The Paleo Diet and Saturated Fat Intake December 8, 2008
Posted by Dr Dan in paleo diet, paleo foods, saturated fat.Tags: Dr Loren Cordain, hunter gatherer, paleo diet, saturated fat
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I have noticed around the internet lately that a lot of people seem to be bashing Dr Loren Cordain’s views on saturated fat intake. The argument goes something like ‘oh come on do you seriously think that hunter gatherers trimmed the fat off of meat?’ or ‘I hate his stance on saturated fats because there not bad for you’. So I am going to try and explain his viewpoint as best I can. I am NOT going to make a statement here that saturated fats are bad for you. The scientific data clearly shows no correlation between saturated fat intake and heart disease. But the argument is not whether saturated fats are good for you or not. The argument is ‘did hunter gatherers eat a diet high in saturated fats’. What consequence saturated fats have on our health has no relevance in a discussion on whether hunter gatherers ate a diet high in saturated fats.
The current scientific research shows that hunter gatherers ate diets that were moderate to high in fat. However, almost all of this fat came from unsaturated fats (monounsaturated and polyunsaturated combined – not trans fats). Less than 10% of total fat came from saturated fats. This is not disputed by any researchers within the field. This is because wild game has very little subcutaneous fat, and this is the reason Dr Loren Cordain argues that you should trim the fat off meat, so that the fatty acid profile is more similar to that of wild game. Before you argue that hunter gatherers preferred organs he included organs in the dietary analysis! This is another reason he suggests consuming unsaturated oils (with no trans fats) such as olive oil and cod liver oil. Because hunter gatherers DID eat the organs and marrow, and these are extremely high in unsaturated fats. So, if you are going to simulate a diet of hunter gatherers you need to have a diet high in monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. Because most people are not willing to eat marrow or organs, which are extremely high in unsaturated fats, the next best option is to obtain these fats from olive oil or cod liver oil.
Now I would like to restate that I am making no claim against saturated fat. Saturated fat increases low density lipoprotein (LDL) as well as high density lipoprotein (HDL). It is the ratio between these two that is likely to cause heart disease – the higher the LDL in proportion to HDL the higher CVD risk. Clearly, because saturated fat increases both HDL and LDL then the ratio is neutral and so saturated fats are likely to be neutral in terms of health benefits. Monounsaturated fats, on the other hand, only increase HDL and so considerably improve the HDL to LDL ratio, and therefore would have direct health benefits. As such a hunter gatherer diet, high in monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, would be more beneficial than one higher in saturated fats. In short, if you are wanting to simulate a hunter gatherer diet then the current scientific research shows that we should eat more unsaturated fats and a small amount of saturated fats. Until someone can provide new scientific research to refute this I will try to keep minimising my saturated fat content so I can be in line with a hunter gatherer diet.
Food
The surprise is still coming but unfortunately I have broken my camera. Arggghhh. Well it more or less broke itself as one day it was working and the next its not. So until I can manage to fix it, borrow my flatmates camera or buy a new one there can be no more pics of food. I will try to get on to this shortly. Sorry. But today I was down to 105.1 kg.
Dan
I suppose it depends on how far you want to go with the hunter gatherer thing. If something is healthy I don’t see a problem and saturated fats are not unhealthy.
There are lots of things that we do that are not HG but are still healthy.
I’ll see what research I can find.
I completely agree. My argument was not so much that people shouldn’t eat saturated fats. More that Dr Loren Cordain’s view is not out of touch with what hunter gatherers actually ate.
Ok – I understand now.
Greetings-
I am a geologist and p/t consultant/prehistorian for The Paleo Diet and their newsletter, etc. Thank you for the reference to Dr. Cordain’s analysis on saturated fats. Your readers might enjoy his more lengthy reply to Sally Fallon (Weston Price Foundation) on this:
http://www.thepaleodiet.com/faqs/#Misc
I think it is important, as you, that it is the evolutionary template that we are following – and clinical/theoretical/nutritional detailed data is ambiguous and debated even at rigorous, scientific levels.
Best, J.R.
J.R. – thanks for popping by. It has been a source of frustration for me as I don’t think a lot of people get why he says to trim the fats. I think that they take it as hunter gatherers used to trim the fat – which of course is ludicrous. Also, thanks for the link I may post both comments on here for people to read also.
Excellent post. I’ve been arguing this very same point to people, not that saturated fats are bad per se, but that’s it’s easy to get WAY to much of them eating carelessly, and that they’re not something our ancestors likely ate much of.
I believe the estimate I read was slightly higher, at 10-15% of total calories, but still nothing way out there.
That said, I’m off to eat some ice cream, which is neither paleo or low in sat fat.
yes its frustrating. I don’t want to paint them as this demonic food. But I much prefer to get more monounsaturated fats if I can.
Hi Dan,
I’ve been reading Stefansson’s accounts of his time with the Inuit lately. Many tribes spent most of their time inland, where they ate land animals like caribou. Caribou fat has about the same composition as grass-fed beef, highly saturated. Even the coastal Inuit often ate land mammals. They preferred mammals to fish when available, although they did favor seal oil which is not very saturated. Considering they got 65% + of their calories from animal fat, it would be hard to imagine a scenario in which many Inuit groups were not eating a lot of saturated fat.
If you want to include healthy non-HGs in the mix, Pacific islanders ate in some cases more than 50% of their calories from saturated fat (from coconut), without ill effects. The Kitavans, one of the best-characterized healthy non-industrial cultures, ate 20% of calories from saturated fat. They don’t get heart attacks or strokes, according to the research of Staffan Lindeberg. The Masai eat about 33% saturated fat from dairy.
Furthermore, if you look at the controlled clinical trials of the effect of saturated fat on cardiovascular disease (which is supposed to be its main problem), there has never been any convincing evidence that it contributes to CVD or total mortality. The most damning study was the Finnish mental hospital trial, which was so poorly conducted it’s embarrassing anyone still cites it. The epidemiology is inconsistent but overall does not support a link either. Only by picking and choosing studies can you find a link between saturated fat and CVD.
Thanks for your blog, it’s interesting.
Stephan. I checked out your blog also very interesting!!! I really liked it. As for the caribou, Dr Loren Cordain based a study of the body fat composition over a year and found that the saturated fat, and in fact the total fat content, was very low. Other than that I totally agree with you. My point of this post was to explain that his research shows that saturated fat content in hunter gatherer diets was low regardless of what effect it has on your health. But this is based largely of HG’s in the tropics and it is likely that those ancestors feeding on land mammals in the cooler regions had intakes higher in saturated fat. The inuits probably didn’t because of all the marine animals they ate. Thats my thinking on it anyway.
Hi Dan,
Glad you like the blog.
I feel the caribou data have been misinterpreted. If you look at Cordain’s paper (link below), you see that adipose tissue and marrow both have very little PUFA in wild ruminants. The subcutaneous and visceral fat is highly saturated, as it is in modern cows. Only brain and muscle have appreciable PUFA, and wild ruminants have very little muscle fat to begin with. Brain would not have much linoleic acid, but would be mostly DHA and arachidonic acid.
The composition of body fat in wild ruminants and grass-fed beef is very similar. They all have bacteria in their gut that hydrogenate fatty acids, making them saturated. Other animals like birds and pigs will accumulate unsaturated fats to a larger degree, based on the diet.
The Inuit ate a minimum of 65% fat by calories. To obtain that much, they went after the fattest animals they could find, during the fattest seasons, during which the fat would have been mostly subcutaneous. Subcutaneous ruminant fat is about 50% saturated. So I feel that for inland Inuit tribes, their diets must have been highly saturated. That’s not to mention the other nearly carnivorous hunter-gatherer groups throughout N America. A few are described in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.
In any case, canola oil is nothing like the fat composition of wild animals. It’s high in linoleic acid, which is rare in animal fat.
Here’s the Cordain paper, I believe it’s free access:
http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v56/n3/full/1601307a.html#tbl1
I agree that the HG’s in north america would have had high saturated fat intakes. I wrote a post on this also when I discussed that our ancestors in the ice ages would have had to have eaten animals with large subcutaneous stores. Thanks for the link by the way it will make some good posts!
Seems like Dr Cordain has changed his tune on SFAs…
http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-cordain-publication-dietary-fat.html