Dr. Eades on Saturated Fat
 

Dr. Michael Eades had a nice post about saturated fat on his blog today.

His conclusion:

I work for big, huge pharma.

Would you believe that last month, yet again.. for the second time this year I attended a meeting about "metabolic syntrome x, hyperinsulinemia, etc..."

It's funny, now that our big power player drug's patent will exprire soon, we start looking at new science.

I sat in the back of the meeting grinning.


Brad

In honor of this thread, I'm eating a huge steak tonight. :)

Brad

It is a really interesting post. The Sat'd fat issue is a bit of an enigma. Seems like one still needs it to be within certain ratios lest problems arise...but not 100% sure on that.

Robb, I tend to agree. I think if the bulk of fats are of the mono- and saturated types (assuming we're talking coconut and palm oils and grassfed meat fat) there is little to worry about. I think those three saturated fat sources contain far too many good things to be labeled as "bad" by any but the most anti-saturated fat. It's the poly's and the over-abundance of carbs that are doing the damage. Didn't you say that excess carbs are actually converted to saturated fat in the body?

If I remember correctly from Cordain's work, the ratio is about 45/45/10 of sat/mono/poly found in wild game. So, if contemporary HG's eat up to 58% of calories from fat, that means approximately 26% of total calories can come from saturated fat - far more than the <10% recommended by the geniuses in the AHA, ADA, ect.

Furthermore, I think it's safe to say that our ancestors would of eaten even more fat since the contemporary HG's don't have as plentiful hunting.

I think this is too often neglected. The most successful hunting groups ate the most fat. And spread their genes most successfully. Presumably then a high (animal) fat diet is the healthiest one for a successful human gene pool. I tend to think the oft used contemporary ethnographic atlas as pretty irrelevant to trying to determine optimally healthy macronutrient ratios.

Stuart.

Scott-
I don't think humans manufacture Sat'd fat directly from carbs...ruminants do however. I'll have to double-check that.

Stuart-
I was re-reading Protein Power: Lifeplan and Dr's Eades make the point that the Hunter-gatherer lifeway is only about 40K years old. Prior to that it was big-game hunter (hunter-hunter?) for nearly 1million years. Analysis of enamel from H. Erectus, H. Neanderthalensis and archaic H. Sapiens show very little plant material consumed. At those times only select areas would have supported much vegetative material but the point that Cordain made in his re-analysis of the ethnographic atlas was that it would be energetically impossible for plants to play a major dietary role, at least from a caloric perspective. To be sure they played some part with regards to vitamins and minerals but even that may be over-stated.

I think this also brings up an interesting point that we have tossed around quite a bit: How much carbohydrate intake is healthy relative to energy expenditure? What type and level of exertion reflects ancestral lifeways?

Cahones to the wall athletic training virtually guarantees the need for some dense carb sources. Although I've been wondering what role high glycogen organ meats (liver, heart, tongue) might have played in "post workout nutrition" as these are universally eaten first when a kill is made.

Interesting stuff!

"What's your post workout nutrition?"



"The still beating heart of a buffalo."



"Sounds yummy."


:D