On Tue, 27 May 1997, Secola/Nieft wrote:

> Todd:
> >AA is also supposedly the villain in farm-fed cattle fat and
> >organ meats.  This is why I have had misgivings about the suet in
> >pemmican.  I still have those misgivings.
>
> Me too, me too. ;) This is starting to remind me of vegetarians who
> consider any non-animal food as good--including Snickers bars, Cheesitos,
> and Diet Pepsi. Will this be what the "popular" version of paleo-diet
> succombs to: as long as its not cereal it's OK.

I doubt that there will ever be a popular version of this way of
eating; it is far too restrictive ever to become popular, in my
opinion.  But that's another topic...

Nevertheless, I do wish we could come to an understanding about
whether suet is unacceptably contaminated, and whether suet from
free-range animals is significantly better.  It would be worse
than ironic if, in our quest to avoid agricultural toxins, we end
up consuming them in concentrated form in pemmican.

> Yet, I gotta wonder, were such elaborate recipes
> (regardless of the difference in ingredients btwn today's foods and wild
> paleolithic foods) as we find for pemmican here commonplace in our
> prehistory; and if so, common for the brunt of our formative years as a
> species or mostly in the late paleolithic? No doubt I'm a few feet over the
> fanatic line, but did our paleo-ancestors double-render/filter the fats of
> grain-fed animals generally consuming a host of questionable medicines in
> their feed?

It's about ingredients, as I see it.  There's no doubt that
pemmican is a processed food, even if the processing technology
is fairly simple.  Rendering fat is a form of *cooking*, after
all.  Rendered fat would have been no more available to pre-fire
people than roasted peanuts would have been.  But I guess the
argument is that cooked fat is chemically still just fat, which
is edible uncooked.

The "questionable medicines" thing is a whole different problem.
The main problem with beef is that the cattle are fed corn and
other grains to fatten them, and their fatty tissues become
impregnated with toxins as a result.  What I don't know is
whether so-called "free range" cattle are fed significantly less
grain, making their fat significantly safer.

> Will folks who ignore the "finer points" of a paleodiet (i.e. searching out
> and eating only high-quality sources of meat/organs) get the results which
> Ray and his family has?

I guess nobody knows.  Is it perhaps better to consume lean meats
such as chicken and turkey, and supplement fat intake by means of
olive and coconut oils?

Todd Moody
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www.sju.edu/~tmoody/