>The human body absorbs 95 percent of the fat we ingest,
>suggesting that this compact source of calories was extremely hard to
>come by in ancient times.  This legacy of our ancient ancestorsí eating
>has created a psychology of food preference that is celebrated in the
>local burger palace. Having existed for eons in an environment where only
>lean meat was available, our ancestors would have found a fast-food hamburger
>a  gustatorial paradise.  It is precisely what our ancestors loved about fat
> - its incredibly rich content of calories - that makes it so bad in modern
>times, when fat is available in great quantities.

1) The human body absorbs about 85% of the carbohydrate we ingest.  The
difference between fat and carbohydrate in this area is therefore very
small, and probably has more to do with the fact that most carbohydrate
forms are locked up in indigestible fibres, whereas fat burns readily than
any evolutionary preference for a "scarce" food.

2) It has long been noted that wild game meat has much less fat than the
meat we buy in the stores.  Unfortunately, this is based almost entirely on
an analyssis of the muscle tissue of the game animals.  This is due to a
cultural oversight; we eat largely just the muscle tissue, therefore that's
all we instinctively analyze in game meats.

An examination of the eating habits of hunter/gatherers shows that they not
only take great pleasure in fat, but they tend to get a good bit of it from
sources that most modern Americans do not eat.  They tend to eat the WHOLE
animal, just as our ancestors most likely did.  They eat the brains, the
tongues, the eyeballs, the gut fat, they suck the bone marrow, and so on.
There is a pretty significant and generous amount of fat in most game
animals if you eat the whole animal rather than just the lean muscle
tissue--which by the way, most hunter/gatherers consider the least
desirable part of any animal.

There is also some evidence of our ancient hunter/gatherer ancestors
hunting animals solely for the fatty tongues and brains, and leaving behind
the lean meat for scavengers.

The Inuit eat diets of about 70% fat and are remarkably free of all the
diseases that are supposedly caused by fat.

3) There is no longer much supporting evidence for the contention that fat
is bad for us, or the cause of any of our modern diseases.  Americans'
consumption of saturated fats remained constant between 1920 and 1960,
while the increase in heart disease we saw did not occur until some time
into that period.  There is clearly no correlation between the increase in
heart disease rates and increased intake of saturated fats or animal fats
in general.  There IS, however, correlation with an increasing reliance on
vegetable oils and most especially hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated
vegetable oils and an increase in heart disease.

In general there's less and less support for the entire idea that fat in
general or saturated fat in particular is any sort of dietary danger for
anybody (with the sole exception of excessive use of modern, processed
vegetable oils).

See http://www.syndicomm.com/lowfat.html for a long list of references on
this point.

It really is time we drive this obsessive, paranoid fear of fat out of our
culture.  It's done a great deal of damage and not much good.

(Feel free to copy this over to the Raw Food list if you like.)