"Jim Swayze [log in to unmask] XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX" wrote:
>
> Marianne > okay, so just when I thought I was understanding which fats to
> eat, I'm all
> confused again. I read a bunch of articles by Ray Peat ... he seems to
> advocate saturated fats (primarily coconut oil and butter) and to say that
> unsaturated fats are the devil! ...I despair of
> ever making sense of it all, I really do.
>
> I don't mean for this to come across as calloused or lacking in sympathy,
> but why waste your time worrying about it?

Some of us are gambling our (short term) lives on the answer to such
questions. I think that's a pretty good reason to waste time worrying
about it. :)

> It's not nearly as difficult as
> you seem to be making it out to be.  Especially with the proliferation of
> information post-Internet, you can probably find a dietary opinion
> somewhere that shows conclusively that a human diet based on tin cans,
> week-old lettuce and gasoline is the way to true health.

Which I think is exactly Marianne's point, said a different way.

> So how do you sort through it all?  Stick to simple, basic paleo
> principles.  To me, that principle is: What did paleo man eat?  A corollary
> of that is what was the fat composition, saturated vs. unsaturated, of what
> he ate?

That's the problem, this is where all the "proliferation of information
post-Internet" sometimes tends to cause more confusion. We can find much
disagreement in the answer to the questions you pose. How am I (and
Marianne) to sort through all this conflicting "information"?

[snip]

> Would, non-starvation-driven, pre-agricultural man have
> ingested (or maybe more importantly, due to lack of availability, been ABLE
> to ingest) the substance I'm wanting to ingest?

And there's the crunch. I can't help wondering if *any* of what is
available to me today was available to man say, 50,000 years ago. More
to the point, is *any* of what was available to him, available to me?

I am unable to find any fruit or vegetable history going back more than
several thousand years. Well into the neolithic times. Ironically, the
oldest claimed history for a vegetable (that I have found) belongs to
the legume family (peas - 9000 years, and beans - 8000 years) foods we
consider nonpaleo.

Just what can I buy in my supermarket (or grow) that is original "old
world" food that was available to paleolithic humans?


Jim.