10ofRods
Verified Anthropologist
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- Jun 27, 2019
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I absolutely think people can run on less food than others. I don’t eat breakfast or lunch (no time, I work 12 hr days) and am perfectly fine until dinner. It’s no big deal to me.
That's because almost everyone can go 12 hours without refueling (and in many cultures, people do exactly that).
But if you were walking cross country, with elevation gains of 1400-3000 feet (and going back down) each day, you'd find it rather different than just being at work (unless you walk 8-10 miles of mountainous terrain per day at work). Most of us burn around 1700-2400 calories a day, with postal workers burning more like 3500 with all their walking.
Hiking in mountainous terrain gets most people to 4000 calories in a day with 6 hours of walking. 6000+ calories is not unheard of for some through hikers to need daily.
THe fact that it's " no big deal " when our brains start to lack protein (or oxygen) is part of the problem. With both protein starvation and drops in oxygen, the sufferer may simply not notice. But activity in the brain is affected, nevertheless.
One effect of protein malnutrition is that a person does lose their sense of hunger (this is true after about 12 hours of fasting for some people, as well - and almost everyone who fasts regularly has a blunted sense of hunger).
Are you saying that y0u go 24 hours without eating, or is the 12 hours in between breakfast and dinner (because frankly, that's pretty normal and most people's brains would be fine with that). 24 hours without protein though, and study after study shows that while people feel "perfectly fine" their reaction times to various stimuli get slower and their thinking begins to show more errors. IOW, you wouldn't want to take a very hard examination after 24 hours without protein..,