dm200 wrote:
Maybe you could enlighten me about what you understand to be when, during evolution, humans (and our ancestors) had high fat diets? Our ancestors were not eating marbled, corn fed beef (hadn't been invented), but chasing down lean, low fat game, foraging fruits and berries (and who knows what else).
I was wondering about that too. According to one article, a 3.5 ounce serving of grass fed bison meat has 2.4 g of fat and deer meat has 1.4 g, compare that with lean roast beef with 14.3 g of fat or chicken without skin with 3.5 g of fat. The wild or grass fed meats have just a small fraction of the amount of fat that corn-fed beef has. I also doubt that they added as much oils and other types of fat to what they cooked. So, even considering that we have far more grain in our diet, I wonder how our distant ancestor's fat consumption really compared. They probably also foraged for various plant-based foods.
As mentioned before, there is good evidence for the health benefits eating a more or less vegan diet. In Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn Jr. MD’s study, angiograms were done on as many of his 18 test subjects as possible after 5 years on a very low fat vegan diet. Of the eleven angiograms done, all had arrested the progression of their heart disease and 8 had actually selectively reversed it. His describes that in his book “Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease.”
In 1990, Dr. Dean Ornish MD did a study using a low-fat vegan diet and had an angiogram done on everyone after one year. In 82% of the patients, their coronary arteries had started to open up after just one year on the diet.
Bill Clinton has recently become a vegan. One article mentioned that Ornish had contacted Bill Clinton after his angioplasty and stents in 2010. Another article, says that Ornish and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn Jr. were his dietary guides.
Dr. Neal Barnard MD has demonstrated the effectiveness of a very low fat vegan diet in treating diabetes. He describes that in his book “Dr. Neal Barnard’s Program for Reversing Diabetes.” In his second study, the vegan diet was 3 times more effective in reducing A1c in diabetics than the other test subjects who were on a diet based on the American Diabetes Association recommendations. Their bodies cells were becoming more sensitive to insulin. Many of the test subjects had to cut back on their diabetes medicine, because of how much their blood sugar had fallen.
As mentioned before, the huge comprehensive study described in book “The China Study” by T. Colin Campbell provides additional evidence for the benefits of eating a plant-based diet with relatively little meat.. T. Colin Campbell also describes his various studies with rats, which seem to show that eating meat or drinking milk increases the risk for certain types of cancer in the rats.
I do not have any medical or nutrition education, but that is what I have run across in several books and articles. I do not know enough about the high fat, high meat paleo diet to be able to compare it to a vegan diet.