October 26, 1998
To: Paleodieters
From: Sally and Mary
Subject: Pemmican
Pemmican was a concentrated food used by the Eskimos and Indians of North
America as a “convenience” or travel food. Stefansson reports that a pemmican
ration of 1 1/2 to 2 pounds could support a large man doing heavy physical
labor throughout the day.
From published reports and Stefansson’s analysis we know that the ratio of fat
to protein in pemmican was 80:20. The question we are debating is the fatty
acid profile of this fat. In his long discussion of pemmican, Stefansson
mentions the use of marrow fat as a component only once. Pemmican made with
marrow fat was called “fine” pemmican. (The Fat of the Land, p 192) Stefansson
goes on to say that this was not the usual type of fat used, because
relatively unsaturated marrow fat would not have good keeping qualities--and
pemmican was known to keep for as long as 20 years.
According to Stefansson, “The Eskimos of northwestern Canada believe, for the
caribou, that the fats which resist rancidity best are from the kidneys and
from the ‘back slab,’ the layer on the back that extends from the horns to the
tail and a little way down along the flanks. Kidney fat is the hardest. Less
hard is the fat from the ribs and brisket. Softest of all, and most easily
‘spoiled’ is the marrow fat.” For pemmican to have good keeping qualities,
“Some form of tallow would be used, certainly.” (p192) Marrow, on the other
hand, was usually eaten alone (p 26), usually raw. Interestingly, the Indians
preferred the hip and shoulder marrow which is described as “hard and
tallowy.” (p 27)
The explorer Thompson says, “the fat of the Bison is of two qualities, called
hard and soft; the former is from the inside of the animal, which when melted
is called hard fat (properly grease) the latter is made from the large flakes
of fat that lie on each side of the back bone, covering the ribs, and which is
readily separated, and when carefully melted resembles Butter in softness and
sweetness.” (p 218)
John Lame Deer, a full-blooded Sioux born eighty years ago on the Rosebud
Reservation in South Dakota states that pemmican “was meat pounded together
with berries and kidney fat.”
MacKenzie said that the fat used was “the inside fat and that of the rump,”
and adds that the rump fat “is much thicker in these wild than our domestic
animals.” (p 217) Stefansson confirms that wild animals in their prime
carried a large slab of back fat, weighing as much as 40 to 50 pounds. (p 28)
The Indians and Eskimo hunted older male animals preferentially because they
wanted the fat. They recognized that a diet of lean meat without enough fat
quickly brought on sickness. (p 31)
It seems that the vast majority of pemmican was made with a mixture of cavity
fat and subcutaneous fat. Assuming the cavity fat to be 75% saturated, and
the back slab fat to be 50% saturated (55% in the buffalo), then the fat of
pemmican could contain at least 65% saturated fat--more if only kidney fat was
used.
Of course, pemmican was eaten only under special circumstances. Normally,
according to Stefansson, the diet consisted of dried or cured meat “eaten with
fat.” (p 198) There is no reason to believe that this fat was other than
cavity and back slab fat, given that this fat was easily separated from the
animal and that the marrow was consumed on its own. Hugh Brody (The Living
Arctic) reports that raw liver was mixed with small pieces of fat (p 55); and
that strips of dried or smoked meat were “spread with fat or lard.” (p 57).
Assuming that the kidney fat from a large animal weighs 30 pounds, and the
back slab weights 40 to 50 pounds, that means there is at least 70 pounds of
easily accessible fat that is mostly saturated on a large game
animal--possibly more on a buffalo whose hump is composed mostly of tallow.
According to Stefansson, much of the lean meat from a large animal was given
to the dogs (p 26) which means that the proportion of highly saturated fat to
lean meat in daily meals for humans could easily have been 80:20.
Of course, the hunter-gather consumed organ meats and obtained some lipids
from cell membranes in muscle meat. A textbook on lipids states the
following: “The lipids of muscle and of most of the organs are, for the most
part, typical membrane lipids with high proportions of phospholipids
containing relatively large amounts of polyunsaturated long-chain acids and
the saturated acid, stearate.” (J F Mead et al, Lipids: Chemistry,
Biochemistry and Nutrition, 1986, p 70) As the phospholipids carry two fatty
acids, usually one is a long-chain polyunsaturated and the other a stearate.
So approximately 50% of the cell membrane phospholipids in organs and muscle
are saturated, and only small amounts are monounsaturated. As not all the
fatty acids in the cell membranes are in the phospholipids, total SFAs are
somewhat lower. In game animals, total SFAs in the membranes of muscle and
organ meats is about 40-45%, as reported by the USDA. Thus organ and muscle
meat are another, albeit smaller, source of SFAs in the hunter-gatherer diet.
We need to be careful not to manipulate what we know about the hunter-gatherer
in order to support the current politically correct agenda, which extols
monounsaturated fatty acids from commercially available oils like olive oil,
canola oil and high oleic safflower oil. Just because these oils lower
cholesterol in short-term experiments does not mean that they protect us from
heart disease. Most serum cholesterol lowering is merely a shifting of
cholesterol from the blood to the cell membranes in order to give them better
melting characteristics. When the cell membranes become too rich in
unsaturated fatty acids, due to high amounts in the diet, cholesterol is
driven into the cells to give the cell wall more integrity or stiffness. The
overall amount of cholesterol in the body is not reduced in such
circumstances; in fact, the body usually responds by making more cholesterol,
so that over time, total cholesterol is increased. In any event, serum
cholesterol levels are not a good marker for proneness to heart disease.
The popular food writer Jean Carper recently described an arty meal of arugula
salad with canola oil and balsamic dressing, followed by lean meat and more
vegetables, as the modern equivalent of the cave man diet! From all accounts,
the hunter-gather dined on guts and plenty of grease, not lean soy-fed meat
and designer oils.
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