Todd Moody wrote:
>         Recently-studied hunter-gatherers have serum total
>         cholesterol levels averaging 125 mg/dl (Eaton, 1988), a
>         value within the range for free-living non-human primates
>         (Eaton, 1992).  Human societies with similar average
>         serum total cholesterol levels have vanishingly low
>         prevalences of CHD.  Americans and other affluent
>         Westerners, conversely, have average total serum
>         cholesterol values exceeding 200 mg/dl - well outside the
>         "natural" primate range - and, for these populations, CHD
>         is the single leading cause of mortality.
>
> Some of these recently studied HGs would be on a diet at or near
> the all-meat end of the spectrum.  But Stefansson's cholesterol
> was over 200, and Andersen's was about 400 while on that diet.

Do we have any idea what the standard deviation is for the distribution
of modern-HG cholesterol levels? Isn't is possible that those
modern-HGs at the all-meat end of the spectrum have cholesterol levels
closer to those of Stefansson than those of the mean (125)?

> Why didn't their blood lipids return to the HG/primate norm, if
> an all-meat diet is ideal for all HGs and primates?  Two possible
> explanations are possible:  Either the Stefansson/Andersen diet
> was significantly different from the typical HG/primate diet,
> causing the difference in cholesterol, or Stefansson and Andersen
> were themselves sufficiently different from the typical HG and
> primate to experience this different outcome.  Or both, of
> course.

Is diet the only thing which affects cholesterol levels? If not,
your dichotomy is false. When you refer to diet in this paragraph,
I infer that you're speaking only of composition, and perhaps
quantity. But perhaps frequency and time between feedings are
also relevant to cholesterol levels.