"Jim Swayze" wrote:

> Bruce > Unless one eats coconut, they can't get a healthy
> level of saturated fat (45-70% of calories) on a paleo diet.
>
> Huh?  This implies the paleo diet isn't healthy. You must
> mean it is difficult to get a healthy level of saturated fat.

I'm a pragmatist. I don't avoid food just because some
minority reacts badly or believes we haven't "adapted"
to it. One can use such arguments to claim we oughtn't
eat cooked meat/eggs/vegetables, despite 125k years of
regularly consuming them. Some claim (without evidence)
that we haven't adapted to RAW, unpasteurized, unheated
dairy products. Many tribes have thrived on diets based
heavily on RAW dairy and saturated fat. Their children
developed perfectly straight teeth without braces, had
little or no tooth decay (1% or less), and were immune
to the diseases of civilization (esp cancer, diabetes,
arthritis, and cardio-vascular disease).

I have seen Loren Cordain, S. Boyd Eaton, and numerous
other paleo theorists claim saturated fats are harmful,
based on studies that FAIL to isolate other compelling
factors (refined sugars & grains, junk food, processed
oils, high carb, low protein, and other modern eating
habits). Cordain & Eaton also tell people to trim all
fat from meat and eat (lean) game meat or pasture-fed
meat, denying the body of preferred saturated fat. By
lumping saturated fat in with modern processed foods
and ignoring healthy primitives eating diets based on
raw dairy and/or coconut fat, they give deceptive and
incomplete advice which denies health.

Cordain, Eaton, et al. tell us to eat plant fats over
animal fats. Plant fats are mostly inferior to animal
fats, in the same way that plant protein is inferior
to animal protein. Vegetarians can deny this all the
way to the doctor's / dentist's office, but avoiding
saturated fat and animal fat weakens us. We do better
for the saturated fats in our diets. Dairy, however,
should always be eaten raw (or not at all). We have
not had enough time to adapt to pasteurization (100
years) or homogenization (70 years). The benefit we
see from avoiding dairy mainly applies to the modern
processed, and adulterated dairy.

Look at food objectively. Ignore the flawed, biased,
and incomplete advice put out by pseudo-scientists,
junk scientists, and food companies. They lie to us
constantly about cholesterol, saturated fat, trans
fat, polyunsaturated fat, refined sugars and grains,
vegetarian diets... Biochemistry refutes their lies.
Natural saturated fats do not cause ANY disease. The
only bad fats are the polyunsaturated, homogenized,
hydrogenated, refined, bleached, deodorized, fried,
and other unstable, altered, or damaged fats.