interesting thread. I'm currently changing my diet, and carbs are almost out. I'll keep low carbs veggies like greens, avocados, onions. maybe some berries, but not much fruits. so i need to go up in protein and fats. Now I cant decide exactly how to break things down. For example the so called optimal diet is protein:fat:carbs of 2:5-7:1 (as energy) , and i think they further break fat as sat:mufa:pufa like 50:40:10 not counting trans. i think paleo would be lower in sat fat than that. but barely any long chain PUFA, so that leaves me with either more LA, ALA, AA or more MUFA (or just less fat altogether). Dr William Davis is more like that, he is not such a fan of sat fat.
one of his reply on his blog is
Dr. William Davis said...
Oils = olive oil, flaxseed oil, canola oil (yes, yes, I know), avocado, almond, oils from raw nuts and meats.
No polyunsaturates here. You've go the wrong guy.
Except oilve oil and meat, of course all the others are mostly PUFA. Sometimes he says really stupid things. Dr Kurt G Harris on his website has a so called panu approach where fish oils are only taken if one cheats on the diet and eats an unbalanced source of omega 6 (ie pretty much never). Sat fats are very high in his plan. Evolutionary speaking, his approach seems to me the least nonsense. But since I think i might have familial hypercholesterolemia, i still want to be careful with too much sat fats (even though i dont believe that much in the lipid hypothesis). Dr Davis says he has many patients with genetically high small LDL or Lp(a), and his description of what they typically look like does not look like me much but still because of lots of LDL in my family i dont want to discard that possibility now.
Also, about 10 days ago i took 90g of MCT oil (first time i tried it) and got a pretty big chest pain the next day* after exercising, which scared me.
All in all, I dont know what to do about fish oil, and about what fats to consume in general.
Edit: * this is not completely accurate, see my post below for details
Edited by PhDStudent, 21 March 2010 - 10:34 PM.