"Eat Like A Predator, Not Like Prey": Paleo In Six Easy Steps, A Motivational Guide

I just found these guys over the weekend http://www.utahnaturalmeat.com/ and am considering pulling the trigger on a 1/4 cow and 1/2 a pig ($3.50/lb hanging weight, seems like a pretty good deal). Here's what they recommend for freezer space:

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Frequently Asked Questions


1. How much freezer space do I need for beef and chicken? A whole cow takes up about 10 cubic feet of freezer space, which equates to a half using about 5 cubic feet and a quarter about 3 cubic feet. For chicken you can store about two chickens per cubic foot. They are similar to storing a football in the freezer. They're just kind of an odd shape and take up a little more room.

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Originally Posted by Rontele

As another affirmation of this diet, for various reasons, I ate grains and dairy this weekend and now feel like shit today :D

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Well I ate grains and dairy on the weekend and feel great. My N=1 is greater than your N=1!

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Originally Posted by DeutschBag

Thank you f My first big step is to quit eating breakfast cereals such as grape nuts or any type of granola (which is so popular here in Germany) and start eating more eggs and meats at breakfast.

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I been doing 1 egg every morning maybe some landyaeger sausage for the last year, I find I don't need to eat much cuz the protien satisfys so I have lost weight and I find it easy to maintain that change in diet

I DO eat the cereal either museli and/or fibre1 but I eat it at night with yogurt and what it does is keep me regular every morning

Somebody with some more knowledge may be able to give you better info, but here's what I was told in an email from Polyface.

"Freezer Space estimate on each quarter is 2 shelves of a standard upright freezer or 1- 1 1/2 48-quart coolers."

In the case of dry-cooked cuts, it's easier to overcook, but if you like your steaks/chops bloody, you wont' have a problem. The ground we get is usually in the 20-25% range, so overcooking isn't a major issue there either. I haven't had to make any adjustments for roasts or other long-cooked cuts.

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Originally Posted by hafilax

Well I ate grains and dairy on the weekend and feel great. My N=1 is greater than your N=1!

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I usally take Saturday dinner off regardless. But this weekend was the perfect storm of shitty weather, family health issues and a stressful work environment. :)

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Originally Posted by Rontele

I usally take Saturday dinner off regardless. But this weekend was the perfect storm of shitty weather, family health issues and a stressful work environment. :)

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Stress and sleep which are themselves correlated have a greater impact on how I feel than what I ate. IME, binging on grains is a small perturbation when compared to those two. Still, anything helps and I try to eat well.

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Originally Posted by Rontele

As another affirmation of this diet, for various reasons, I ate grains and dairy this weekend and now feel like shit today :D

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Originally Posted by hafilax

Well I ate grains and dairy on the weekend and feel great. My N=1 is greater than your N=1!

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I ate a couple of bowls of cereal two different times this weekend and felt a bit of "head dead" (not sure if that's an expression other people use or just something I"ve incorporated into my lexicon from the somewhat broken English my wife speaks) shortly thereafter. (It was pretty tasty, though.) I also ate eggs, bacon and sausage for breakfast both days and didn't feel any "head dead," though I did feel somewhat fat, probably as a consequence of the fact that I really ate a lot of food. (It was also tasty.) I believe that this data, together with that provided by Rontele and hafilax, is conclusive proof.

More seriously ...

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Originally Posted by hafilax

Stress and sleep which are themselves correlated have a greater impact on how I feel than what I ate. IME, binging on grains is a small perturbation when compared to those two. Still, anything helps and I try to eat well.

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Very true for me, too.

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Originally Posted by woodstocksez

I've given careful consideration to your thoughtful post.

????????????????

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I guess I didn't express myself well. I'm saying I agree with you 100% here. And spats' response and his impulse to "rebut" specifics of content show that he doesn't understand what you're saying at all, and I think it would behoove him to.

A study that shows that people doubling their grain intake results in decreased health certainly does not support "eat more grains, die sooner"

http://www.gnolls.org/715/when-the-c...initely-paleo/
Cordain most certainly has the better interpretation of the data and this blog post proves absolutely nothing.

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Because subcutaneous and abdominal body fat stores are depleted during most of the year in wild animals, PUFAs and MUFAs ordinarily constitute most of the total carcass fat (11). [False: half the carcass is SFA. 47%/53% and 49%/51% equal 1/2 within the precision of their data set.]

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Splitting hairs. 53% is the majority of the fat and he defines dominant as being strictly >50% in the sentence you conveniently left out. 47% is about half. You just rounded the opposite way since it suits your argument. He may be guilty of the same but it doesn't really make your case.

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MUFAs and PUFAs are the dominant fats in the edible carcass of caribou for all 12 mo of the year, as illustrated in Figure 6 (11, 60-65). [False again: as shown above, there is as much SFA as MUFA and PUFA combined.]

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Same as above. There is slightly less SFA.

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Because of the seasonal cyclic depletion of SFAs and enrichment of PUFAs and MUFAs, [What seasonal depletion? 49% to 47% is insignificant, being well within the rounding error of the percentages they use in the table]

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The table is for 1 specific animal. He references a paper which discusses the issue in detail and not just based on a single animal's fat content. I have the feeling that he's not telling the whole story and knows more about the distribution of the fat and what is eaten than what these average numbers indicate. I'm also not sure of how one can use this data for cooked meat which can lose significant amounts of fat.

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a year-round dietary intake of high amounts of SFAs would have not been possible for preagricultural hominins preying on wild mammals. [False again! Even the leanest animals, in April, provide over 30% of their edible calories from fat -- and October meat provides 82% of calories from fat! This means that, on average, caribou hunters are obtaining over half their calories from fat.]

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This is assuming that 100% of their calories come from game year round and that game availability is constant. Especially in northern climates with migrating herds the availability of meat would have varied by huge amounts. There is not a 1-1 correspondence between the game fat content and the percentage of fat in the diet.

If anything, Cordain probably is guilty of cherry picking the caribou as a lean meat example given that another name for Rabbit Starvation is Mal de Caribou (aka protein poisoning). Early explorers became sick from eating a diet of lean caribou and yes they ate the fat. It sounds like the dominant mechanism is the limit of how much glucose the liver can produce from protein. When dietary energy and fat stored in the body run low, the body can only produce so much glucose from protein which is barely enough to live.

Where your argument falls flat is the comparison to the grain fed cow if the page you link is representative. Sure the fat percentages are similar but the numbers say 794 out of 1125 calories are fat. 70% of the carcass energy is in fat and there are 0 seasonal fluctuations. Even though grass fed cattle are better they still have not-so-great fat profiles when you look at the details.

My interpretation of Cordain's argument is that the amount of fat available to us from commercial beef is significantly higher than what was available to HG and that the distribution of the fats is not good for us. This does mean that we shouldn't eat fat but that we shouldn't eat all that is available to us. Even lean cuts of grass fed beef will have a high fat content when compared to game in the lean seasons. Indigenous people eat all of the fat when they can but they have no more of a steady supply of fat than they do meat.

The HG would have gone through seasonal weight fluctuations as well, putting on fat when the game was fat and plentiful and losing it in the poor seasons. Animal husbandry changed all that and now we have a steady supply of fat meat from obese cows, even if they are free range and grain fed. It's not just the slabs of fat either. Feedlot meat is engineered to be marbled with loads of fat in the muscle. It is ridiculous to assume that we should eat like the HG did in the fat gaining season all the time. Even a lot of the game meats are farmed and will have a higher average fat content than their wild and hunted counterparts.

TL;DR Eat your fat but understand how much fat you're eating.

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Originally Posted by ilikecandy

A study that shows that people doubling their grain intake results in decreased health certainly does not support "eat more grains, die sooner"

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Help me out. Are you referring to the Helsinki study mentioned above?

What do you think about the question I asked before? Is a single controlled study commonly taken as dispositive proof of a "fact" in scientific investigation (particularly one as seemingly sweeping and extravagant - to my layperson's eye - as "eating more whole grains makes you die sooner")?

How about this question: does performing a controlled study mean that you eliminate with certainty any effects/relationships/interactions other than the one you're attempting to study?

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Originally Posted by Dantheman

I just found these guys over the weekend http://www.utahnaturalmeat.com/ and am considering pulling the trigger on a 1/4 cow and 1/2 a pig ($3.50/lb hanging weight, seems like a pretty good deal). Here's what they recommend for freezer space:

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That's a Corriente though and they can be smaller. I was told that my half would be about 400 pounds (hanging weight). I also just saw somewhere that you can get about 35 lbs of meat per cubic foot if it's packed pretty well.

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Originally Posted by woodstocksez

Help me out. Are you referring to the Helsinki study mentioned above?

What do you think about the question I asked before. Is a single controlled study commonly taken as dispositive proof of a "fact" in scientific investigation (particularly one as seemingly sweeping and extravagant - to my layperson's eye - as "eating more whole grains makes you die sooner")?

How about this question: does performing a controlled study mean that you eliminate with certainty any effects/relationships/interactions other than the one you're attempting to study?

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Obviously no, and those are important issues that the fanatics need to face.

But you don't even need to go that far. Salt mind I think and others are arguing that a small, but discrete, amount if grains is helpful/ideal. Using that Helsinki study to disprove that shows a major failure in logic. Spats is seeing results that may SUPPORT his point, and mistakenly thinking they prove it

edit: i'm being unclear again. my problem is not that the study is not enough to prove his point, which is true. my problem is that it seems to me to support the point he is trying to rebut at least, and probably more than, his own, i.e., that a small but DISCRETE amount of grains is a good thing

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Originally Posted by zion zig zag

I also just saw somewhere that you can get about 35 lbs of meat per cubic foot if it's packed pretty well.

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They say their whole Corrientes are typically 350-450 lbs hanging and recommend 10 cubic feet so 35lbs/cubic ft sounds about right.

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Originally Posted by Dantheman

They say their whole Corrientes are typically 350-450 lbs hanging and recommend 10 cubic feet so 35lbs/cubic ft sounds about right.

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I don't know how lean they are but wouldn't 400 lbs hanging yield about 250-300 pounds of meat?

Yeah, they say to plan on about 70% yield. 35 lbs/ft seems like a good planning number for freezer purchasing.

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Originally Posted by SaltMind

My main assertion is that whole grains are a net positive when consumed in moderate amounts ...

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Originally Posted by ilikecandy

A study that shows that people doubling their grain intake results in decreased health certainly does not support "eat more grains, die sooner"

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Originally Posted by ilikecandy

... Salt mind I think and others are arguing that a small, but discrete, amount if grains is helpful/ideal. Using that Helsinki study to disprove that shows a major failure in logic. Spats is seeing results that may SUPPORT his point, and mistakenly thinking they prove it

edit: i'm being unclear again. my problem is not that the study is not enough to prove his point, which is true. my problem is that it seems to me to support the point he is trying to rebut at least, and probably more than, his own, i.e., that a small but DISCRETE amount of grains is a good thing

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OK, I think I get what you're saying there at the end, and I didn't before. (I didn't see stated above what I understand you to be giving as the conclusion of the Helsinki study, and I didn't click the link to read more, but stipulating that it is ...) Is the following it? Doubling grain intake is not consumption in a moderate amount; it's excessive consumption. So, not only does that study not undermine Saltmind's contention, you could view it as suggesting support for Saltmind's contention, since excessive consumption was required to produce deleterious effects.

i don't have the attention span to read through this entire thread right now. anybody care to comment on the big picture differences between paleo diet and the general diet promoted by the weston price foundation?

tia

I've got a great butcher just down the road from me that I visited for the first time today. I bought 500g of ground and mixed hamburger/pork (that's very common in Germany), 10 slices of premium speck (bacon) to eat with my eggs in the morning, and 5 steak filets with the fat left on. Not sure what the cut was because I simply don't have all the meat jargon down auf Deutsch yet. I did try to ask the butcher if the beef was grass fed or ate corn and he just looked at me funny. I don't think my German was up to par, but he finally got it. He said 'of course they eat outside from the ground'. Good enough, I guess. I then asked if the cattle was injected with hormones. I got another weird look and he just shook his head and said 'it's healthier than in America and it's all local from this area'. I told him I'd be a regular customer and just lived down the way and this made him happy.

I get my blood tested regularly for my uric acid measurements for my gout. I'll ask for my cholestorol and other relevant figures the next time I go in too. Might as well keep track of that as well.

I'll report back after a week or so. So far, it's been great eating more meat! Can't wait to eat the speck tomorrow morning!

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Originally Posted by bodywhomper

i don't have the attention span to read through this entire thread right now. anybody care to comment on the big picture differences between paleo diet and the general diet promoted by the weston price foundation?

tia

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If you can't take the time to read and gain knowledge about a certain diet, something tells me you don't have the intestinal fortitude to stick to any type of diet.

Paleo: no grains, no beans, no dairy
WP: limited grains, limited beans, limited dairy
Both: Eat real food

chicken with hot sauce and a texas hamburger for lunch today - threw out the bun of course. haven't experianced that in a few years, nice. overall doing ok with it; really trying to cut those pastas, cereals, breads and doing good so far - and pounding the veggies/fruits.

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Originally Posted by hafilax

Paleo: no grains, no beans, no dairy
WP: limited grains, limited beans, limited dairy
Both: Eat real food

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thanks.

gameface, i appreciate your assumptions about me and my dumb fat ass :P

i'm going to the gym. the machines there allow me to exceed a certain level w/o destroying my old joints. many of them have a limited range of motion, which allows me to strengthen the muscles around joints which also only have a limited range of motion.
plus, there's hot chicks

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Originally Posted by powdork

i'm going to the gym. the machines there allow me to exceed a certain level w/o destroying my old joints. many of them have a limited range of motion, which allows me to strengthen the muscles around joints which also only have a limited range of motion.
plus, there's hot chicks

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This is purely IMHO based on things I've read here and there and personal experience... MACHINES = BAD, *exactly* for the reasons you mentioned:

You "exceed" a certain level by strengthening a specific 'large' muscle (i.e. bis, tris, chest, quads maybe) without strengthening any of the supporting muscles because the movement is isolated and mostly supported by the machine. You end up strengthening this one specific muscle beyond what your ligaments & supportive muscles can handle which in turn leads to damage to the joint, exactly the opposite of what you would expect/were hoping for. By limiting the range of motion you help shorten the muscle causing imbalances and chronic tension/compression which leads to further problems/inflammation/stiffness. IMHO, you're MUCH better off doing free weight, olympic lifts, and power lifts, starting off with light weights & learning good form, rather than working on machines.

Plus, hot chicks dig sweaty grunting men clean & jerking 225lbs ;)

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Originally Posted by BurnHard

This is purely IMHO based on things I've read here and there and personal experience... MACHINES = BAD, *exactly* for the reasons you mentioned:

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Jesus, what, the one argument in this thread wasn't enough for you?

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Originally Posted by iceman

Jesus, what, the one argument in this thread wasn't enough for you?

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If you argue for arguments sake then one argument per thread might be enough, but I'm actually interested in the topic & welcome arguments/opposing ideas so :the_finge

I'm just looking forward to this thread sinking out of sight is all.

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Originally Posted by iceman

I'm just looking forward to this thread sinking out of sight is all.

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Bump.:the_finge

Any Paleo menus for those of us that like direction.

The photo of the dinner of eggs meat and peppers was a good start.

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Originally Posted by DasBlunt

Any Paleo menus for those of us that like direction.

The photo of the dinner of eggs meat and peppers was a good start.

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How hard is it? Just go out with your spear and cook anything you catch over your camp fire.

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Originally Posted by iceman

I'm just looking forward to this thread sinking out of sight is all.

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Reminds you too much of the days before you were frozen into the ice?

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Originally Posted by DasBlunt

Any Paleo menus for those of us that like direction.

The photo of the dinner of eggs meat and peppers was a good start.

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Google. There are more Paleo recipe sites than can be counted.

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Originally Posted by iceman

I'm just looking forward to this thread sinking out of sight is all.

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Maybe spats can find something else to debunk on the internet?

We've gone through economics, criminology, virology and now death by baguette.

What's next?

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Originally Posted by hafilax

Reminds you too much of the days before you were frozen into the ice?

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The bad old days, I call them. I still can't believe those fuckers shot me with an arrow. I guess I'm a little over-sensitive about prehistory now.

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Originally Posted by Phill

How hard is it? Just go out with your spear and cook anything you catch over your camp fire.

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Small neighbor children are usually pretty slow, for example. Especially the fat ones, who are, happily, also the most healthy for you.

Just head to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I hear the meat is excellent.

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Originally Posted by hafilax

Just head to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I hear the meat is excellent.

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Its supposed to be a cow...

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Originally Posted by BurnHard

This is purely IMHO based on things I've read here and there and personal experience... MACHINES = BAD, *exactly* for the reasons you mentioned:

You "exceed" a certain level by strengthening a specific 'large' muscle (i.e. bis, tris, chest, quads maybe) without strengthening any of the supporting muscles because the movement is isolated and mostly supported by the machine. You end up strengthening this one specific muscle beyond what your ligaments & supportive muscles can handle which in turn leads to damage to the joint, exactly the opposite of what you would expect/were hoping for. By limiting the range of motion you help shorten the muscle causing imbalances and chronic tension/compression which leads to further problems/inflammation/stiffness. IMHO, you're MUCH better off doing free weight, olympic lifts, and power lifts, starting off with light weights & learning good form, rather than working on machines.

Plus, hot chicks dig sweaty grunting men clean & jerking 225lbs ;)

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but see, that is where i know you are wrong as it applies to me. i have a bad shoulder. sometimes it's pretty much useless and feels like there's little bits floating around inside. sometimes it can lift hundreds of pounds in one direction, but not the weight of the arm attached to it in another. i've done free weights, and i've done machines. EVERY time i switched to free weights, I would end up having to take several weeks off to heal (often as a direct result of the use of the free weights). With the machines, I can continue to work the shoulder even when injured at least with some. This results in greater overall strength of the shoulder and less time hurting.
My right hip starts to ache badly after long repetitive exercise (think 10 mile hike or skin). I do like to make sure a 10 mile hike or skin is a piece of cake, athletically, however. How do I do it without exacerbating my hip? Combination of stairmaster, bike, and the thing that seems like skinning that i can't place a name to right now.
Lachinload once said to be able to stomp just about anything, you need to be able to do sets (squatting or leg press, not sure which) with double your skiing weight. The safest way to do that is the leg press machine.
Yes, one machine that is designed to work one muscle won't target the small muscles around it, but there are other machines for those. I had pretty much also given up on sit ups. Just because the floor is hard (even with a mat, i hated the friction on my lower back.) There are six different abdomen machines at the gym to choose from (not all are machines per se).

but the most important reason it doesn't apply to me is that i prolly get more exercise than 95% of the populace before hitting the gym.

Anyway, my real point is that those touting the benefits of this are superimposing their values over everything and portraying everything in a very black and white manner when everything is really gray. maybe if all the other variables were held constant, it is better to only use free weights outdoors in direct sunlight. the other variables are never constant. sometimes it's dark, for instance.
Very few people, when deciding how to work out, simply look at what the absolute healthiest, best, most efficient method will be. more important is that they like it (this also applies to food).

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Originally Posted by DasBlunt

Any Paleo menus for those of us that like direction.

The photo of the dinner of eggs meat and peppers was a good start.

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I link a big list at the end of the article in the OP:
http://theclothesmakethegirl.blogspo...o-recipes.html

I'll probably write a whole article about this, but here are a few pointers:
-Buy roasts. Cook roasts. Own large Takealongs to put half-eaten roasts in. That way you can slice off a bunch of meat whenever you need it, instead of having to cook it at every meal.

-Tender cuts of beef are expensive. Own a crock pot so you can make pot roasts. I take the pot out and put it in the oven because the temperature control is better.

-Scrambles are your friend. Potatoes go in first because they take longest to cook. (Cook with butter and beef tallow.) Chop veggies while potatoes are cooking, add veggies, then add hamburger and spices, then add eggs.

-Have lots of Takealongs for half-eaten veggies and leftovers.
-Have at least two big cutting boards, one for veggies, one for meat.

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Originally Posted by hafilax

Paleo: no grains, no beans, no dairy
WP: limited grains, limited beans, limited dairy
Both: Eat real food

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WAPF emphasizes that all grains and beans must be sprouted to increase their nutritional value and decrease toxins.

Furthermore, they're not so much "limited" on the dairy :D
http://www.westonaprice.org/images/s...appybutter.gif

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Originally Posted by Mofro261

His [Cordain's] take home is not "saturated fat is bad or good". His take home is less than 10% or more than 15% SFA intake as a percentage of total calories is discordant with our evolved human genome.

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That is a trivially falsifiable claim: see below for my debunking.

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Originally Posted by hafilax

Splitting hairs. 53% is the majority of the fat and he defines dominant as being strictly >50% in the sentence you conveniently left out. 47% is about half. You just rounded the opposite way since it suits your argument. He may be guilty of the same but it doesn't really make your case.

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If you look at the data set, you'll note that all the figures are rounded to the nearest percentage point...which, when you're talking about proportions like 2%/8%/9%, mean that a single 1% variation due to rounding (let alone multiple variations) can change those proportions by 12% up to 50%, depending on which number you twiddle.

Therefore, my point stands. The conclusion he draws is so far inside the error term that it's meaningless... especially in relation to the basically identical composition of grain-fed cattle, which is what he is warning against.

Let's also remember that we're talking about fat measurements of wild caribou, which are unlikely to be accurate to within one percent. Here's one way they're measured: cut through a frozen carcass with a circular saw and measure the 'sawdust'.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3800916

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Originally Posted by hafilax

If anything, Cordain probably is guilty of cherry picking the caribou as a lean meat example given that another name for Rabbit Starvation is Mal de Caribou (aka protein poisoning). Early explorers became sick from eating a diet of lean caribou and yes they ate the fat.

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Early explorers didn't typically eat the brains, the marrow, etc. as the natives did, which is a major source of carcass fat. And they were often exploring during the leanest parts of the year (early summer), whereas the natives ate all year, preferentially harvesting during the fattest times. Meat preservation isn't an issue in the winter in places where there are caribou...

If you want to understand the importance of fat to the diet of hunters, and how much trouble they went to in order to get it, you need to read "Imagining Head Smashed In", which I review here (and which contains a link to a free PDF of the entire book!)
http://www.gnolls.org/1403/hunters-m...al-by-hunting/

It's a fascinating read, and really brings home the extent to which fat was valued and lean protein disdained not only by Native Americans, but by the early explorers in the region who lived off of bison. Given that most wild ruminant fat is 40% SFA or greater, positing a maximum of 15% of edible calories from saturated fat means less than 40% of calories from fat...or 60% from lean protein. At a daily intake of 3000 kcal for an active hunter, that's 1800 kcal of lean protein, or about 450g.

This is nonsensical, since the human body can only process perhaps 200-300g of protein per day. Therefore, Cordain's conclusion fails trivially for any hunting society.

As I said: he's done a lot of important research, but he's been stuck on the lipid hypothesis, and it's destroyed his credibility on these issues for me.