One of the community has had a close shave after circumstances, work and weather forced him to eat lots of tinned and processed foods for months which gave him an unpleasant shock, his diet drove him to the very edge of developing diabetes. He has now fortunately now addressed the issue and is eating much healthier, but this raises the issue staying healthy long term whilst relying on your emergency rations.
Its becoming clear that to remain healthy rather than just sustained we cannot rely totally on tinned or processed foods, we NEED to supplement our food stores with fresh stuff by either growing extra food stuffs and / or harvesting edible plants that are native to where you live.
Its Bushcraft but its something I think we NEED to at least have a high quality illustrated guide to identifying wild foods we can scrounge after TSHTF.
Websites and books such as this may assist people.
http://www.gallowaywildfoods.com/?page_id=357
What tinned food was he eating? I agree that some canned food. Usually the canned meals like stews and currys etc are awful nutrition wise.
Not quite sure but I got the impression it was ONLY tinned and dried stuff he was eating for a few months without fresh food.
the whole point of having a store of tinned food post SHTF is that it is a BACKUP for when you cant get fresh food either foraged, hunted or scrounged or grown yourself, not as a full term replacement.
I can assure you that tinned and dried foods in and of themselves were not the culprit, it was this person's choice of foods that did him in.
I have friends that were part of submarine crews and lived on tinned and dried foods for months and were just as healthy when they came out of the sub as they were when they went into it 6-10 months earlier.
I also have friends and relatives that have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and lived on MRE meals, with only one or two hot meals in a year, and they came back healthy.
I also have friends that live in remote regions of Alaska, where fresh foods, except for wild meat, are only a dream, and they remain healthy.
If you live on bottled jam, peanut butter, bread and baked beans you are going to get diabetes. If your tins include an assortment of vegetables and balanced nutrition you will suffer no ill effects.
processed foods are not good for the human body and should be used in moderation under normal circumstances, my main weakness is cheese...I love the stuff but eating too much of it isn't doing me any favours. we don't eat to much tinned stuff normally, maybe a couple of tins a week on average, maybe slightly more in the winter. we normally eat as much fresh stuff as we can get, we have some good farm shops around here where we can buy our meat and veg, our eggs are free range and bought at our local market as is most of our fresh fish. at the moment we can get local plums by the bucket load, plus all the stuff we grow ourselves. our tin store is mainly for a back up supply when TSHTF but we only buy what we eat and eat what we buy so it does get rotated..eventually.
Knowing how to, and what to, forage is a massive advantage. The masses, I'm sure, have little idea of how many things we walk past on a typical verge or hedgerow that are actually edible. Post-SHTF, the land will be picked clean of all the obvious stuff, but I'm sure there will be plenty of nutritious food that many people just don't know they can eat.
+1 to NR on the guide to things we can find to eat.