I've just been thinking about how hungry I get and how everyone here encourages me to eat fat by the spoonful. But I was thinking . . . Grok wouldn't have had a jar of coconut oil or a bowl full or ghee or bars of butter easily available, would he? I know he would have eaten fatty cuts of meat--the fattier the better-- but grassfed meat isn't as fatty as regular meat so he'd have to eat more to get more fat, right? He couldn't dip his chicken in liquid tallow like I do either. And he no doubt didn't have a lot of access to nuts all the time. So, how did he deal with this hunger thing without constant access to fat?
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Steven, the unifying trend of all the traditional pastorialist and hunter-gatherer diets I've been able to find more in-depth information about is a very high intake of animal fat, most often supplemental. The fat is collected from the animal, set aside, and then refined and used for a variety of food purposes. *The primary calorie source of the traditional Inuit of North American tundra, and Yupik/Yuit peoples of upper Siberia, was the rendered fat of their very fatty prey (seal, whale, muskoxen, caribou) which they stored and transported in giant sealskin bags. *Non-farming Native Americans were relatively fast-moving nomads, and hunted large game as their primary food source. They made the kills they couldn't eat fresh into pemmican, which is 70-80% fat. And the staple of their diets through the winter. *The Khoisan 'Bushmen' of Africa were reported to have very high animal fat intake in the days when most of them still hunted and gathered traditionally, and to this day they especially prize the eland (largest antelope in Africa) for it's high body fat which is eaten ritually. Khoisan people who have adapted to the majority local cultures by becoming cow herders are notable for refusing to grow crops and buy many grains to eat, preferring to live mostly on the meat and milk from their animals, and foraged plant foods. *We've all heard about the Maasai; they used to be hunters, but have been cow-herders for some time now, and this traditional diet of milk, cow meat, and cow fat supplemented with some vegetables/tubers (what can be found in dry grassland) is very high in fat. *A huge number of traditional Mongolian herding cultures still exist in the inaccessible steppes. 30% of the people in the country are nomadic herders! They raise reindeer, goats, yaks (kept especially for the fatty milk), sheep, cows, camels (not used for milk or meat) and horses; butterfat is a main source of calories, and they eat a lot of mutton and goat which is high in fat. They even put butter in their tea. Due the difficulty of transporting anything, many eat amazingly little dry goods/Western foods... *The nomadic traditional Bedouin survived primarily on the meat, fat, milk and milk fat of their animals (they call their clarified butter, an important component in many dishes, samn), and on dates. *The traditional Sami people (reindeer herders) of Finland eat tons of animal fat. Butterfat is a major calorie source. Great info on the Sami diet, lifestyle, genetics and disease incidence here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2080452/ Makes me feel like I'm on the right track. There's a lot more out there, but it's basically more of the same. Every (ETA: pastorialist and hunter-gatherer) culture studied which doesn't farm mass amounts of grains or live directly next-door to grain farmers pushing their product on them, gets a large majority of their calories from animal fat. Humans who farm grains get most of their calories from carbohydrate. Based on this I don't see anything excessive or unusual in the recommendations to 'eat more fat' (60-80% of calories). |
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Yes, Grok ate 'fatty cuts of meat'. He also stripped tens of pounds of subcutaneous and visceral fat from every large 'grass-fed' herbivore he brought down, and he and his family made very good use of it. Grass-fed and wild animals have less intramuscular fat, AKA 'marbling' through a cut of meat. They do not have low body fat - most ungulates have great gobs of body fat, unless they are starving. Of course Grok could dip his fowl in liquid tallow. People have been rendering and using great gobs of animal fat for as long as we've been cooking with fire. ETA: If you doubt my claims that grass-fed beef and various wild herbivores have plenty of body fat for the taking, pls to watch youtube videos of butchering said animals. Grok didn't let any of that good stuff go to waste. |
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It's highly likely, at the beginning, us lowly humans were scavengers. Fortunately we were reasonably smart scavengers that could make tools and the like to break open bones and skulls to get at the lovely fat and good protein in the marrow and brains. The other animals that would like to eat us and who made the kill in the first place didn't have the smarts to access the skull and bones for the goodness inside. 2000 calories is about 220g of fat, which isn't that much, kind of like a big handful. As we became better hunters and better scavengers for that matter, we would of had more and more of the kill to ourselves, and access to plenty of fat, of which we eventually learnt how to keep to consume later on. So getting enough fat, wouldn't of been overly difficult most of time. And when it wasn't you'd use your own. Edit: A bit of an after thought.. Another good question would be to flip it and ask, How did Grok get enough carbs? During Ice Age there would of been infrequent and very little edible plant matter around. Fat would of been the dietary staple. |
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It is obvious that 99% of the people on this site have never hunted and butchered their own meat. We always hunted when I was growing up and a large part of my family, that lives farther north, still hunts & fish to supplement meat. Wild meat is rarely marbled but there is lots of fat to be had on most animals, this includes buffalo that my uncle raises that never see grain of any kind. Fat is energy dense so a little goes a long way. My ancestors also made pemmican and some of my family still does, a little bit is very filling. Perhaps the debatable point is the frequency of which fat from animals was obtained. We will never know what our species ate or how much they ate in the distant past, but one thing I do know from listening to stories from our elders is that when you have to hunter/gather food on a daily basis in order to survive you become very efficient and knowledgeable about your natural environment and how to use everything to your advantage. We 'modern' humans have a very narrow view of what we consider food, nature provides a bounty of food sources if one knows how & where to look for them. |
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Organ meats. I may be wrong but I thought the Masai ate mostly organ meats and fed the muscle meats to their dogs.... |
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I think it has a lot to do with how domesticated livestock has been bred lean... I hope that makes sense. |
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He didn't get fat. Only the sabre tooth tiger got fat on humans. Get too fat equals food for tiger. There were no fat grokman/grokladies 300000 years ago. That is why sprinting is in our genes. That is why Wallace and Darwin called it evolution..survival of the fittest. We are a living testament that Grok was not fat. Now we are a living testament of how screwed up our nutrition is. Edit: Oh well! Color me pink! He got his fat by sprinting faster, along with his family unit, than the animals he killed to eat. Ate the brains, liver, stomach, intestines, heart first then the muscle. |
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This is one of my hang-ups with the "eat more fat" camp, because:
So, I don't see the evolutionary support for eating lots of fat and strictly or nearly all meat (again, except way up North and much later, and with a population living a dramatically different lifestyle that we or other populations tend to). While some do just fine on this type of diet, I don't understand how it can be called "paleo" if "paleo" is based on evolution and the real world paleolithic man inhabited. Where most are in agreement is that grains, sugar and anything highly processed are definitely out. After that, it's a smorgasbord of diets. As for scavenging, our closest cousins, the chimps, don't scavenge. That said, they have very different teeth, etc., and there is great variability among primates as to diet, so it's anyone's guess whether we did or not. A lot of omnivores do. What makes sense to me is about 50-50 meat and veggies, reasonable amounts of butter or coconut oil, and fasting or IF as one wishes, but it's not something I plan. If I start getting weird cravings, then I know it's a good time for a brief fast. That's what seems to be optimal for me. |
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I took this from the Archevore blog but grassfed meat has PLENTY o' fat. It's just not marbled. Check out this grass finished Buffalo. Once grok started hunting big game he probably had plenty of access to fat. http://www.tribeoffive.com/2011/04/hunting-for-good-food-and-roaming-bison.html |
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Others have pointed out how livestock has been bred for leanness for at least 40 years (which is about 20 generations in the case of cattle; even more for chickens or hogs). But even beyond that, there's just a big difference between wandering to a fresh patch of grass every day, versus wandering around the same pasture that's just big enough to support the herd you're in. Techniques like rotational grazing and mob stocking help to restore the natural way herbivores eat, but they're still relatively rare. Even wild animals like deer don't eat the same way their ancestors did, since human activity restricts them to smaller areas of timber or grasslands. |
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