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So what's the truth about Cholesterol

Do you think hunter-gatherers live exclusively off rabbit? Try eating a squirrel, it's like opening a can of grease.
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Would a squirrel be a good source of Fat or protein or both? I got one of the little blighter's yesterday with the car, If I'd have known that I would have picked the little ****** up for the pot, hundreds of them where I live, they are a pain. Sorry in advance to any squirrel lovers, but they antagonise my Dog, he gets quit stressed out with them
 

All animals (apart from rabbits) are a great source of fat and protein.

The "can of grease" thing comes from Taubes' book, where he describes that even if you starve squirrels, they still put on a layer of fat during the autumn.



Here is what he looks like on the inside:
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http://1.bp.blogspot.com/__jFgOqdirRY/R7zhoSa91FI/AAAAAAAAA7Q/-T0L3O498tM/s400/fat+bowel.jpg
 
How many carbs in em, looks like they are going on the menu, squirrel and rabbit stew with celery and leeks and a few fava beans finished with a drop of Chianti :twisted: :twisted:
 
borofergie said:
All animals (apart from rabbits) are a great source of fat and protein.
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That is just not true Stephen, game animals are all very low fat ask any butcher, ask any chef if venison is fatty, not sure about squirrel meat as Ive never eaten one but I will ask a farmer friend of mine who is very knowledgeable about all game as he has shot it for over 50 years. No most game spends its life running from predators and is never going to carry any fat of note. Only modern farm reared animals are high in fat as they are bred for there meat and palaeolithic man did not have the husbandry skills to rear a high fat meat source.
 
borofergie said:
Here is what he looks like on the inside
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I'm kinda worried you have a whole library of pictures of the inside of things..
I'm having breakfast you know!
 
swimmer2 said:
borofergie said:
Here is what he looks like on the inside
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

I'm kinda worried you have a whole library of pictures of the inside of things..
I'm having breakfast you know![/quote
I know spooky in it, best not get Borofergie started on human anatomy? :lol: :lol:
 

No Sid, it is true. Check out the photo of the entirely grass-fed Bison:
[mod edit: photo changed to link. Note that photo may appear quite graphic to some.]
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_w02O4nerCH4/TM9HHTGqzrI/AAAAAAAAALA/AGG35MMzyjI/s320/DSC_0104.JPG

http://www.archevore.com/panu-weblog/?currentPage=3
 
 
And if you still don't believe me, the macro-ratios for a typical carnivore are:
  • <5% Carbs
  • 25% Protein
  • 56% Saturated and Monounsaturated fats
  • 14% Polyunstaturated fats.

So where do you think the 70% fat content of a carivore's diet is coming from if they aren't eating fat?

I might be wrong, but I don't think that Lions eat Olive Oil (unless Popeye runs out of spinach).
 
I might be wrong, but I don't think that Lions eat Olive Oil (unless Popeye runs out of spinach).
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:lol: :lol: :lol: Who says we cannot add levity to Diabetes.
 
And how many grass fed bison did paleo man stumble across? I accept that all animals have fat just as skinny humans do but paleo man could not have lived off it, if you kill an animal for food you dont eat the fat first do you you eat the stuff you can chew and actually eat the scavengers are the ones left with the fat, bone and gristle, not the predator.

You didnt answer my question about venison Stephen?
 

This is a frankly bizarre comment. Do you really think that if you'd gone to all of the trouble of killing an animal you'd just pick at the lean bits and leave the biggest source of energy (fat) for scavengers? If you live on the edge of starvation, you don't waste food energy.

I just told you that 70% of the edible tissue of an animal is fat.
Chimpanzees eat brains first, becase they are the the fattiest part of the animal.
Some cultures only eat the fat, and feed most of the lean meat to the dogs.

You didnt answer my question about venison Stephen?
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I think you are confusing the lean-cuts of meat that you get from a commercial venison, to eating the whole of a wild animal.

Here is a picture of the hind quarter of an alfafa fed wild deer:

http://onyourownadventures.com/hunttalk ... p?t=248674

Not exactly lean is it? By the time you've eaten all the offal, brains and bone-marrow, there is lots of fat in Venison.

I'd also humbly suggest, that what you are suggesting is in the face of everything that we know about how we evolved as a species.
 

I've read lots of books on it. Does that count?
(I'm reading African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity, at the moment - it cost me fortune, but it's very good).

So I guess this means that you are conceding the argument?
 

We're assuming that our ancestors killed the animals themselves. Prior to the development of tools it could very well be the case that we were the scavengers. Also, it begs the question: just how would a tool-less man (we all know a few of those! ) carve up and take his choice cuts to the cave larder? He couldn't. Like any wild animal he would have to gorge on what he could before something bigger and scarier came along and said "beat it skinny". Perhaps the only animals that could be taken and eaten in their entirety were smaller ones?

Obviously evolution would introduce tools, fire and teamwork and the options available to man would increase enormously.
 

We had simple stone tools from the lower-paleolithic (that's why it is called the "stone age") which would have been good enough for butchering. Before that we would have been scavenging. Team-work and simple projectiles are the usual explanation of how our ancestors defended their carcasses.

Access to meat supplies is generally thought to be the reason why our brains evolved to be so large over a relatively short evolutionary time.
 
borofergie said:
Access to meat supplies is generally thought to be the reason why our brains evolved to be so large over a relatively short evolutionary time.
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Agree. Along with the fact that we had more to do and think about than our primate friends. The human brain is currently (over the last 5K years) in the process of decreasing in size and this is being attributed to the fact that we are now so much more reliant on other people. Need food, go to the supermarket, simple.
 

The proto-humans at Olduvai Gorge were making crude stone tools with edges that had been used for cutting. Yes, they certainly would have scavenged (so do lions!) and gathering would have produced a fair proportion of the diet, including some root carbohydrates, grains and fruits in season. That's up to 350,000+ years ago!

Once we were properly out of Africa we spread into Europe as Homo Sapiens Sapiens, what we now count as "human". Much of the time we were pushed back and forth by the various glaciations. I can't for the moment remember the date of Boxgrove Man (Kent, I think - should be engraved on my subconscious!), but there is a Palaeolithic stone handaxe from the Gower Peninsula that dates to 75,000 BP.

Permanent colonisation of what we now call the British Isles didn't really start until about 15,000 years ago, at the retreat of the last glaciation. The cultures in southern France and Spain that produced the most famous cave art flourished around 40,000 years ago. Homo sap sap has had a long time to evolve, and for most of that time has been a hunter-gatherer. We know they were using mammoths (and there were mammoths in our region, look at the finds trawled up from the Dogger Bank) all across North Europe - and mammoths didn't live outside of cold latitudes, similar to the modern northern steppes. There's not much to eat in those latitudes if you can't digest grass, even in the short spring and summer.

Our big brains were developing with us, fuelled by fat, and produced a social animal that learned quickly how to co-operate for survival. The animal I think has the greatest similarity to humans in that respect is the wolf - no wonder we get on so well with their descendants. The earliest domesticated dog so far known in the world is about 9,000 years ago, at Starr Carr in Yorkshire.

At Boxgrove there's evidence of animals (horses, I think) being chased over cliffs - easy then to kill the injured and have a great harvest of raw materials - skins, tail and mane hair, bones, hooves and sinews, as well as the meat and fat. As my great-granny used to say of pigs - "the only bit you can't use is the squeak".

As for game animals not being fat - those in northern (or southern) latitudes have to have fat to see them through the winter. How do you think a female anything - let's take horses - can carry and grow a foal through the winter to give birth to it in spring, fully developed and able to run in less than an hour, if she doesn't have fat stores?

I hate ethnographic parallels, but if you want a Palaeolithic culture living off grass-fed bison, look no further than the Plains Indians of North America. They didn't suddenly start hunting when they got horses - they'd lived off bison for thousands of years before that. Yes, they hunted and gathered and had a varied diet, fruits and some grain in season. But bison was their staple animal - they even made their teepees and footwear of bison skins. They hunted deer, used the skins to make their clothes. You can 'stalk' deer just as well with a bow & arrow as with a rifle!

I can't emphasise in season too much. All mammals living in the equatorial regions, including us, possibly don't need to get fat 'cos they don't really have seasons. Food all year round. As soon as you get to higher and lower latitudes, you have to adjust to seasonality.

The Masaai lived on meat, blood and milk as the basis of their diet. The Eskimos lived on fish, meat and fat. The Australian Aboriginals lived as pure hunter-gatherers, with a different suite of prey animals and resources. All before us civilised Westerners got to them, to give them flour and sugar and alcohol - oh, and our diseases including diabetes! Which was virtually unknown, certainly among the Eskimo, before they adopted a Western diet.

See "Weston Price: Nutrition and Physical Degeneration; A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects 2010, Benediction Classics, Oxford ISBN 978-1-84902-770-0

and Vilhjalmur Stefansson My Life with the Eskimo first published 1913 Macmillan & Co, New York. Reproduced recently by Book Jungle, New York. ISBN 1-59462-651-0

As far as statins are concerned - well, I actually asked to go on statins 'cos I'd heard some research that said they protected against Alzheimer's. I think that has now been reversed - Google 'Stephanie Senneff' for a paper about that. By the time I found that out, the damage to my joints and muscles had been done.

Viv 8)
 
borofergie said:
So I guess this means that you are conceding the argument?
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Stephen, you know me better than that surely? :lol:

As you say you like reading so much Stephen here are a couple of links to some reading matereal that may interest you.

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Mozambican Grass Seed Consumption During the Middle Stone Age

Julio Mercader

+ Author Affiliations

Department of Archaeology, University of Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4, Canada.

Abstract

The role of starchy plants in early hominin diets and when the culinary processing of starches began have been difficult to track archaeologically. Seed collecting is conventionally perceived to have been an irrelevant activity among the Pleistocene foragers of southern Africa, on the grounds of both technological difficulty in the processing of grains and the belief that roots, fruits, and nuts, not cereals, were the basis for subsistence for the past 100,000 years and further back in time. A large assemblage of starch granules has been retrieved from the surfaces of Middle Stone Age stone tools from Mozambique, showing that early Homo sapiens relied on grass seeds starting at least 105,000 years ago, including those of sorghum grasses.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/326/5 ... 0.abstract

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What about vegitaiaians, they claim that we evolved to eat a largely vegetarian diet and they're eveidence to back up their claim seems just as compelling as that of the Paleo crew.


http://www.ivu.org/history/early/ancestors.html

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And then there is this writen by David Katz MD

Fundamentally, I am a proponent of the Paleolithic diet. However, much depends on the specifics of the Paleo diet in question...

The flesh of animals our ancestors ate was generally quite lean, often with fat content around 10 percent of calories or lower. That fat was far more unsaturated than the fat in most modern meats as well and even provided some omega-3.

Prof. Cordain noted that the flesh of grass-fed cattle approximates the Paleo experience, albeit imperfectly. Game does so even better. I concur -- but how much of this is there in the modern food supply? In my experience, many people who use the Paleo diet as justification for carnivorous preferences simply eat more of the kind of meat they tend to find. And generally, they are not finding antelope...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kat ... 89349.html
 
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