> Not that lean meat is necessarily a desirable thing.  The best "cheap"
> meat I've ever had is "70% lean" grassfed beef.  Just the right
> proportion of protein to fat.
> 
> Jim

When we start to get bogged down in arguments over the details, like whether fats should be 40% or 70% of the diet, we should remember that in the future schools will teach the theory of biological discordance, not the theory of optimal fat percentage. It's best to focus on the important stuff.

For indeed the pro-fat vs. anti-fat debate may be missing the bigger picture. It may be that BOTH views are right about SOME things and BOTH wrong about others. Since there is NOT much intramuscular fat in wild animals, that suggests that the anti-fat people may be right about large amounts of intramuscular fat in an animal being undesirable (think about it--would you consider large strips of fat WITHIN your bicep muscles to be desirable?). Since there IS plenty of fat in the perinephrium and back/hump of wild animals, that suggest that the fat in those depots may be desirable. This fits in with the numerous findings that SOME fat is good and SOME is bad. It's more complicated than either side in the heated debates tends to admit. Since people love soundbites, a simple way to describe it may be:

  Wild, ancestral fat is good and agrarian, modern fat is bad. 

Paleolithic nutrition is much more than a diet, it’s a natural scientific model that can be used to make predictions. We should be able to use it to predict that the sorts of fats that were commonly available and commonly consumed during the Paleolithic era will tend to be the healthiest. So we would predict that fats of wild ancient animals would be healthier than the fats of the animals that are the products of generations of breeding for intramuscular fat and further fattened on foods and drugs that are toxic for them (grains, soy, molasses,  hormones, etc.). When we examine the fats of grain-fed animals we should find less healthy ratios of fats, and sure enough, that is what the data have generally shown. So Paleolithic nutrition is a model that DOES have predictive value. That makes it immensely valuable.

If optimal nutrition were just a matter of all fat is good or all fat is bad, with no explanatory model behind it, it would not have predictive power and therefore be of limited value. It would leave crucial questions unanswered--Why? How?

Let's make the assumption that all animal fats, including farm-fed and dairy, are good for a moment. Why is it that all animal and dairy fats are good? How did it come to be that all animal and dairy fat is good? How can we use this knowledge to make further predictions? The Weston Price model does not fully answer these questions. Since dairy foods have not been consumed as staples long enough to have enabled full evolutionary adaptation, biological evolution cannot explain it. Instead we are left with vague generalizations and the circular reasoning that traditional pastoral foods are healthy because they have been demonstrated to be--with no explanation of why that should be.

We CAN answer all these sorts of questions about foods, health, disease, medicine and human evolution with the Paleolithic nutrition model, which again is why it is so valuable. When you get lost in the endless debates about nutrition and the contradictory medical news reports, always return to the intuitive and predictive model of Paleolithic nutrition, to the ways of your ancient ancestors. Relearn "the instructions on how to live."