On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, Phosphor wrote:

> The point is
> > simple enough: paleo meats tended to be lean
>
> no they don't, as i explained at some painstaking length to Amadeus, since
> nearly all animals must fatten up at some point in the year to account for
> lean times ahead or mating/nesting behaviours. they are indeed lean at some
> times, but they are hunted precisely when they are fat. this is not a
> difficult concept.

For most animals, this fattening up period is in the late fall,
so the animals can get through the winter.  This is when deer are
the fattest, for example.  But even then, the deer *meat* remains
lean.  The added fat is deposited elsewhere on the body.  The
composition of deposit fat is different from that of the
intramuscular fat of fatty meat -- which is why suet works better
than drippings for making pemmican.  The same is true of bear
meat, which is very lean, even though the bear has large fat
deposits.  Fatty meat, in large animals, is mainly the result of
giving animals amounts and kinds of feed that they would never
eat in the wild.

> the balance of omega 3/6s I grant is likely to be
> somewhat different, but the amount of omega 6s will still be far less than
> in most cereal grains. The logical way to balance this is doing what paleo
> man actually did to get his omega 3s and eat fish oils from flesh and liver.

Liver is not a good fat source.  Omega 3s in fish are mainly in
cold water fish, which paleo man didn't eat until the mesolithic
period.  I agree that such fish is a good omega 3 source, but it
is as foreign to the actual paleolithic diet as flax oil.

Todd Moody
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