Philip J. Goscienski, M.D.
November 2010
There is a common perception that Stone Age humans ate lots of meat and they also enjoyed saturated fat. After all, we're told that our ancestors were aware that animals anticipating hibernation store up lots of fat, so they must have hunted them.
That's not quite correct. Early humans lived in temperate and tropical areas where animals didn't hibernate and never accumulated those juicy fat deposits. By the time people confronted the chills of the European Ice Age their body chemistry had already matured into what it is today. Like ours, it was a metabolism that was poorly adapted to an abundance of saturated fat.
The wild creatures that formed the prehistoric food supply had roughly one tenth of the saturated fat of today's domestic beef, pork and lamb. Those three modern meat sources contrast with the dozens of "large game" animals that Stone Agers hunted. Eating a variety of plant foods that consisted mostly of grasses, not a monotonous diet of corn, those animals yielded fat that consisted mostly of polyunsaturated, i.e., healthy, fats. Even the bone marrow of wild game consists mostly of monounsaturated fats, not the artery-clogging type in today's hamburger.
The grading of beef is nutritional idiocy. Meat with a saturated fat content of nearly 40 percent is considered the best, i.e. prime, whereas that which most resembles wild game with a fat content of about 5 percent is the least expensive, and is worth less.
Americans avoid eggs because we have become obsessed with the cholesterol problem even though it has become clear that dietary cholesterol in moderate amounts does not raise blood cholesterol levels. Saturated fat is the real culprit and it appears in the foods that we eat with our eggs: bacon, ham and sausage.
Some wild game contains trans fat but it is chemically different from that which results from pumping hydrogen into vegetable oils and that is directly toxic to blood vessels.
There were no strict vegetarians back in the Stone Age but they included nuts in their diet. Several kinds of nuts have a moderate amount of fat but it is primarily the healthy forms, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. Leafy plants have minimal saturated fat and the nutritional benefits of plant foods greatly overshadow even this small amount. Like nuts, leafy, green plants provide us with monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats.
The supermarket does have good fats. It's up to us to find them.
Philip J. Goscienski, M.D. is the author of Health Secrets of the Stone Age, Better Life Publishers 2005. Contact him at drphil@stoneagedoc.com.