The Challenge of Going Vegan

[bemildred]

23. In a modern industrial food culture it's no problem at all.

If you try to live solely on unprocessed plant foods, you will find it is, like salt and carbs. There is a reason we like certain things that we consider to be bad for us now - when we can get as much as we like - and the reason is that they are necessary to our health and hard to come by in the natural world.

You are right about cholesterol, but I'm not talking about cholesterol:

Brain lipids
They have two principal functions in the body: as repositories of chemical energy in storage fat, primarily triglycerides, and as structural components of cell membranes. The brain contains virtually no triglyceride, so it is in their role as membrane components that brain lipids initially commanded the attention of biochemists. Later, some bio messenger functions of non membrane lipids, such as steroid hormones and expands, became evident. Some membrane lipids, such as phosphatidylcholine, which were previously believed to have only a structural role, also have important functions in signal transduction across biological membranes. In addition, lipids covalently coupled to proteins play a major role in anchoring marker proteins within biomembranes. These discoveries established that lipids participate in both the fnction and the structure of neural membranes.

Lipids account for approximately 60% of the brain's dry weight. These lipids are important for normal brain function. Increasing amount of data demonstrate abnormal lipid content in common brain disorders like Alzheimer's Dementia (AD) and mental depression. The lipids of the brain are integrated in so called phospholipid membranes enveloping brain cells in the gray matter and the neurons of the white matter. Phospholipids contain two fatty acids (FA). In the brain one FA is saturated and the other is polyunsaturated. Saturated fatty acids are stiff molecules while the polyunsaturates containing several double bonds forming spiral structures. The polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) provide the brain cells with a unique degree of elasticity and fluid binding capacity.

DHA and ARA are the most common fatty acids in the brain. These fatty acids are involved in the fine-tuning of mood, sleep/alertness, memory and emotions. The most important PUFAs of the brain are docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and arachidonic acid (ARA). These are the fatty acids of the omega-3 and omega-6 series with the highest number of double bonds.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080909062741AAjecVT

I just picked that off the web. Think about people long in the past sitting around the campfire gobbling down all the raw fat they can get their hands on from some fresh killed carcass, that's what I'm talking about, that fat-hunger which most of us know nothing about.