Protein poisoning is an unusual nutritional deficiency where patients mainly consume lean meat, with no other sources of nutrients, and develop health complications as a result. This condition appears to be a combination of factors including not getting enough calories, receiving inadequate nutrients, and experiencing stress as a result of environmental factors such as very cold weather. Patients with access to healthcare and nutritional options rarely develop or die from protein poisoning, but it can be a risk in remote communities during periods of limited food availability.
This condition is also known as "rabbit hunger," a reference to the idea that communities that rely heavily on rabbit, a very lean meat, could be at risk for protein poisoning. Protein poisoning patients get most of their nutrition from lean meat, usually because they subsist on hunting in winter, when they cannot supplement their diets with plant foods. Often the victim is actively foraging for food, expending more calories than usual, and therefore needs more, even when consuming less because the caloric value of lean meat is limited.
In patients with this condition, the body does not get the nutrients it needs to function. The patient may experience a constant feeling of hunger, even right after eating, until they eat carbohydrates to balance the diet. The liver is also overloaded with protein and cannot process it as fast as the patient can eat it. Patients can become fatigued and generally develop headaches and diarrhea. Blood pressure and heart rate drop, sometimes dangerously low.
Historically, people who experienced protein poisoning often consumed things like the livers of the animals they hunted in an attempt to control their hunger. This led to additional complications, as the patients developed vitamin A toxicity from eating too much liver. The problem for patients with this condition is not necessarily an excess of protein, but rather imbalances in the diet that lead to the inability to function normally.
Most indigenous people who rely heavily on meat-based diets consume animals that are high in fat, such as whales and seals, and therefore have a low risk of protein poisoning because they receive more balanced nutrition. This condition can become a concern when communities are forced to rely on subsistence hunting for rabbits, deer, and other lean animals in adverse weather conditions where no other sources of nutrition are available. Rarely do people in industrialized areas develop protein poisoning as a result of extreme diets;