What rawpalaeo foods are you eating right now?

[cherimoya_kid]

One more marrow question. If I had some venison bones would I just wack them with a hammer then get out what I could. I get hungry thinking about marrow, but just not understanding, maybe if I'm holding the bone it will make sense.

It's pretty hard to break cattle bones open.  Deer might be easier.

[eveheart]

One more marrow question. If I had some venison bones would I just wack them with a hammer then get out what I could. I get hungry thinking about marrow, but just not understanding, maybe if I'm holding the bone it will make sense.

Hammer shatters the bone, messing up the marrow. Hacksaw works well - cut off the knuckle (end), then cut the shank of the bone into halves or thirds. A chopstick works well to push the marrow out of slender bones - push from the narrowest center part, towards the thicker end, and the marrow slides out. For beef bones, I use a knife at an angle to take out chunky slivers of marrow. Also, it's the femur (thigh) bone that has the nice core of soft marrow.

[TylerDurden]

Tyler, how is it that you source all this wild game? Do you just buy it from hunters or wild game processors?

   Usually, I get my raw wild game from local farmers' markets as they are so much cheaper there - farmers are the most frequent hunters, for obvious reasons, so they are the best source. I can get wild venison, wild hare and wild mallard duck from them as well as a variety of raw wildcaught seafood. However, these days, I don't usually bother as I have access to a local wildgame wholesale company which  usually sells to restaurants but which also sells to the public. It's expensive, but, there,  I can get hold of raw moufflon and raw wild boar which I prefer.

[Löwenherz]

I'm having my usual:-  raw wild moufflon(thanks Iguana for recommending it) and raw wild boar meats. Also some raw eggs and some raw grapes, the eggs are not organic or free-range by label but are as good in quality, the grapes are nonorganic.

I have not eaten wild moufflon so far. (hard to get in Germany)

Is it very lean?

Löwenherz

[TylerDurden]

I have not eaten wild moufflon so far. (hard to get in Germany)

Is it very lean?

Löwenherz

I don't think so. At least the cuts I get probably have some of the fat already cut off, if there was any. But then again, raw wild game is notoriously lean.

I'm sure there are wild game wholesalers/butchers in Germany who can provide raw wild moufflon. I know that they are available in Austria.

[Löwenherz]

I don't think so. At least the cuts I get probably have some of the fat already cut off, if there was any. But then again, raw wild game is notoriously lean.

I'm sure there are wild game wholesalers/butchers in Germany who can provide raw wild moufflon. I know that they are available in Austria.

Yes, in southern Germany near the Alps you can get wild moufflon easily. In the rest of the country there are only a few scattered very small moufflon populations. Unfortunately the most german "wild meat" wholesalers are very untrustworthy because they usually sell meat from animal pens ("Gatterhaltung"). Therefore I prefer local hunters.

Regarding the fat content: With the exception of some wild boars all game meat available today in Germany is ULTRA lean. And if I understood you correctly wild moufflon is also very lean.

The consequence is that a paleo low carb diet based on (most healthy) wild game meats would not be possible. For me this point is still a critical issue in the whole raw tuber-free paleo concept.

You mentioned several times that a raw zero carb diet brought you near death. I made similar experiences. You need fruits on a constant basis. There is no fruit at our latitude. Furthermore there is nearly no fat in wild meats nowadays. Result: Our raw paleo model is completely dependant on domesticated animals. That is not 'dramatic' but also not perfect in an attempt to find the theoretical perfect paleo world (which is irrelevant, no question). Where did our ancestors in Europe get all the fat from? Have they been totally dependent on Auerochs and Wisent?  Or did they cook some tubers? Tsss...

Löwenherz

[TylerDurden]

I disagree that fat is all that important - and wild animals have always been very lean due to doing exercise, it's only domesticated animals that can build up large amounts of fat. Plus, HGs in palaeo times would have eaten the raw organs as well, some of which are very fatty indeed. The meats I get currently are mostly raw muscle-meats.

[Hanna]

Where did our ancestors in Europe get all the fat from? Have they been totally dependent on Auerochs and Wisent?  Or did they cook some tubers? Tsss...

Hi Löwenherz,

They certainly ate plant foods, including cooked and processed plant foods (seeds (including wild grains!), nuts (plant fat!), roots, berries etc.). This even applies to the Neanderthals:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2010/12/27/fossilized-food-stuck-in-neandertal-teeth-indicates-plant-rich-diet/

We had a similar discussion in Lex´s journal:

http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/journals/lex's-journal/msg49333/#msg49333
http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/journals/lex's-journal/msg49614/#msg49614

[Löwenherz]

I disagree that fat is all that important - and wild animals have always been very lean due to doing exercise, it's only domesticated animals that can build up large amounts of fat. Plus, HGs in palaeo times would have eaten the raw organs as well, some of which are very fatty indeed. The meats I get currently are mostly raw muscle-meats.

Nearly all raw paleo dieters here place most emphasis on fats. But if fat is not all that important for you, then you have to eat much more carbs. Nobody is able to eat only lean muscle meats from wild animals. Or are you an exception?

I think I will NEVER understand your diet.

Lex gives all readers exakt numbers and quantities. But your examples are always wishy-washy. Sorry, but I still try to get a clear picture. If I eat high amounts of wild lean game meats without enough fat I always get in trouble.

Let's say you eat 1 kg of wild venison muscle meat in a day. That's more than 200 grams of protein but only 1000 calories. How many kilos of fruit do you eat in such a day?? How much ultra-lean wild muscle meat can you eat in one day?

Löwenherz

[Löwenherz]

They certainly ate plant foods, including cooked and processed plant foods (seeds (including wild grains!), nuts (plant fat!), roots, berries etc.). This even applies to the Neanderthals:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2010/12/27/fossilized-food-stuck-in-neandertal-teeth-indicates-plant-rich-diet/

Hanna, thanks for the interesting article:

"
From the individual from the Iraq site (Shanidar Cave), for example, the team found that 42 percent of the recovered starch was from cooked materials, though Henry and her colleagues "expect that the actual proportion of cooked foods within the diet of this individual was probably much higher."
"

The question is again if cooked plant food beside healthy raw meat could be better than just fruits. What is your opinion?

Löwenherz

[cherimoya_kid]

I disagree that fat is all that important - and wild animals have always been very lean due to doing exercise,

Yeah, but HG peoples tend to really prize the marrow and fat.  Granted, their diets were probably fat-starved if they couldn't get fatty fish, due to the lack of fat on wild animals, and in plant foods.

[Iguana]

Tonight I had :
- lamb liver
- lamb leg
- a whole fennel
- a whole broccoli stem
- peanuts (raw, of course)
- 3 apples
 

[Isthmus]

Tonight I had :
- lamb liver
- lamb leg
- a whole fennel
- a whole broccoli stem
- peanuts (raw, of course)
- 3 apples
 

Sounds like a great meal Iguana. I am interested that you eat peanuts. Personally I had some negative experiences with peanuts in the past and gave them up. I wonder if you have to be careful not to overindulge in them?

Best,
Isthmus

Edit: Just about to sit down to some rose veal topside (which is butt I think [: ), a lamb heart and some carrots.

[Iguana]

Sounds like a great meal Iguana. I am interested that you eat peanuts. Personally I had some negative experiences with peanuts in the past and gave them up. I wonder if you have to be careful not to overindulge in them?

Thanks, yes it was a great meal !

It’s difficult to find raw peanuts, they may have been heated without you knowing it. It’s also absolutely crucial to spit the bad ones, there are always a few very bad and noxious ones. If these conditions are met and if you don’t mix’em with other foods, you should be able to eat as many as you like : you will certainly know when your body has had enough.

But I had a very strong belly pain decades ago with raw peanuts (I don’t know why, perhaps I swallowed to quickly and ingested one or more bad ones?) and, like you, I gave up for some years. But then I tried again latter on and ever since I never had any negative effects, eating often quite a lot of raw peanuts.

[Hanna]

The question is again if cooked plant food beside healthy raw meat could be better than just fruits. What is your opinion?

Certainly not for me, personally, since I seem to have an allergy or something against any cooked food.
Are cooked tubers tasty if you don´t add any salt?

Tyler eats some cooked foods, including high carb foods.

[Hanna]

Where did our ancestors in Europe get all the fat from? Have they been totally dependent on Auerochs and Wisent?

Speaking of Auerochs and Wisent: Apparently they do not have that much fat. Here is a comparison:

Beef: 14g fat / 100g
Auerochs: 5g fat / 100g
Wisent: 3g fat / 100g

http://rlp.nabu.de/projekte/lfa-weidelandschaft/nabuagrarumwelt/
http://www.moesta.info/de/11000-bison.htm

Unlike commercially raised beef which can be rapidly cooled because its meat is well protected from extreme cold by a heavy layer of insulating fat, bison, especially grass-fed bison, has a much leaner fat cover.

http://www.bisonbasics.com/pastured/fully_grass_fed_and_finished.html

[goodsamaritan]

Maybe the fattest, tastiest animals went extinct first. 

Elephants, dugongs and hippos come to mind... HORSES are VERY VERY FAT.

Our ancestors drew lots of horses.... maybe one of their favorite foods.

--------

I'm taking care of my son so I tasted everything he could eat before he eats:

- raw fish malasugi (he ate a lot of this)
- raw beef barbecue (with honey, garlic and calamansi)
- live oysters (just mine)
- live clams (he ate a lot more than me)

And the 2 younger children helped in cracking open the live clams.  I'm enjoying while it is still a novelty for them to smash open live clams.

[TylerDurden]

Hanna has a point. Wild animals even in palaeo times were pretty lean. They had to be. If they were hugely fat, they would not have survived long against predators, plus they were forced to exercise. This makes it clear that fat isn't all that important a nutrient.

It is true that some organ-meats are very fatty, such as the brain, marrow and tongue, but those form only a small part of the overall body.

As for Loewenherz's comment re my "wishy-washy" accounts, what do you expect? I follow a far more varied diet than Lex, which is also subject to food-availability(that is, on rare occasions, I might, one  week, not be able to buy any raw wild game or raw grassfed meats, so I might just eat raw fruits instead for those 7 days; another time I might eat only 100 percent raw meats for 5 days because I can't be bothered to go out and buy raw fruits etc.

Whatever the case, I think that raw fat is only an essential on a raw, zero-carb diet, and, even there, I think that the overall percentage of fat required is lower than the percentages quoted in Zero-Carb circles.

[TylerDurden]

GS, horses are generally classified as providing "lean meats", being low in fat.

Hippos are also very lean:-

"Hippopotamuses have a great percentage of lean flesh and little fat. Food is used to renew the muscular tissue, it is not stored as fat reserves." taken from:-

http://www.dynamisch.nu/feno/english/e5pigs.html

Judging from online pdfs, dugongs are also considered to have lean meats.

Elephants are claimed to have mainly lean meat here:-

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080309170009AARnUCC

People have quoted seals and  other arctic animals as being fatty due to the blubber content, but, apparently, their actual meats are very, very  lean  indeed underneath the blubber.

[HIT_it_RAW]

Elephants are claimed to have mainly lean meat here:-

Elephants exceed the body bulk vs body surface area rule and thus have serious cooling problems. Thats why they have huge ears with lots of veins in them. They act as radiators to vent off excess heat. Given this it would be very surprising if they had a lot of heat insulating fat

[Inger]

Elk (Moose) that is my staplemeat here in Scandinavia, have very little fat too.
Ground elkmeat has only 3 % fat. Really no fat there.

I tried to live only from local wild meat and berries etc. in the summer. Just for one week, I just got no fat at all. I got such cravings for coconut(fat) I had to stop my experiment.
So there cannot have been much fat around. Of course they ate marrow and brains but there was not lot of these. I guess everybody shared them, and they were looked at as the best parts, as fat was so rare. That is why. I do not believe we need huge amounts of fat either. At least not when eating fruit and veggies as Tyler said.
For therapeutic reasons it might be great for a while though.. to fat-load.

Inger

[KD]

The actual percentage of physical fat deposits on an animal is not important. If you use up every section of the leanest of animal  you can easily be eating many meals of more than 60% fat by calorie. This would be particularly true if your diet did not involve catching a single animal and bringing it back home to dine exclusively on, but mirrored more the actual processes generally available in nature. In a situation like the plains with some larger predators not being able to make use of things such as marrow, humans are very capable - and thought to thrive - scavenging and picking out bone marrow, brain etc... This is not even accounting for other fats such as plants or fats of other animals in other climates. Some people emphasize fat as their main macronutrient without eating much of it (or any with modern folks) from animals such as those found in coconuts and mongono, avocado etc..

The discussion over fat as a nutrient and as a energy source are totally different. Many see fats as the most important nutrient (or just other macronutrients as more problematic) but the issue for most people is energy. People dwell on their own macronutrient percentage of fat because generally when one is limiting carbs in a current artificial climate its going to indicate how much of the diets energy is coming from fats and how much the body is working to get it from protein. Its simple math that if one is eating less than 20%, 10% or 5 % of a diet from carbs and less than 30% of their diet is fat than you are going to be dealing with maybe 400 g! of protein or more DAILY for the average inactive person. with 50% fat its still going to be around 300g protein! Keep in mind in nature one would need to be active, possibly for long periods of time which would require being able to burn fat, OR having a constant and regular supply year round of carbohydrates.

Basically if you took an entire animal even if its BF percentage was extremely low you could still get quite a large quantity in grams of fat from it. Possibly enough to walk away with food for weeks or more. Eating muscle meats as a primary fuel in areas absent of much plants carbs I'm not sure would be a suitable option.

If one isn't eating a large part of their energy as fat or plant based carbs you are inevitably talking about inadequate energy and potentially problematic intake of proteins.

For a modern person its pretty self-explanatory.
a diet of 1 banana, 5 lbs of separated-lean deer meat and 1 deer brain yields: 3188 calories 73/03/25 protein/carbs/fat for the moderately active adult male. This works out to be 500+ g of protein. Without eating enough fat regularly and therefore adjusting to actually burn it for energy, eating extra fat would likely just lead one to feel more sluggish while still burning protein for fuel. This seems to be the justification for keeping a high general % of fat intake unless one is taking in thousands of cals in energy from carbs to offset getting it from protein.

--eating lamb liver luncho.

[Löwenherz]

Speaking of Auerochs and Wisent: Apparently they do not have that much fat. Here is a comparison:

Beef: 14g fat / 100g
Auerochs: 5g fat / 100g
Wisent: 3g fat / 100g

Hi Paleo friends,

wild animals are generally lean. I think that we all agree on this point.

Nevertheless the above average numbers are meaningless. Even a wild Wisent has a fatty tongue, bone marrow, back fat and kidney fat. But to follow a high fat "paleo" diet you would have to kill endless numbers of such animals and waste tons and tons of lean meat. Is this a realistic scenario? Does it makes sense?  People like Lex certainly argue that you would indeed find 'tons' of animal fat in wild nature. Hippos etc...

So, if we assume that animal fats have been rare for our paleo ancestors, carbs must have  played an important role!

AND there was nearly NO fruit, at least in ALL colder regions like todays Europe.

Furthermore don't forget that

a) Protein is a very bad energy source for us and
b) we definitely have a protein ceiling (too much lean meats without carbs OR fat becomes very toxic)

Conclusion: The 'original' paleo diet in colder regions must have been high in cooked plant foods if fruits AND animal fats had been rare.

A diet that consists of a lot of fruit + lean animal meats could never have been the diet of our ancestors in USA and Europe.

I appreciate your thoughts..

Löwenherz

[Löwenherz]

Maybe the fattest, tastiest animals went extinct first. 

Yes, in Europe this has definitely been the case: Wisent and Aurochs

Elephants, dugongs and hippos come to mind... HORSES are VERY VERY FAT.
Our ancestors drew lots of horses.... maybe one of their favorite foods.

Horses are 'very very fat'?? Really?

Löwenherz

[Löwenherz]

A for Loewenherz's comment re my "wishy-washy" accounts, what do you expect? I follow a far more varied diet than Lex, which is also subject to food-availability(that is, on rare occasions, I might, one  week, not be able to buy any raw wild game or raw grassfed meats, so I might just eat raw fruits instead for those 7 days; another time I might eat only 100 percent raw meats for 5 days because I can't be bothered to go out and buy raw fruits etc.

Whatever the case, I think that raw fat is only an essential on a raw, zero-carb diet, and, even there, I think that the overall percentage of fat required is lower than the percentages quoted in Zero-Carb circles.

You may follow a very varied diet (regarding animal food this can only be good, IMO) but nevertheless the thing is very easy. We all here eat animal protein. Beside this we can eat carbs, carbs + fat or only fats. Regardless how many different animals you eat, there are only these three possible dietary scenarions:

1. animal protein + carbs
2. animal protein + fats
3. animal protein + carbs + fats

In this schemata food variety doesn't play a role.

If fats are not so important, your diet logically becomes (MUST become) very high in carbs. And because you don't eat cooked food on a regular basis your diet must definitely be extremely high in fruit.

Conclusion: Your diet is very different from the diet of our European ancestors.

Correct?

Löwenherz