I was doing some searching around last night trying to find a new source for grassfed beef because my beloved Thundering Hoooves went tits up, and I stumbled across this interesting article by Sally Fallon and Dr. Mary Enig:

http://www.whiteoakpastures.com/Its_the_Beef.html

"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."30 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% to 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've been noticing a lot of posts by people saying they are eating tons of lean meat and veggies and then get sick, and blame it on "paleo". Are they perhaps suffering from fat hunger aka rabbit fever? People are usually quick to chime in with suggestions of adding enough fat to restore wellness, but I feel like some sort of "paleo psa" could avert the suffering to begin with. Or maybe people are just too socially conditioned to fear fat and it takes a lot of personal experimenting and even illness to overcome that fear.