Omega 3 and 6 Fatty Acids

This is a book review of a small part of a book, What Your Food Ate, by David R Montgomery and Anne Bikle.  It is the most recent (2022) in a series of books including:

Dirt - what happens to a civilization that treats its soil like dirt

The Second Half of Nature - what goes on in a rich organic soil

Growing a Revolution - how to restore degraded soil, from the top, in one to three years - a process that nature  takes centuries to restore, working from the bottom up.

 

This essay is on fatty acids which is only a very small part of the book, which is jammed packed with information on the food-value of foods grown in rich organic soil, compared with foods grown in degraded soils, using chemical nutrients.  The difference is significant.  So what is a fatty acid. 

A fatty acid is a chain of carbon atoms with three hydrogen atoms attached to one end and a OOH at the other end.  All the other carbon atoms in the chain have 2 hydrogen atoms attached to it.  An omega three fatty acid has one H atom missing from the third carbon from the three-hydrogen end.  And as you might guess an Omega 6 fatty acid has one H atom missing from the 6th carbon atom from the three hydrogen end. Seems like a pretty minor difference, No?  This results in  a double bond at the location in question.  Actually, if I remember Organic chemistry correctly, the double bond  flashed back and forth between the carbon in question and the two adjacent carbons but don't take my word for it.  My Organic chemistry is pretty rusty.

Both types of fatty acid are necessary for human health.  The Omega6 fatty acid play a role in inducing inflammation.  Inflammation is part of the defense of the body against viral and bacterial invaders.  Omega 3 fatty acids play a role in shutting down the inflammation when it is no longer needed.  The ideal ratio of these fatty acids in the body is 1:1.  If there is an excess of Omega6s, inflammation may carry on and this can lead to auto-immune conditions and even cancers.  

Humans and many animals can not manufacture these fatty acids.  The ratio in your body reflects the ratio in the food you eat.  This is the same for livestock and if you eat meat that has a 1:1 ratio, you will tend toward a 1:1 ratio*.  

*Of course you don't only eat, say, beef.  The rest of your diet also contributes to your 3-6 ratio.

 

The milk, butter and cheese of a dairy cow will also reflect the 3-6 ratio in the feed of the cow.  

 

Cattle that eat pasture plants will have the ideal 1:1 ratio of fatty acids in their meat.  Cattle that eat concentrate, especially concentrate that is heavily based on corn, will have highly excessive Omega 6 fatty acids in their meat.  If a cow has been raised all her life on pasture and then 'finished' in a feed lot, it only takes a month or two for her fatty acid ratio to reflect her new feed.

 

You see where we are going with this.  I always thought that the "Pasture Fed" advertising was just a marketing gimmick.   Apparently not.  It really is far better to eat pasture fed meat  than feed lot meat.  I suppose the same would apply to animals which are hunted such as deer, pigs, birds in comparison to the same animals,  raised on concentrate. One wonders if feed lots explains the preponderance of auto-immune type conditions that seem to be increasing just as we have pretty well conquered diseases caused by micro-organisms. This seems to be particularly so in America where it seems that any prepared food you eat contains corn.

By the by, what foods besides pasture raised meat are rich in Omega3 fatty acids.  It included many nuts such as walnuts, oily fish at the bottom of the food chain, Other fish - especially wild caught ones,  flax seeds, chia seeds, cold pressed Olive oil, pumpkin seeds, soy beans, eggs if fed on Omega3 rich food, spinach, papya and Brussle Sprouts.

I would heartily recommend getting the four books mentioned at the start.  They explain so much.  By the way, there are no references in What Your Food Ate.  Including them would have increased the size of the book by 50 pages so the authors put the references on line.  The URL, if you want to have a look at them is www.dig2grow.com 

There is much more information on fatty acids in What Your Food Ate and on the nutrient quality of food grown on rich organic soil compared with food grown on degraded soil with the nutrients provided from chemical fertilizer.  In a sentence, the concentrations of minerals, vitamins and phytochemicals in plants grown in rich organic soil are considerably higher.