Food for Thought (Literally)

You should care about omega-3s. I just learned a bit about them. Like: they make you smart. And keep you from having heart attacks.

Some interesting facts:

• Green plants and algae create these essentially fatty acids in their cells.
• We get these vicariously through the animals we eat. Or at least we used to, back before industrial agriculture perverted our food system so much that it barely resembles what nature intended it to be...(yes, I'm bitter)
  
• Factory-farmed animals are fed diets not of grass, which is what they evolved eating, but of a combination of corn, antibiotics and growth hormones, and the animal fat byproducts of slaughterhouses (yes, that steak you had for dinner last night ate cow fat back when it was still a cow...augh). No grass=no green plants=no omega-3s. 
• One of the reasons we consider fish to be one of the best sources of omega-3s is because a lot of our fish still eat more or less their natural diets. But, there's no telling how long this will last, as scientists are already in the process of teaching factory-farmed salmon to eat corn (or maybe they already have?). It fattens them up faster.
• Side note about corn: the carb content of corn (about 80% of the calories in corn come from carbs) that makes it so appealing as a diet for our beef cattle doesn't just 'work its magic' on our animals...through their meat, its effects continue within our bodies. So all of those taboos about eating too much red meat aren't really about the meat itself, as much as the unhealthy, fattening diet the meat once consumed.
  
• Omega-3s promote healthy neuron growth. But not in a vague this-is-somehow-good-I-guess kind of way. In a damn-are-you-serious kind of way. Consider:
  
• Pregnant women who get extra omega-3s have children with higher IQs
• Kids who don't get enough omega-3s have more learning and behavioral problems
• Puppies who get a lot of omega-3s are easier to train
• Low levels of omega-3s have been linked to depression in adults
  
• It's not just the amount of omega-3s that we consume that's important, it's also the ratio to another essential fatty acid, omega-6s. Omega-3s thin blood and omega-6s make it clot. Ideally, we should have equal parts each to keep everything in balance.
  
• Back when we were hunter-gatherers, we had an equal balance of both fatty acids. Now that we eat so much meat (and corn-fed meat, at that), the ratio is more like 10:1. This is bad. This is very bad. Such a high ratio severely increases the risk of heart disease. Again, so many of the health problems attributed to red meat can be traced back to the corn. 

All of this is courtesy of The Omnivore's Dilemma, which I'm currently reading. I really like the book, despite it being depressing as hell. I like it because I find all this info on food and nutrition fascinating. I find it depressing because all this info just paints an ever bleaker picture of the state of our agriculture here, and it seems the only way to really eat healthy anymore is to grow all my own food or buy it from farms. And that is just such an inconvenient truth.

But anyways, now you see the significance of these random little things called omega-3s. They make you smart and happy, and they keep your heart from stopping. Very good things. Unfortunately, very good things that we get very little of because of industrial agriculture's need for faster output (i.e. cows that get very fat very fast).