Hope you see this but do you have a source. All I could find is that it’s about 40% saturated

http://www.springerlink.com/content/p01g743kp80r1u3r/

Not like that harms the point, but I just want to be correct before putting things out there.

I would think that the health of people in India, (if they indeed are vegetarians) have more to do with the things they aren’t consuming, rather then the things they are consuming.

Peter, you may also be unaware that Cordain is backpedaling on sat fat. See the 4th item here:

http://freetheanimal.com/2009/10/more-links-quick-hits.html

Flax oil??

Are you serious? Flax oil is linseed oil – mechanically extracted from flaxseed and used in paints and varnishes. Even if you do eat it, the efficiency of conversion of the ALA to the n-3 s we need in our cell membranes is so low you’d have to drink a pint of it.

Just avoid eating processed vegetable oils and little if any supplementation should be required.

What the hell is paleolithic about eating linseed oil better suited to furniture refininishing?

“The paleo diet” is a book of confirmation bias. If you read GCBC first like I did, you will see what I mean. It was decided a priori that saturated fat and salt are bad, end then these premises were used to filter a “paleolithic principle” to get a politicially correct diet book that would not irritate cardiologists.

How does Cordain know that paleolithic men were careful to eat equal parts of the carcass by volume to purposefully “avoid” excess sat fats from the tastier parts that had more fat? That is pure speculation and defies both logic and evidence from modern age HGs.

The Pelvis reduction would have come up because we were getting very good at hunting large animals, and were getting a lot of fat quite easily. We probably did not need the canines because we were softening up the meat by beating it up with tools. We must have become predominately carnivores, and had been getting very little calories from plant matter, this would have resulted in less need for the large gut. Notice that carnivorous animals have very small pelvises. So it need not have anything to do with cooking.

This does not mean that our brains became as large as they are now at that time. This must have happened when we incorporated starch, which allowed substantially higher glucose, and must have helped the brain to grow.

We might have stopped fearing the fire by 1.8million years, and may have started using it and keeping it alive, whenever we found it, but it would not be a reliable source.

It is pretty clear that these paleo-times humans would have spent a good portion of each year living on high saturated fat animal sourced foods. There is just not much else to eat! Even in the height of summer/fall fruit seasons, there are precious few chokecherries, elderberries, tart little crab apples and such. A few starchy roots and some edible bulbs.

I just intuitively think that humankind in these northern climes, had a good life eating from the animal world, and that would mean lots of sat fat, humans were never dumb, they exploited the riches available. Think about the world around you, where you live now. What would you be eating on a cold November day in the sage brush covered steppes at 7,500 feet in wind swept Laramie, Wyoming? Probably some meat.