I would guess that the very Gaelic name of Jacques Cousteau (not Clouseau) occurred to most who scanned the headline of my contribution this week, and indeed M. Cousteau is probably the single most famous Frenchman to be associated with the wine-dark sea, as Homer liked to sometimes call it. However, if your relationship to the ocean is more personal than documentary television watching, the name of Alain Bombard is one you cannot afford not to know. Why? Read on dear reader, read on.
Say you're floating on the Atlantic Ocean in an inflatable dinghy. Your yacht has disappeared under the waves some hours ago. You are alive and well but one problem is getting bigger and bigger: you are very thirsty and you have no drinking water at all. The sun is riding hot and high and it may not rain for many days.
What are you going to do about it? There's water all around but would you drink it? No, you wouldn't. Why? It's better not to drink at all than to drink seawater? Yeah, I know, that's what I also have heard all my life.
"If you are shipwrecked, and you are so thirsty that you decide to drink salt water, dehydration is amplified and death can result from a few cups of salt water."
"Shipwrecked sailors sometimes, in their desperation, drink salt water, and that makes them thirstier than ever, and brings on madness and death."
Everybody knows these are undeniable facts. Hard science. Clear-cut reality. Supported by overwhelming evidence. Few know that this clear-cut, overwhelming, hard-science evidence is total bupkas.
Alain Bombard, a medical doctor and biologist, crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1952 on an inflatable dinghy, without any food and drinking water supplies whatsoever, and provided undeniable proof that a shipwrecked man can survive on the ocean for months. Naturally, in his time he was mostly considerd a crackpot, a heretic and an overall, not-to-be-taken seriously wise guy -- explaining why almost no one knows his name today.
While exposing his ideas to his peers, Bombard discovered that theory wasn't very convincing, so he decided to cross the ocean as a shipwreck volunteer in order to provide proof in practice that he was right.
He spent more than two months on the ocean as a castaway and drank salt water each time when no drinking water or liquid pressed from a fish he had caught were available. But practice didn't matter much more than theory because French scientists who never even saw the ocean knew for sure: only a few cups of salt water and the osmotic inbalances will do the rest.
Bombard was supported by friends and some co-heretics but the often invoked "scientific community" violently opposed his ideas, and most people couldn't care less because they didn't figure to be faced with the choice salt water or perish any time soon, if ever.
Can we imagine how it must have been for the brave and foolish Bombard?
— Hey, listen! I got great news! I must have swallowed buckets full of salt water, one time I even drank it for more than a week. Because it was the only drink available. Two months on the ocean. I had no food or water supplies at all besides plankton, fish and fish juice and rain or condense water. And I survived! We must revise the manuals, we must tell the sailors to change their possibly fatal beliefs!
— Who are you? A wise guy? You know better than everybody right? Why don't you shut up, crackpot? Millions will die if they follow your hair-brained advice, murderer! Murderer!
And what do "actual" people say for today when confronted with this remarkable, and true story?
JT — Well there's a story of a French doctor called Alain Bombard that's quite well known, and he was in exactly that situation, and he basically tried a few scientific tests, I guess on himself, while he was in that situation.
QC — When you say "was in that situation", what on Earth situation was he in?
JT — He was shipwrecked...
QC — Ah, right.
JT — …and he was shipwrecked on a raft for 63 days in fact, and survived, I mean it's quite a well-known story, and his account of his survival has been published. But he reckons that after a few tests on his own body, so to speak, in that situation, that if you don't drink more than 32 ounces per day, you can actually survive. I mean that's a bit, well not exactly scientifically tested, but it worked for him, should I say, so...
QC — I hope he got a Nobel prize for employing scientific methodology in adverse circumstances.
JT — He's certainly a very brave person to do that.
[Or stupid -LB]
Yeah. Or stupid. LB notes. Isn't it a fantastic world? Alain Bombard puts his live at stake and crosses the ocean to attract some serious attention because he found out something that might save quite a few lives. And what do people who know next to nothing say about his heroic achievement, some fifty years later? "Well, it may have worked for him. But is it science?"
Let's see if Bombard made it anywhere near a publication in Science or Nature. Google: "Alain Bombard" scientific publication shipwrecked
Four results. Four. And not one coming within a thousand nautical miles of Science or Nature - 50 full years after the facts.
Ok their editors are not quite as up-to-date as they claim, but in only half a century Alain Bombard has wormed his way into Today In Science History, proving perhaps that with a little more patience a first-choice place in the annals of science may yet await some of the sacred cow kickers of today whose names are as familiar to readers of YBYL as Jacques Cousteau's was, and Alain Bombard's now is.
Jan Spreen is a Dutchman who has lived in France since 1982.
This very much reminds me of the research done by early 20th Century anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson. In his work for Dartmouth and other institutions, he was a polar explorer who did some of the first and most important anthropological studies of the Inuit (i.e. "eskimo") populations of the arctic circle.
A little-known fact about Stefansson, however, is that he discovered that vitamin C is not the only cure for scurvy: in fact, what he determined was that if you live on a 100% (or nearly 100%) meat diet, you not only never get scurvy but you can be otherwise perfectly healthy.
This was met with enormous skepticism in the medical community when he published it. But how did he find it out? Simple: he lived among the Inuit for a few years, and found that for an average of 9 months a year the Inuit live on nothing but meat and fish--there being nothing else to eat in such a barren frozen environment. Even during the summer months there really wasn't much in terms of edible plant life, so walrus and whale and fish and such made up the vast bulk of the people up there's diet--and while he was there, that's what he ate too.
No one ever got scurvy.
Back home he was met with massive skepticism from medical authorities who said that a diet of nothing but meat would destroy the liver and the kidneys, throw the whole system out of balance, and probably kill a person within a few days or weeks at most.
So Stefansson agreed to undergo, along with a fellow arctic explorer, a controlled study under the auspices of the Journal of the American Medical Association. They were locked up in a lab and under constant guard for two weeks and ate nothing but meat. The only negative thing they discovered is that very lean meat made them sick very quickly, but meat rich in fat was just fine. They not only did fine for two weeks but under rigorous testing were found to be able to exercise and perform all normal activities without a problem. Then, just to be sure, they were both followed around for a solid year by a guard and pledged to do nothing but eat that whole time.
The results were published in JAMA.
And by the way, some arctic and antarctic researchers still use this diet by the way. Instead of stocking up on vitamin C they simply switch to a 100% meat diet.
Funny thing being, medical authorities will still tell you this is impossible and such a diet would kill you in short order. When informed that there are still Inuit in the far north eating their traditional all-meat diet, they'll try to tell you there must be something genetically weird about the Inuit. Never mind the non-Inuit who do the same thing--it's impossible I tell ya!
Posted by: Dean Esmay | November 09, 2006 at 12:44 PM
Oh and by the way, when I have in the past cited the JAMA study--which I do have the specifics for, not offhand but will supply upon demand--I have been met with this answer:
"Don't you have anything more recent than a study published in the 1920s?"
Never mind that no refuting study was ever published after that.
But you know, truth is determined by who has published most recently. Or so I have learned from the Elder Priests of Science.
More on Dr. Stefansson here and here and here and here.
(I hope Otis doesn't mind me cluttering up YBYL's comments section with this stuff. But what a fascinating guy he was.)
By the way (still relying on Otis' good graces here) I want to correct one small linguistic mistake I made above. I said, "The only negative thing they discovered is that very lean meat made them sick very quickly, but meat rich in fat was just fine."
Just to be clear, what I meant was that they determined that a diet made up of NOTHING BUT very lean made the subjects sick very quickly. Very lean cuts of meat or fish with almost no fat made them sick very very quickly. But meats (including fish) very rich in fat had no such effect.
When they did the JAMA studies this actually surprised Stefansson because he was confident in his "I can eat nothing but meat and be healthy and robust" assertion. But for a few days they made him eat nothing but almost fat-free meat, and he got incredibly sick after only a couple of days. But that was just an experiment the controlling scientists proposed. Yet instead of taking him off the all-meat diet, they agreed to let him eat a diet rich in brains and fatback for a couple of days, then suddenly he was fine. And he finished out the rest of the year-long experiment without a problem.
His fellow arctic explorer was fine the whole time, because they never asked him to eat nothing but lean meat.
You can say that this was not double-blind and that more experiments should be required to really establish the facts in the case. Which I would agree with. But few since the 1920s have even tried.
Still you encounter "dieticians" who will tell you that the whole thing I just described is impossible.
Posted by: Dean Esmay | November 10, 2006 at 09:31 PM