Richard Archer wrote:

>At 18:55 +1000 14/10/02, Phosphor wrote:
>
>
>>no, you're telling lies again.  It's a bad habit. you gave the roo example
>>to try to establish that aborigines had access to few sources of fat.  tell
>>me again how much fat an emu carries?
>>
>>
>
>Oh no you don't. I'm doing all the searching for figures here.
>You are presenting emu as an alternative source of dietary fat.
>So you tell me. What's the total carcass breakdown of protein and
>fat in an emu?
>
>I bet you a paleo-beer that the figures show something in the order
>of 20% protein and 10% fat. I'll even go out on a limb and hypothesize
>that the fat profile is *way* less saturated than the full-carcass
>profile of kangaroo, beef or red deer; let's guess at S:M:P of 2:2:1.
>
>

I happened to find the following site,
http://www.indianemu.com/Emu_production12.html, which give the information.

"Slaughter statistics from emu ranchers incorporated (ERI) report
average carcass weight is 80 pounds, with a 53.75 percent-dressed yield.
The average meat per carcass is 26 pounds and average fat is 17 pounds."

Since emu meat is extremely lean (only 1.5g fat per 100g), the protein
to fat ratio by weight is about 1.5:1.  This turns out to be 11.8 kg of
meat and 7.7 kg of fat.  Converting to kcals, and disregarding the small
amount of fat in the lean meat, that's 47200 kcal from protein and 69300
from fat.  That comes to about 60% of energy from fat.

There seems to be quite a bit of interest in medicinal properties of emu
oil, which is pretty unsaturated.  See
http://www.windyridgeonline.com/articles/research.html for example.

Todd Moody
[log in to unmask]