
How a Special Diet Kept the Knights Templar Fighting Fit - grendelt
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-the-templar-knights-ate
======
jps359
Did they live longer because of their diet or because of their reliable access
to food?

~~~
dorfsmay
I think both. Poor people died because of lack of nutrients and even calories,
while the extremely rich died of gout and diabetes because of excess.

It seems the templar got all the nutrients they needed (feast on large amount
of protein once a week, plant based diet the rest of the week) while using
moderation most of the week and even a fast once a week.

~~~
joker3
They did a Lenten fast once a week, which is not usually the same as
abstaining from food. From the article, it sounds like they were eating but
not eating meat. However, note that fish is not considered meat for the
purposes of Lenten fasting.

~~~
monkmartinez
It is the same today... Catholics in my pueblo do not eat carne on Fridays
(during Lent) which is to say no air breathing animal. Tuna fish salad is a
very popular meal on Fridays if you have a house full of Catholics during
Lent.

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FrankyHollywood
The 'vegetable fasting days' seem a lot like the popular 5-2 diet. Only
difference is these knight didn't need years of medical research to discover
this, perhaps just years of poor health :)

[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2015/ja...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2015/jan/27/fasting-
facts-is-the-52-diet-too-good-to-be-true)

[http://www.bbc.com/news/health-19112549](http://www.bbc.com/news/health-19112549)

~~~
castlecrasher2
The article says the off-meat days included eggs and cheese, though, so not
quite the same thing.

~~~
AstralStorm
Not a lot though. These things were expensive even for knights.

Similarly the usual days did not have as much animal produce as today.

Remember that these people were professional soldiers with at least a few
hours of strenuous exercise a day combined with relative leisure In prayer.
(Compared to peasants or even modern day workers.)

~~~
perl4ever
Were eggs expensive? I thought that eggs traditionally were the inexpensive
alternative to meat, going back a long time.

~~~
oh_sigh
Doubtful that eggs were expensive on terms of cost per calorie compared to
chicken.

A 4 pound chicken will get you about 2000 calories after it is cooked, whereas
the same chicken would lay approx 5 eggs/week, each @ 75 calories, or 375
calories/week. So, it would only take 6 weeks for a chicken to output as many
calories as exist within it, and chickens lay eggs productively for 4-5 years.

~~~
moonka
And at the end you do still have the chicken, albeit a little bit older and
perhaps less tasty.

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didibus
Also, fasting has many anti aging properties. And exercise, which I assume
they got lots of.

~~~
adamsea
“He chose ..... poorly.”

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sorokod
The diet sounds similar to those of other monastic orders. Are monks in
general where know for their comparative longevity?

~~~
zbentley
Yep. Living a (relatively) hermetic/isolated/minimal-external-contact
lifestyle while the rest of the world was getting ravaged by plagues probably
got them a long way. To say nothing of being generally granted greater
autonomy/self-sufficiency without invasion/domination by political orders, and
living a lifestyle that emphasized self-sufficiency and discipline.

~~~
masklinn
I'm guessing the relative insulation from feast/famine regimes helped quite a
bit.

~~~
fouc
Except they would fast by choice? Lent or meditation fasts, etc

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rebuilder
Periodic fasting is quite different from famine, though.

~~~
zbentley
Hell, sometimes they fasted on beer alone:
[http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/25/my-take-what-i-
lear...](http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/25/my-take-what-i-learned-from-
my-46-day-beer-only-fast/)

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camillomiller
Looking forward to the Templar Knight Diet Program. Only 99.99$ a month!
Approved by the Pope!

~~~
mhd
Given the history of the templars, I'd rather sell this as "Secrets the Pope
didn't want you to know!"

~~~
artmageddon
"Keep your army fighting fit with this one simple trick!"

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b34r
Omg that article took so long to get to the point!

~~~
loblollyboy
and what an underwhelming one - they ate meat, veg, bread and cheese!
Sometimes even a lot, but usually not too much

~~~
b34r
Curious why I’m getting downvotes for this

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1024core
> They were not permitted even to speak to women.

There's the secret.

I'm kidding, non-male members of HN!

On a more serious note: "even though it was “understood that the custom of
eating flesh corrupts the body.”

As a vegetarian, I find this intriguing. Why, if it was understood thus, did
meat eating become so prevalent?

~~~
kevinconaway
> On a more serious note: "even though it was “understood that the custom of
> eating flesh corrupts the body.”

The source material [0] that the quote is taken from has a footnote that says
"The Cistercians held that rich food increases sexual appetite"

It would seem that the "corruption" here is related to keeping ones libido in
check.

[0]
[https://books.google.com/books?id=cBqgOXfMxAoC&pg=PA26&lpg=P...](https://books.google.com/books?id=cBqgOXfMxAoC&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=understood+that+the+custom+of+eating+flesh+corrupts+the+body&source=bl&ots=EyMRZ7TvRw&sig=6lDUnDCoK_K9vUUbn2Qzd3hnFak&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjEyvbHsIXbAhWJwVQKHdN8AWsQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=understood%20that%20the%20custom%20of%20eating%20flesh%20corrupts%20the%20body&f=false)

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eksemplar
How can you publish historical articles without knowing people actually grew
old?

Sure life expectancy was low, but that’s mainly because people died young. Out
of 14 children in a royal family you’d expect less than 5 to reach the age of
15, and that was for royalty.

That doesn’t mean the people who didn’t die at birth or as young children died
before they grew old.

If you factor out all the child deaths, the average life expects wasn’t that
much lower for a Knights Templar than it is for you. Hell, if you’re a poor
20+ American, you’ll probably live shorter, even with the help of modern
medicine.

~~~
ItsMe000001
Just to add a link for perspective:

It's not the middle ages but Victorian Britain, so still before widely
available modern medicine, but in this lecture (transcript available):

[https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/return-of-
the-...](https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/return-of-the-microbes-
how-infections-are-once-more-taking-over)

the professor mentions as an aside that

> _And what is interesting, if you take out the childhood mortality, the
> Victorian person between 1850 and 1880 lived slightly longer, if he was a
> male, than you do today. So, your life expectancy at five, in England, as a
> male, in 1870 was slightly longer than it is now, which is an extraordinary
> statistic, slightly shorter then if you were a female._

So it seems to me that medicine's main contribution to life expectancy is for
women (making giving birth much less risky) and for children. The rest of life
expectancy gains probably is from gains in sanitation, clean water, nutrition,
life/work conditions. It seems that the lives saved by antibiotics did't
actually move the statistics by all that much, never mind all the other stuff
medicine came up with.

Note: This isn't saying "there was no progress" (it comes from a professor of
medicine after all, and obviously there _was_ a lot of progress overall), it
is about identifying the specific areas where progress was made, and what
specifically lead to progress in what area. So you don't look at different
groups and strata and not one single population number.

~~~
pcrh
The median may not have changed much, or even the age of the oldest.
However,the distribution has changed significantly. Check out this chart of
mortality curves from 1851 to a forecast for 2031. Mortality curves they have
become much more "square" than they used to be.

[https://i.imgur.com/ONRm4Ep.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/ONRm4Ep.jpg)

~~~
ItsMe000001
My quote explicitly stated that it excluded children and women. What is
included in that image? I assume it's everybody ("persons"), so I'm not sure
why you want to use it as a counter-point to what I quoted. What I wrote
already acknowledged the huge amount of progress for children and women. Of
course the curve shows significant improvement when you include those groups.
See my last paragraph in the comment you replied to.

~~~
pcrh
The chart shows all persons, and all ages. You can see the decrease in child
mortality at the left of the curve, and the relatively small change in the age
of the oldest at the right part of the curve. In the central part you can see
where the biggest effects have been seen, i.e. in the annual risk of death for
all persons.

E.g. for the cohort born in 1851, and who survived childhood disease, there
was an annual risk of dying between the ages of 20 to 60 that was very much
greater than the same for the cohort born in 1931.

You are correct in that most of this improvement can be accounted for by
improvements in treating and preventing communicable disease, and prevention
of septicemia, including but certainly not limited to those acquired during
childbirth, as well as better management of the birth process itself.

------
sandworm101
Something isn't right here. At the time of the Templars nobody ate like this.
Nobody could. Rich or poor, holy or not, food changed according to the season.
Vegetables were only available at certain times of the year. The rest of the
time it would be a combination of bread (grain) and meat. The diet described
in this article would only have been possible in relatively temperate climates
with long growing seasons. But even so, there would have been seasons.

The concept of a weekly diet, one that can be followed month after month, is a
very modern thing. You ate what was in season. You didn't eat meat when there
was plenty of vegetables available. You shoved the extra vegetables into
animals, which you then ate during the seasons when the vegetables weren't
available. This concept of a "balanced" diet between the two would have been
impractical and extremely wasteful.

Also, be careful with the word meat in old texts. The meaning changes
depending on context. Western cultures generally don't count fish as meat but
others do. Similarly, 'game' and even 'fowl' are sometimes not included, with
'meat' reserved for the slaughter of domesticated animals. So a text about
people not eating meat at particular times doesn't necessarily mean they
weren't getting a pile of fats and proteins from something that we today would
consider meat.

~~~
zeveb
> Rich or poor, holy or not, food changed according to the season.

Tha's true.

> Vegetables were only available at certain times of the year. The rest of the
> time it would be a combination of bread (grain) and meat.

That's not. Plenty of fruits & vegetables can be put up for quite a long time.
Root vegetables can be stored for many months (almost a year) by digging them
up and piling in 'silos,' which alternate layers of soil or sand & vegetables.
Apples can be stored in barrels. Cabbages can be covered in leaves, or
fermented. Beans & peas can be dried. Almonds can be used to make milk (in
fact, in the middle ages almond milk was more common than cows' milk).

Christians have been fasting on Wednesdays & Fridays, Lent & Advent for
millennia, well before refrigeration and modern foodstuffs.

~~~
sandworm101
Try storing food that way for a few months. The results aren't pretty. What
survives are carbs. All the vitamins are gone. You have carrots suitable for
pottage, not salad. Seeds (peas, nuts, grains etc) can indeed be stored but
they too are just blobs of carbs. When we talk about "eating vegetables" we
don't mean porridge and dried nuts. Scurvy was a thing for a reason.

~~~
perl4ever
Scurvy was a thing on sailing ships. If it had been universal for everybody
everywhere, wouldn't we have retained the ability to produce vitamin C like
other creatures do - and not lost it through evolution?

I am amazed if you truly cannot imagine a root cellar, just a generation or
two ago.

