Ground BISON!!

[coconinoz]

"If I had to choose between rendered grass-fed animal fat or a vegetable fat like coconut or olive oil, I'd choose the rendered animal fat hands down.  Even though rendered grass-fed animal fat has been heated and some nuritional damage has been done, it still has a far better lipid profile (omega3/omega6/omega9 ratios) which are the primary building blocks for our cells."

i second that

not that i render fat: i can only render some service or help or else translate

luckily, i am now 100% oil free, which means free of heartburn & acid reflux, as well as enjoying non-heavy meals totally devoid of plant lipids, esp. the sat fat & mufa types (which add up to the adipose tissues & cause insulin resistance) & the plant pufa's (aka plant omegas) which are hard to convert to aa, epa, dha

[TylerDurden]

Sully,
You can't dehydrate fat.  It will just go rancid if you try it.  The cellular structure retains moisture and the fat quickly oxidizes (takes on excess electrons, also known as free radicals in bio speak) and this is not a good thing.  You can slow the process down from days to several months by freezing the fat, or you can render the fat at a temperature above the boiling point of water.  Rendering will release the pure fat from the cells and evaporate all the water.  Rendered fat will keep for years if it is in a sealed container, but the relatively high heat will damage some of the fat soluable vitamins like A and D just like any other cooking process.

If I had to choose between rendered grass-fed animal fat or a vegetable fat like coconut or olive oil, I'd choose the rendered animal fat hands down.  Even though rendered grass-fed animal fat has been heated and some nuritional damage has been done, it still has a far better lipid profile (omega3/omega6/omega9 ratios) which are the primary building blocks for our cells.

Lex

I've never put fat(suet) in a dehydrator, but I have let it dry by leaving it out or in the fridge for weeks. It becomes dry as sawdust(sometimes with a little green fungus on it), but it lasts forever.

[Kristelle]

Suet lasts long in at fridge or room temp but muscle meat fat not so much. After 2-3 weeks, it starts to smell real bad and tastes yukky!

[Sully]

Suet lasts long in at fridge or room temp but muscle meat fat not so much. After 2-3 weeks, it starts to smell real bad and tastes yukky!

What the texture like of muscle when it left that long? 

[lex_rooker]

Sully,
Suet is the fat that cushions the internal organs like the liver, kidneys, and spleen.  It has less connective tissue (protein) and therefore is sort of flakey or crumbly.  It is the protien that tends to spoil quickly.  Suet often has much less protein than muscle fat so the spoilage is not as apparent.

Beef fat is the fat that separates muscle tissue.  This is the fat that you see on the edge of steaks and roasts in the meat market.  And in the case of a ribeye steak, the fat that separates the "eye" from the surrounding tissue.  This fat can have a lot of connective tissue running through it (grizzle?), and this is made from callogen and protein and will spoil quickly due to the nitrogen content unless the water and protein is removed through the rendering process.

Both sources are similar in nutrition.

Lex

[coconinoz]

now a little background, in my current understanding, to my previous remarks

afaik, there are 2 kinds of body lipids:
~ structural: animal pufa (aa, epa, dha) in all cell membranes & nervous system; perceptible as flavor in land or sea meat; neither visible to the naked eye or touchable
~ in storage for fuel: sat fat & mufa in visceral, muscular, subcutaneous adipose tissues (10-20% adult body weight); pathologically as plaque in blood vessels or floating in blood; visible & touchable; these tissues also contain structural lipids in their cells & blood vessels

2 main environmental effects on animal (incl. human) lipids:
~ aerobic > peroxidation of pufa & mufa (rancidity); as in ground or cutup meat with or without visible fat (i.e. rancidity of both fatty & lean meat, since both contain structural lipids in addition to their presence or absence of visible saturated storage lipids)
~ anaerobic microorganisms > hydrogenation of pufa & mufa (saturation); as in fermentation inside the cow's stomachs or in a jar culture

this is the main reason i discontinued 2 practices i enjoyed previously: eating groung meat & meat fermentations (high meat & anaerobic)
now i'm experimenting with anaerobic herbal fermentations...

[coconinoz]

re. wild vs domestic dietary animals:
here are some tidbits from crawford & marsh, the driving force, 1989, ch.12

"if an animal is overfed & denied exercise it simply gets fat [excess adipose tissues]. if the process is continued long enough, it loses muscle & depot fat infiltrate the retreating muscle fibers, giving the 'marbled' appearance characteristic of modern intensively fed animals. this infiltrating fat is, like the rest of the storage fat of ruminants, saturated fat ...
"by contrast, under natural or free-living circumstances this cannot happen ... hence analysis of its [wild] meat shows it to be characterized by the type of fatty acids involved in cell function & structure, that is [aa, epa, dha]" (p.222).

"before the enclosures of the 17th century, cattle had mostly been herded in open grass, bushland, & forest. when people began to contain them in fields ... the variety of food that the animals could select for themselves was drastically reduced [alfalfa & clover, which are legumes, within electric fences]" (p.223).

"added to all this was the clever idea of castration, again to make the males quiet & to gain weight faster: but the weight was largely fat -- saturated, storage fat" (p. 224).

"the energy contained in [dietary] storage fat represents about 1.097 times 10 to the power of 14 joules a day, or enough to keep an oil-fired 1200 mw station in operation for a year. translated into candle power [candle = sat fat], the present animal production in the uk provides enough white storage fat for all families to throw away their electric light bulbs. we now eat the candles" (p. 225)

the following is from their table 5:
"comparison of proportion of lean meat & nutrients in the carcasses of wild [w] & domestic [d] beef animals"
lean meat         w = 75%      d = 50%
protein & nutrients   w = 15%      d = 10%
(water removed)
storage fat         w = 4%      d = 25%
[sat fat]

"what is termed lean meat in butchers' carcasses is not lean meat at all. the tissue is infiltrated with veins of [storage] fat, which can account for anything up to 20% of its weight. in wild animals there is virtually no visible fat between the muscle fibers. the only fats present [in wild] are structural lipids [aa, epa, dha] used for building the cells. any surplus fat the [wild] animals have is stored around the interior organs such as the kidneys & the heart" (p.227).

[Nicola]

This was a statement on the "Saturated Fat For Health" Yahoo Group:

Hello Dr. Groves
 
Is this right?
 
The reason any fat (including butter) alone or butter without carbs will cause you to be hungry shortly afterwards is that, without glucose (usually from carbs), the fat cannot be metabolized!  If it is not metabolized, it cannot be oxidized.  It is the oxidation of the fat that produces ENERGY!  Glucose activates the citric acid (fat-burning) cycle.  It is in the citric acid cycle that the fatty acids are oxidized (for energy).

and Dr. Groves answer:

Eating fat causes you to feel hungry shortly afterwards? Not in my experience. Indeed I find that fat is the best food to prevent feeling hungry for several hours.
 
There was a belief in the 19th century that 'fat burns only in the flame of carbohydrates'. It was thought that fat and carbs were literally burned in the lungs as they would be in a fire. Just as that was proved to be wrong, so was the belief that carbs were needed to burn fats. Let's face it, if it were true, how would Inuit and Maasai survive?

Nicola
 

[Satya]

I no longer consume coconut or any other vegetable oil and that includes flax seed oil and olive oil. The lipid profiles of vegetable fats are very poor. There is no real Omega3 in most vegetable sources, only percursors that the body can "convert" to Omega3, and this is very inefficient.

Though Coconut oil is a staple for island dweller's, I'm just not convinced it is the best food for humans - especially when other better foods are available. If you think about it, Island dwellers would quickly exhaust the meat supply on an island so they would have to find a replacement for animal fat or perish.  This doesn't mean it is an optimal food. 

I'll choose grass-fed saturated animal fat everytime over fats or oils from any vegetable source including coconut, olive, or flax.  All vegetable fats are modern additions to the human diet.  Raw unprocessed animal fats are also down right cheap compared to most "high quality" vegetable oils and fats.  I see no reason to include them in my diet and now avoid them like the plague.

Lex is right.  These veg oils take technology to extract.  The sole exception is olive oil, which can be pressed by hand.  I can't imagine making coconut or flax oil without electric-motor machinery.  These oils would not be available pre-agriculture.  I think it is important to consider this when choosing foods.  You know, just because it is a paleo foodstuff, it may be pretty modern, much like most juices are.  That said, I do consume some olive oil, and it is probably less than ideal.  But then, we will all miss the mark in terms of paleo living.  It boils down to picking your poison and choosing your battles.  But pretending that veg oils are a pristine food source is fooling yourself.  Better to eat a coconut or olive than the processed oil product.

[lex_rooker]

Nicola,
I've had some correspondence with Mary on this subject.  Whether her belief that carbs are necessary for the efficient metabolism of fat I really don't know, however, she has done some experiments that appear to support this belief.

I have great respect for Dr. Groves and his experience as well.  That said, Dr Groves has told me via e-mails that it is his practice to eat a piece of fruit as a snack before retiring.  This would certainly provide a few carbs.  

Also, when I challenged Mary on this point, telling her that I had only eaten meat and fat for several years and it appeared that I was efficiently metabolising the large amounts of fat that I consume, she reminded me that as long as I was consuming any significant amount of protein, then gluconeogesis would create the necessary glucose to burn the fat.  So even if Dr Groves comments were related to a time when he did not consume a few daily carbs, I don't know that he would have eaten fat only and excluded both carbs and protein from his diet.

If I understand Mary's comments correctly, then glucose from any source (dietary or GNG) is all that is necessary for efficient fat metabolism.  I'm planning on doing an experiment prompted by Elli where I only eat fat for a couple of days to see what happens.  I'm going to be discussing this experiment with Mary to get her predictions on what will happen based on her understanding of the citric acid cycle model.

This should be another interesting experiment and will post about it in my journal over the next couple of weeks.

Lex