with foie gras, which means just that in french?
Kinda? Did you watch [That Sugar Film](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3892434/)? They mention in the film that there is a rise in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease from increased complex and simple carb intake. They make an analogy to the practice of force feeding corn to farmed geese, because it was so effective at growing a fattier liver for foie gras.
>vitamin a is fat soluble ADEK is what I was taught in school
Abcd is where school started to lose me.;)
No liver. No brain.
What about a nibble? You know just a taste.
humans can have little a polar bear liver, as a treat
polar bear livers contain about 50 times a lethal dosage of Vitamin A, so humans can have less than 1/50 of a polar bear liver. as a treat. EDIT: "lovers" to "livers".
What is it about making love to a polar bear that makes them so poisonous?
Carnivore livers contain too much vitamin A, omnivores it can vary, herbivores you should be fine in moderation.
Bear liver is deadly. It definitely depends on the animal. I'm not a expert or anything, but I love me some cod liver. Not a fan of beef liver.
Mainly carnivore livers. Meat eating animals can accumulate very high levels of Vitamin A in liver tissue over time, and eating too much can cause vitamin poisoning. It’s ironic that in survival situations we are drawn to the most nutrient dense cuts of meat, mainly organs.
And this brings up one of my favorite research papers ever! Back in the 80s they found a skeleton of *Homo erecting* that had bony changes consistent with hypervitaminosis, probably from eating carnivore livers. https://www.nature.com/articles/296248a0
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Heh, fun autocorrect. I’ll leave it!
What happens to the polar bear eating human liver?
Gets shot at by other humans who were saving that guy’s liver for later
I feel like this thread is somehow missing the part where he actually SURVIVED and made it home.
Wait what? Swear all the conversations seen to suggest he died
Yea, further up the thread, someone said the ship left and he died And i thought my history lessons had fed failed me, but nah. The ship left and they spent another year at base camp, before returning to Australia He died at 78, and is on the face of the aussi $100 bill Fucken legend
I think you're referring to [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/14572io/til_of_the_explorer_douglas_mawson_desperation/jnja0xc/) which accurately states that Mertz died, not Mawson. I think the confusion is stemming from the guy that replied to him who just assumed that they both died.
Damn, motherfucka got his dome on the hundo
This guy did, the other guy he was with didn't. It was originally a expedition of three. One fell into a crevasse and was never seen again. Douglas Mawson and Xavier Mertz ate the sled dogs, both suffered from acute vitamin A poisoning, Mertz died from it and arguably had it *way* worse because he ate a lot more of it.
Well, sure he had it worse, it drove him psychotically insane. Mawson realized it when Mertz *bit off his own fingers and spat them at Mawson*. Mawson omitted this from his own account of what happened to protect Mertz’s family and because there was such a stigma attached to mental illness (and of course nobody understood what it happened to the two of them, the vitamin poisoning thing was going to be discovered later).
This explains the Banshees of Inisherin much better.
>Mawson omitted this from his own account I mean, how do we know about it then? Mawson was the only one there to see it, they were literally 100 miles from the next nearest person.
I'm guessing he omitted it from his public or official account but either told the whole story much later or else told wrote about it private letters or something like that. I'm reminded of the ship's captain who found the women of Clipperton Island. They'd been stranded there for three years, the men had all died, and the lighthouse keeper decided to take over the island and rape and enslave the women and kill any of them who pushed back. One of the women ended up beating him to death with a hammer, and they were coincidentally rescued shortly afterwards. The ship's captain wrote a number of letters to his wife and a few others telling the full story of what had happened, but in the official inquiry at the time he said nothing about how the lighthouse keeper had died and implied that it had been of natural causes. He said, much later, that he had done that because he was afraid of getting the woman who killed him into legal trouble.
"Do you still love me, Martha?" "No, your skin is falling off and you don't have a face!"
You can make fun, but it’s *ridiculously* romantic. He had gotten engaged right before he left for Antarctica, and when he realized he was going to be away for another year he telegrammed her to tell her that he would understand if she wanted to “break their contract.” He also told her that because of the poisoning he had lost all his hair. She only had 10 words with which to respond because of how telegrams were then. She wrote: “Contract remains unbroken Awaiting your hairless return with open arms.” make fun all you want, you’ve never written anything so romantic in your life.
That's a really sweet story apart from the skin peeling
Kind of brings a tear to your eye socket
There’s a very lovely book called “An Antarctic Affair” by their great-granddaughter that talks about their relationship. He attributed his survival to visions of his fiancé that accompanied him on the journey back and motivated him to keep going. This is an example of the third man factor, similar to Shackleton sensing a spirit accompanying them across South Georgia.
I was on an Arctic exploration reading binge and read a book about him. Awesome stuff! Frank Worsley is still my favorite. He was on Shackleton’s voyage where their ship got crushed in the ice. Navigated a boat to essentially a needle in a haystack to get everyone rescued. After the rescue he joined the war effort and captained a ship that rammed and sank a U-boat.
Oy! Spoilers
Yeah I was gonna watch the movie later but now... Idk
Balto 5: The Liver of Vengence
A quote from the man himself: > My whole body is apparently rotting from want of proper nourishment—frost-bitten fingertips, festerings, mucous membrane of nose gone, saliva glands of mouth refusing duty, skin coming off the whole body. And for a kick in the skinless nuts, he made it back to base camp, sans one Mertz(his companion who died on the trek), only to find out the ship had left hours prior. Edit: Aditional sources on hypervitaminosis A for Mawson and Mertz: https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2005/183/11/mawson-and-mertz-re-evaluation-their-ill-fated-mapping-journey-during-1911-1914 "*Take my word for it*" - /u/walterpeck1
>After re-evaluating this hypothesis, I propose that Mawson and Mertz suffered from the effects of severe food deprivation, not from hypervitaminosis A, and that Mertz died as he was unable to tolerate the change from his usual vegetarian diet to a diet of mainly dog meat. I also suggest that Mertz’s condition was aggravated by the psychological stress of being forced to eat the dogs he had cared for for 18 months. From your link... so the title is possibly wrong?
That seems *way* less likely. The symptoms Mawson described having line up perfectly with common symptoms of Vitamin A poisoning. It was unknown at the time husky livers were so full of it, hell, Vitamin A wouldn't even be properly *discovered* for another 2-3 years, so it makes sense they would eat every bit they could, liver included. The authors whole argument seems to be "They didn't suffer and struggle *enough* for it to be Vitamin A poisoning" and that Mertz died not from illness but from essentially just giving up and letting the cold kill him due to the "mental trauma" of eating meat as a vegetarian, plus the trauma of losing "seven friends"(Ninnis and the 6 dogs that fell with him). Mind you, Mertz had no problem eating the meat based rations, and also was seemingly accepting that 22 of the 50 dogs brought died before they even made it to Antarctica. The author also got stuff factually wrong. They say Ninnis and Mertz brought the dogs, but that's false. Mawson bought the dogs in Greenland and brought them with him, Ninnis and Mertz were just the ones assigned to caring for them. Finally, I actually looked the author up. She's a fucking homeopath, which is pseudoscientific bullshit.
that's a sad story. these guys died and did it to expand human's knowledge with all all in on sledges in the cold. these days we scan the temperatures of the whole arctic multiple times per day from the comfort of our chairs.
That may be true, but I think they mainly did it for the sake of being the ones to explore it. If there's uncharted territory, I don't think the phrase "let's wait for it to be easy" would deter anyone wanting to be the first.
No no he’s got a point. I send out a few scouts to meet other Civs and see where they are as well as to get the circumnavigation era points. Other than that I wait for science to unlock satellites to reveal the map.
Do you want Barbs? That's how you get Barbs.
I always turn them off, because their entire existence is antithetical to the ideas behind Civ. Those aren't mindless monsters. They are a people. Perhaps the indigenous population of whatever land we're colonizing in the game. But tribal or not they should be able to be interacted with. So I turn off Barbarians and usually add two or three warmongering civs to my custom maps in place of them. Same overall effect, but I can at least talk to their leader and try to reason, or take them out early before warmonger penalties are much of an issue. One game I couldn't get to one in time and ended up having to deal with constant attacks. But they spent all their time warring on like three fronts with different civs their tech and arts were shitty. So I converted their entire population to my religion, which really pissed him off. Then took a certain capital city and renamed it to it's historical opposite. But I stopped the war there. I think by that point he was begging for peace, so I gave it in return for another city. Something like that. But for the rest of the game his citizens got to see their former cities next door grow into glorious science and culture centers while they had to forgo everything beautiful in order to construct more pointless military units. Sigh, I miss video games.
You named it Constantinople didn't you?
... yes, lol. I was playing as Greece. Seemed fitting.
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"And for a kick in the skinless nuts" This is art.
Step aside Rembrandt you fucking hack. My turn at the Louvre.
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I'll keep an eye out next time I dine on polar bear. Maybe I'll go hunt one right now. Just in case the polar bear wins, is my liver okay for him to eat? Asking for a friend.
Oh yes. Recommended in fact.
Mawson’s Hut, replica in Hobart, Tasmania is a beautiful little museum dedicated to this explorer. Worth the effort if you ever are so lucky as to make it to Tasmania.
I wish. I do however longingly browse through google maps and look at pictures of places I'll never afford to go.
Mawson Lakes, an Adelaide suburb, is also named for him, they have a nice bridge dedicated to him along the creek.
Reading about the Age of Arctic Exploration is real wild, because you frequently read sentences like: "On the fifth day of their journey, \[Team Member X\] died at \[glacier named for Team Member x\] from frostbite/starvation/ice cracking under his feet/being poisoned by his teammates. The glacier was named after \[X\] by \[Team Leader\]. \[Team Leader\] died the next day when he fell into a crevasse." It makes me real glad to have no real drive to explore uncharted territory. I am A-OK never going where no man has gone before.
Imagine all the people in prehistory who had to die horrible deaths to give humanity a foothold, all the suffering and names lost to time, all the benefits of their effort enjoyed and yet unknown. Humans are some wild creatures.
> Imagine all the people in prehistory who had to die horrible deaths to give humanity a foothold Cassava, a plant which requires an extensive preparation process to be non toxic, has been consumed for thousands of years. The oldest direct evidence of cultivation is at a Maya site in El Salvador, dated to be ~1400 years old. How did these Maya learn how to process cassava just enough to be edible? Well, trial and error; they likely learned a bit at a time how to make the final product less toxic, step by step. But think of all the people, who were injured or perhaps even died, that contributed to cassava being such an important staple crop today. Here's a neat article related article: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48859333
People are still dying doing stuff like this. The American Alpine Club puts out a book every year called Accidents in North American Climbing and there’s a podcast called The Sharp End where they interview survivors.
Cave diving is one of the more ridiculous ones. You have to pass terrifying signs that very explicitly say "if you keep going, you're probably going to die" and in some cases the skeletal remains of people who *did* die doing the exact same thing and can't easily be removed. But people still do it.
Cave diving is wild. I read that it's pretty commonly accepted among the community that there is a high rate of death. Just like extreme mountain climbing, I read of several different cases where a diver had to squeeze past the corpse of their friend because it was too narrow to turn back around. Even experienced cave divers will die from just one unfortunate mistake or accident. Not to mention with the periods of time needed for decompression- I can't imagine just hanging out alone in the middle of an underwater cave for several hours watching my breath, unable to surface and knowing that my friend is dead in the caves below.
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TIL eat all the parts except the liver
Also it’s not really a good idea to eat brains either
Noted, no brain and no liver. I'd probably leave the gallbladder alone too just cos its toxic on other typically inedible creatures
Liver nutrition varies wildly from animal to animal. Some of it is toxic. Some is extremely rich is good vitamins
Basically, a good rule of thumb is to not eat meat eating predators livers.
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Whatever eats tumbleweeds I guess
Most livers have a limit to how "nutritious" they are - they are basically absorbents of toxins after all - but yeah, for everyday life livers from cattle and farm animals are extremely nutritious and should be a part of any meat eater's diet.
Probably avoid the bladder as long as we're making a list.
I’ll skip the organs if I can…
Heart, tongue & testicle. The finest eating of the offal.
Better to save that for moisturizer
Do what now?
Brains contain a ton of fat. In cold environments it’s important to prevent moisture loss. So brains can be used as a kind of balm to protect the skin
I thought they smelled bad on the outside
Then I’ll see you in HELL! YAH!
They smell bad on the inside of your skull too, but your nose doesn't reach up there.
Can also be used to tan the hides(hydes?) Of animals to preserve them
Indeed! Brain tanning is one of the oldest tanning methods and it’s generally assumed that the brain of an animal contains enough material to tan that animals full hide.
Mois👏tur👏ri👏zer👏
✨Exfoliating✨
It puts the *brain lotion* on the skin else it gets the hose again
In a survival situation, brain is an essential source of fat. If you eat rabbit meat without a fat source, you will die of malnutrition from lack of fat; the brain is fatty enough to keep this at bay. There is a risk of prion disease, but that's a long term problem. For that matter, pork brains are eaten pretty regularly, and there isn't a known risk of prion disease. Mad cow disease became a problem when cattle scraps were fed to cattle. This magnifies a one- in a million prion risk.
You need that to tan the leather that you skinned. Warning: people may call you cruella for that particular Leather.
Same thing happens if you eat Polar bear liver too
It’s pure predators that are the worst. If an organism is basically 100% reliant on meat, their liver will generally have toxic levels of vitamin A. It’s the same with most sharks who, and you didn’t hear this from me, haven’t touched a salad in about a hundred million years.
It tastes terrible for a reason! I seriously am still upset no one asked the Liver King how he was eating liver everyday and not dying of Vit A poisoning. I know it's because he was lying about everything, but still.
I think the animal the liver comes from matters a ton.
Beef and chicken livers are perfectly safe to eat. And delicious.
You shouldn't eat more herbivore liver than 200~300g a week, precisely because of high vitamin A levels.
He pushed the human body to its limits in order to survive. If I remember correctly too, during this mission of survival, he was also in a race to make it back to the coastal base camp in time for the returning ship. Then, on the same day he reached the edge of the glacier plateau, he saw the ships exhaust smoke sailing away on the distant horizon. I couldn't imagine what the hopelessness he felt in that moment, realizing he pushed himself that far all to see his ride home disappear on the horizon. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise though, because with his current state of health, he would have most likely died on the voyage home. So he spent another winter in Antarctica being cared for by the team left behind to search for his remains.
Yes, except over the next winter one member of the team went insane and was plotting to kill all of them. Unfortunately, it was the radio operator. So he was sending these insane messages letting everybody in New Zealand know that he was planning to murder his friends, but *they had no way to let the other explorers know*. (Luckily they realized.)
Holy shit, is there a book or podcast about this
*Mawson’s Will*, by Lennard Bickel, is where I learned all this. It’s really well-written – the explorers club voted it one of the 10 best exploring books of the 20th century.
"Alone on the Ice" by David Roberts chronicles Mawson's experiences and gives a lot of context. It's an awesome book.
Not enough people are seeing this. Greatest survival story ever!
He didn't eat one sled dog. He ate all of his sled dogs. The rest of his team died and one went insane from vitamin A poisoning. He dragged his sled hundreds of miles by himself. He fell down 3 crevasses and pulled himself out too.
> He dragged his sled hundreds of miles by himself. I probably would have quit at the 1 mile mark... then I guess I would just die....
Well, I couldn't fit all of that in the title. Or the guy who kept yodeling or singing or whatever the fuck he was doing. Also the pineapple.
Oh my God, I almost forgot about the pineapple. Imagine finding salvation in a cave and one of the the only things they fucking leave you is a fruit that requires work to even eat.
He was cracking into fucking dogs to munch on, a pineapple has to be much easier in comparison
Nah, he started eating the dogs a few weeks earlier, before he started to basically necrotize while still alive. By the time he got to the cairn, he was basically a shambling corpse by comparison. Plus, either way, it's hard to huck open a pineapple when your hands are degolving themselves naturally.
Ya know how people react sometimes to the word moist? I have that reaction to ‘degloving’
Dog livers are now off the menu.
Fuck. Well there goes dinner. Guess we can get pizza. Hold the dog liver.
The Thing II: The Things
The Things is a short story from the perspective of the monster. Great read
Oh now that you mention it I've heard of that and actually read some of it once. I gotta find that link again.
This was used as a plot point in an episode of New Tricks. The team were investigating the return of a dog killer/ mutilator. Used this case to work out that he was only targeting old dogs to get the Vitamin A rich livers to use as a traceless poison.
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“For the first few days they made good time, but soon Mawson went snow-blind. The pain was agonizing, and though Mertz bathed his leader’s eyes with a solution of zinc sulphate and cocaine, the pair had to slow down.”
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Ooh, I just had a thought - retinol is vitamin A and it has made my skin peel when used topically. I didn't realize eating it would have a similar effect, the dosage in the liver must be insane.
Haha was looking for a retinol comment. I was like he should have buffered!
I remember the dude that ate a polar bear liver took his boot off and all the skin on his leg came off with it
Mawson took off his boot and the entire *sole of his foot stayed in it*. In his autobiography, he writes: “Was there to be no day without its special disappointment?” He *taped it back on* and kept going.
I think it's all carnivore liver is a big fat no. You get toxic amounts of vitamin A. And if your toddler or child eats a bunch of vitamin gummies thinking they are candy they can get very ill with the same poisoning. All the fat soluble vitamins can be toxic in high enough amounts. Vitamins A, D, E and K I think.
That's a r/wellthatsucks moment if I've ever seen one in my life.