Gary:
>>Stefansson
>>also pointed out that although the Eskimos ate some of their meat raw,
>>especially fish (frequently "aged" fish), they ate the majority cooked
>>(usually boiled).

Kirt:
>Practices must have varied since I have read accounts of them thawing
>frozen fish/meat over seal oil lamps. As I remember it much of their food
>was dipped in seal oil before eating. But again, practices likely vary
>considerably--as you pointed out regarding the Greenlanders. One word:
>Eskimo--but many different cultures. BTW, doesn't the word Eskimo mean "who
>eats it raw"? Or is that an old wive's (swapping ;)) tale?

You're right. My old dictionary says Eskimo is derived from the word
"eskimantik" = eater of raw flesh. Still, I think the ones Stefansson knew
ate more boiled than raw. Maybe Ray or someone else has a better feel for
the breakdown.

G:
>>As far as your not being able to develop a liking for meat in competition
>>with fruit, Stefansson points out that adapting to an all meat diet really
>>takes a substantial amount of time (and suggests that there might be some
>>relationship with how young and adaptable you are).

K:
>I have no problem on all meat when I cook it. When I tried to do it
>entirely raw the taste would fall off after a few days generally.

Not sure what you mean by the taste falling off. You mean it no longer
appealed to you or that you actually found it off-putting?

K:
>Since, the Eskimos were the extreme in terms of eating such a high
>percentage of animal foods (the "norm" being what, 50-60% calories from
>animal foods--which means a heck of a lot of plant food still) I think we
>might view them as one end of the continuum in human alimentation regarding
>the animal/plant foods ratio. Isolating a single hunter-gatherer group and
>glorifying their diet has its problems. My point being this: it sounds to
>me that few of our paleolithic ancestors were in ketosis for most of their
>lives. (I'm interesting in other opinions on that, of course.)

It's good to keep in mind that you can get into ketosis withoug necessarily
dropping carb intake extremely low. All that's required is sufficiently
high energy expenditure. The relevance of ketosis to hunter gatherer groups
is a point I'm quite intersted in. In fact, I find the whole process of
ketosis fascinating. It's quite a dramatic shift in metabolism and
undoubtedly involves changes in the regulation of several genes. I get the
impression that ketosis is generally thought of as a sort of back-up system
for the body when sufficient carbs aren't available, but I wonder about
this. To the extent that certain hunter gatherers were predominantly meat
eaters (depending on locale), ketosis might have been the predominant - and
perhaps ancestral - energy-generating metabolic pathway for that group.
Another point of interest is that the body goes into ketosis during
fasting, a state that is relevant to surviving famine and that can be
considered the limit for the longevity-enhancing (in animals) process of
caloric restriction.

K:
>While
>ketosis is probably useful for us switching from high carb diets, is it the
>goal of paleodieting? How many of the listers here figure they are in
>ketosis most of the time?

Good questions. My impression from the book is that Neanderthin hovers
right around the ketogenic threshhold and could go either way.

K:
>FWIW, when I would overdo avocados (esp over-ripe ones) I would get
>"mediciney breath" as my wife called it (kinda like alchohol, she said). I
>took that to me a sign of overeating fat. But no matter how much animal fat
>I eat (whether raw fatty fish, or raw marrow, or raw of cooked fatty beef)
>I have no symptoms of overeating it. Hmmm... This puzzles me since I
>considered that the loss of attraction of the raw animal foods (RAF) after
>a couple days meant I had had my fill and anymore would be overdoing it.
>Now, with cooked meat the attraction never seems to wane.

Since the ratio of fat to protein is of importance during ketosis,
questions here might be: a) whether you eat as much fat when you eat raw
meat as when you eat cooked, and b) whether your protein intake might be
lower when you eat those avocadoes than when you eat the meat.


G:
>>Longer term, the effects of
>>eating too much fat on a mixed diet are obvious.
>
>I don't get it. Do you mean wieght gain. Isn't most of that weight gain
>supposedly the result of veggie oils and processed carbs.

On a mixed food diet, if you eat an amount of fat significantly in excess
of maintenance requirements, you will store the fat and gain weight. I
presume this also has to happen even on a keto diet, but that it's much
more difficult to accomplish.


G:
>>On a keto diet - I don't
>>know. The Belleveue results suggest that an all meat diet is not - by
>>itself - an effective way to decrease total cholesterol, but then,
>>cholesterol per se may not be the fundamental concern it's made out to be.
>>(We also don't know how HDL and LDL varied at Bellevue.)
>
>I'll be curious to see what my levels are down the line if I keep at this meat.

For sure. Keep us posted.

Gary