I've been following this discussion about lean & fat meat very closely.  I
feel very conflicted on the issue of how I should eat and how Audette and
Cordain somewhat differently address the lean/fat meat issue.  I keep
thinking that it could make a difference in my longevity.

I've done genealogy for several years now and have learned quite a bit about
my ancestors and when and sometimes how they died.  My mother, born in 1920,
was raised on a farm and grew up eating lots of saturated fat--butter, lard,
bacon grease (but my moither didn't like and never drank milk and my dad
says her father (my maternal gfather) always kept his pigs lean, that he
thought the flavor of the meat was ruined when pigs were allowed to get
fat).  My mother died at age 53 yrs, 10 mos, 20 days of a heart attack.
She'd had a heart cath less than 2 years before her death that showed 90%
blockage in one area and 70% in another.

Now we get to my mother's paternal grandmother (my ggm). She died in 1911.
She was lifting a butter churn to the table top when she collapsed and died
on the spot.  In the small country cemetery where she is buried, her
tombstone has the broken churn in front of it to this day.  When I
calculated her total lifespan I was shocked to see she died at age 53 yrs,
10 mos, 15 days.  My mother outlived her grandmother by 5 days.

I don't know if there's some hardwired, timeclock genetics at play here, or
whether a diet rich in saturated fats might have been a culprit.  My mother
had high cholesterol problems and I do too.  I used to think that maybe all
the bacon grease we used when I was growing up might have been the problem.
Come forward in time and I  thought maybe it was the transfats (Crisco,
margarine) that we used when I was growing up.  But I don't think my ggm
would have had any transfats in her diet in 1911 or before.  So this takes
me back to the saturated fat issue.  And I don't think I can blame feedlot
meat and skewed ratios, either, though I'm not sure whether the farm folk
might have grained their animals prior to slaughter around the turn of the
century.    It hardly makes sense to me, though,  that my Paleo forebears
wouldn't have been adapted to sat fat.

Anyway, as I said, I'm conflicted on the issue of whether to eat lean or fat
meat.  I usually alternate between the two because I like variety in cuts
and, heck, fatty, marbled meat just plain tastes good and is more tender to
the tooth and less "dry."  (But I do not eat and have never eaten the fat
surrounding a cut of meat because from my earliest years I've just never
liked the taste or feel of it in my mouth.)  But at 48, I have little desire
to join my ancestors in their eternal rest any time soon.

This may be a topic that has been explored on the list before, but I've not
been here but a shy couple of months and I'm eating up every bit of the
discussion and hope to learn more about what dietary choices are best for
me.  It might make years of difference.

Theola