How much fat did Grok eat? page

[rubinglen]

Hi, I'm Glen, I just started primal blueprint a couple of weeks ago. I received the book 3 days ago and am about 1/2 way through. Since, starting I do feel healthier, but haven't seen much weight loss. My question concerns the fat content of Groks diet. If he was subsisting mostly on vegetable matter and small game then why does the primal blueprint recommend fat as the primary source of our calories? Wild animals are pretty lean no? Where did Grok find all this fat to eat?

[Legbiter]

Various hunter-gatherer groups get or got anything from 50-80% of their daily caloric intake from fat. In the tropics these groups generally get more plant-based calories than those groups who live further north.

I've been primal for about 2 and half months now and I've lost almost 20 pounds (started at almost 200) but nothing much happened the first 2 weeks. So you're not at all unusual, this isn't really a crash course diet, more like an entire lifestyle overhaul that incidentally can lead to weight loss if you play your cards right.

Oh, and grok on!

[Primal Bill]

i would recommend looking at the nutrition facts of steak, pork, bacon, eggs, ground beef, etc... Even though wild animals are lean, they are still high in fat. If you look at the percentages of calories coming from fat and protein in these foods, i think it may help clarify how they ate 50-80% calories from fat

[MalPaz]

it depends where 'grok' was and what time of the year it was

[AceRimmer]

This high fat brainwashing never stops...
Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets

[Legbiter]

This high fat brainwashing never stops...
Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets

Good link AR. Liked this particular quote.

Hunter-gatherer plant-animal subsistence ratios
Figure 1 (A–C) displays the respective frequency distributions of economic subsistence dependence on gathered, hunted, and fished foods in the 229 hunter-gatherer societies listed in the Ethnographic Atlas. These compiled data indicate that the most representative (median and mode) subsistence dependencies are divided approximately equally among the 3 subsistence categories of hunting, fishing, and gathering. However, it is evident from Figure 1D that most (73%) of the worldwide hunter-gatherers derived >50% (≥56–65%) of their subsistence from animal foods (hunted and fished), whereas only 13.5% of worldwide hunter-gatherers derived >50% (≥56–65%) of their subsistence from gathered plant foods. Of the 229 hunter-gatherer societies listed in the Ethnographic Atlas, 58% (n = 133) obtained ≥66% of their subsistence from animal foods in contrast with 4% (n = 8) of societies that obtain ≥66% of their subsistence from gathered plant foods. No hunter-gatherer population is entirely or largely dependent (86–100% subsistence) on gathered plant foods, whereas 20% (n = 46) are highly or solely dependent (86–100%) on fished and hunted animal foods.

Bolding is mine.

So the take-home lesson from this study is...eat ALOT of dead animals.

[Hedonist]

it depends where 'grok' was and what time of the year it was

+1

[Lewis]

Wild animals are pretty lean no?

Yes, "no", as you say.

That is to say they are not all lean. For example, you can render 15 (fifteen) gallons of oil from the fat of a black bear—which North American Indians did. By no stretch of the imagination can one call that "lean".

There are plenty of other animals carrying plenty of fat and you also have to remember that people chose to kill the oldest and largest, therefore fattest, animals. Analysis of bone material from the Upper Palaeolithic shows that they did to such an extent that they succeeded, over many generations, in causing some herd animals to get smaller. Of course, they went for the big animals—and they did that for the fat. Stefansson mentions slabs of back-fat on caribou weighing 40 (forty) lbs.

In addition, people took the fattest cuts from carcasses. This can be seen from kill-sites, where the remains of bones show that some cuts have been taken away (not surprisingly, the ones with the fattest cuts on them), much of the rest of carcass being simply abandoned, left in situ.

People saying that people in the remote past must have eaten lean meat is sheer ignorance. Such a view couldn't survive even a modest acquaintance with some off the ethnographic source material collected over the past 400 years or so, detailing the lives of hunter-gatherers. (And things would have been no different in the remote past). Here's Jewitt, a captured seaman, on the headhunters of Nootka Sound:

Their mode of living is very simple. their food consists almost entirely of fish, or fish spawn fresh or dried, the blubber of the whale, seal or sea cow, mussels, clams and berries. All of these are eaten with whale oil for sauce.

Early Canadiana Online - Item Record

The diets of Plains Indians have been described as consisting of "guts and grease":

Guts and Grease: The Diet of Native Americans - Weston A Price Foundation

This absurd mythology of low-fat hunters is merely a counter-factual attempt to write the ideology of the 7 countries/diet-heart hypothesis back into the remote past. Since the 7 countries/diet-heart hypothesis is absolute balderdash anyway, there could be no more ridiculous pursuit.

[Grumpycakes]

If he was subsisting mostly on vegetable matter and small game

Who said anything about small game?

[Hedonist]

Primal is not a high fat diet. It is simply pre-1970s, before fads like low fat, low cholesterol, high whole grains and avoid the sun started ruining our health.

Many of us came from vegan, vegetarian or low fat/cholesterol diets. Our bodies need plenty of fat to heal. After that, we may need and want less, dropping to a moderate level of fat eating.

Get some saturated fat and do what works for you.