This may have been covered before, but here it goes. I was discussing wild game tastes and what we have eaten from the wild over the years, and every time I say i've had Caribou someone will say there is no nutritional value in it. I am curious why this is thought to be true. I thought it tasted very good no matter what. My standard reply is that thousand of wolves can't be wrong. Does anyone have any proof one way or the other?

I do not know where that comes from, but it is physically impossible for any meat to not have nutritional value.

In fact, Caribou is a very low in fat, high protein meat that tastes great. I have eaten at least 6+ whole caribou and pieces from dozens of others and I would just ignore that fallacy.

Well, after nigh on 40 years and maybe 200 'bou, I ain't dead yet and can walk the legs off you with 150 pounds on me back!

At one time I had the results of a study from Alaska that showed caribou as the most nutritious of all wild game, and miles ahead of beef, much higher in vitamins and minerals, and no cholestrol.

.........it's good for you, ....eat it!

~Arctic~

Nutritional value? I worked in a nuclear power plant in the late 80's. A fellow brought in caribou that he had taken way up north. It was radioactive due to Chernobyl. Don't mean to scare ya but. WE humans can F*&%^K UP a planet pretty good.

A few years ago i was hunting caribou, the weather got real bad on the last day of our hunt, (of course) Got stuck in the tent camp for over 4 days longer then our hunt, ate mostly caribou the whole time. I felt "nourished" the whole time there.

I've heard people say the same thing, no value. i've been on 14 bou hunts and have eaten alot of bou meat! Don't think that statment has any "meat" to it!!!!

This old saying most likely was started by someone who starved to death in the Artic by eating starving and poor condition animals that were starving to death themselves. In late winter especially, the animals are living on their fat reserves, and burning them up and getting skinny. Well, contrary to what my doctor is telling me, lean meat con't have much calories or nutrition in it, maybe some protein and a few minerals, but not much else. and you have to get some calories somewhere else just to digest the stuff. That takes energy and calories, takes calories just to keep warm in a cold climate. that's where the fats and the sugars come in.
But that is true of all lean meat from any animal. that's why a wolf or a cougar will only eat the meat and what ever little bit of fat from inside the gut of a late winter kill, if there is any left. That is usually the last place to have any fat when the animals fat reserves are used up.
Man, it's only October and you guys have got my mouth watering for a fat juicy caribou steak already. wayne

Protein and carbs have 4 calories per gram and fat has 9 calories per gram. Some meat will have more calories than others because of higher fat content, but you can't go below a certain number of calories. I think a pound of meat even with 0 fat in it would still have about 2000 calories per pound.

What Walex says about very poor nutrition from animals that theselves are starving is true. One of the first HBCo explorers in Canada's north worte of seeing hundreds of caribou carcasses left after an Indian hunt. All that had been taken were the large leg bones, themeat and hides etc had been left. The reason for this was not wanton waste but rather the natives knowledge that the marrow in the bones held the last fat which was what they themselves required.
Moffat in one of his books, People of the Deer if I'm not mistaken tells how was at first turned off by the high fat in the natives diet but after a long spel of winter he cravced fat. I find that I prefer more fat in my diet durring winter.



Here is a little info on the necessity of fat in our diet

http://www.medbio.info/Horn/Time%201-2/vilhjalmur_stefansson1.htm



"
Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who spent many years living with the Eskimos and Indians of Northern Canada, reports that wild male ruminants like elk and caribou carry a large slab of back fat, weighing as much as 40 to 50 pounds. The Indians and Eskimo hunted older male animals preferentially because they wanted this back slab fat, as well as the highly saturated fat found around the kidneys. Other groups used blubber from sea mammals like seal and walrus.




"The groups that depend on the blubber animals are the most fortunate in the hunting way of life," wrote Stefansson, "for they never suffer from fat-hunger. This trouble is worst, so far as North America is concerned, among those forest Indians who depend at times on rabbits, the leanest animal in the North, and who develop the extreme fat-hunger known as rabbit-starvation. Rabbit eaters, if they have no fat from another source-beaver, moose, fish-will develop diarrhea in about a week, with headache, lassitude, a vague discomfort. If there are enough rabbits, the people eat till their stomachs are distended; but no matter how much they eat they feel unsatisfied. Some think a man will die sooner if he eats continually of fat-free meat than if he eats nothing, but this is a belief on which sufficient evidence for a decision has not been gathered in the north. Deaths from rabbit-starvation, or from the eating of other skinny meat, are rare; for everyone understands the principle, and any possible preventive steps are naturally taken."




Normally , according to Stefansson, the diet consisted of dried or cured meat "eaten with fat," namely the highly saturated cavity and back slab fat that could be easily separated from the animal. Another Arctic explorer, Hugh Brody, reports that Eskimos ate raw liver mixed with small pieces of fat and that strips of dried or smoked meat were "spread with fat or lard." Pemmican, a highly concentrated travel food, was a mixture of lean dried buffalo meat and highly saturated buffalo fat. (Buffalo fat, by the way, is more saturated than beef fat.) Less than two pounds of pemmican per day could sustain a man doing hard physical labor. The ratio of fat to protein in pemmican was 80%-20%. As lean meat from game animals was often given to the dogs, there is no reason to suppose that everyday fare did not have the same proportions: 80% fat (mostly highly saturated fat) to 20% protein-in a population in which heart disease and cancer were nonexistent."



I believe the problem has been traced to the body's need for special enzymes to digest lean meat proteins. If we do not get sufficient fat to use in the making of these enzynmes from our food we will steal the necessary fats from our own body in effect self cannibalism.