Marianne > okay, so just when I thought I was understanding which fats to
eat, I'm all
confused again. I read a bunch of articles by Ray Peat ... he seems to
advocate saturated fats (primarily coconut oil and butter) and to say that
unsaturated fats are the devil! ...I despair of
ever making sense of it all, I really do.

I don't mean for this to come across as calloused or lacking in sympathy,
but why waste your time worrying about it?  It's not nearly as difficult as
you seem to be making it out to be.  Especially with the proliferation of
information post-Internet, you can probably find a dietary opinion
somewhere that shows conclusively that a human diet based on tin cans,
week-old lettuce and gasoline is the way to true health.

So how do you sort through it all?  Stick to simple, basic paleo
principles.  To me, that principle is: What did paleo man eat?  A corollary
of that is what was the fat composition, saturated vs. unsaturated, of what
he ate?

Let me also say this.  I don't know if you have any of this in you, but I
believe that there's a lot of wishful thinking going on about what is and
what isn't paleo.  Desires can muddy the water too a little, since it's
human nature to want to have our cake and eat it too, to tinker with ideal
situations.  As I've said before, my current experiment is with
clearly-non-paleo red wine.  I'm sure there's some leeway, dependent of
course upon individual tolerances.  But if I ever feel confused, I go to my
paleo yardstick.  Would, non-starvation-driven, pre-agricultural man have
ingested (or maybe more importantly, due to lack of availability, been ABLE
to ingest) the substance I'm wanting to ingest?  There's plenty of room for
disagreement about the answer to that question without having to agonize
over the latest addition to the mile high stack of misguided dietary advice
out there.


Jim Swayze