More on Heathy Foods

  More on Healthy Food
Both Omega 3 and Omega 6 are essential fatty acids. Omega 3 is an anti- inflammatory fatty acid while omega 6 is inflammatory which is good when the body is fighting a wound or disease.  It is bad when inflammation becomes chronic,  It appears humans evolved when the 0mega 3:Omega 6 ratios were about 1:1 to 1:2, while western diets are now closer to 1:15.    There is a graph at  https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/optimize-omega-6-omega-3-ratio showing the high amounts of high omega 6 soybean oil we are consuming because it is so cheap. It is one of the reasons refined foods can become bad.  Another reason is the finely ground wheat flour in which even the enzymes in our saliva begin to break down the starch into glucose because the fine grind allows the saliva enzymes can get at the starch. Other reasons refined foods can be bad are added sugar and salt to make them taste good. 

  
As recently as around the 1930's, corn yields were about 30 bushels per acre. Corn and soybeans, both low in Omega 3, result in milk and meat that are also low in Omega 3.  Good ratio oils would be canola, olive oil and especially flax seed.  Poly unsaturated fats are very susceptible to oxidation; the reason olive oil is kept is a dark bottles. Also any oil is better cold pressed than solvent extracted.  You can find some of the diseases caused by chronic inflammation at  https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/mptoms/21660-inflammation 

 
We are what we eat. One recommendation made to obtain a better Omega 6:Omega 3 ratio is to take supplements, but these are are not always what they claim or may deteriorate in time. Furthermore obtaining Omega 3 as well as vitamins and minerals contained in food is preferable. We can do this by choosing foods higher in Omega 3,like fish and grass fed dairy products and reading labels on highly refined food products.  

  
I suppose you could say the western diets started with farming about 10,000 years ago with selection in grain crops.  But it really kicked off 70 to 80 years ago with corn hybridization, the Green Revolution and artificial nitrogen fertilizer which made it possible. The last 50 years have got real bad with herbicides, pesticides, solvent oil extraction, refined foods, and grain fed diets to milk and beef animals. So how could this be possible? When you start reading this stuff, it becomes apparent western diets are terrible. At first, It seem impossible to understand why this is so with all the information available. Then think about the Green Revolution.  Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize plus many other honors with some people crediting the Green Revolution saving a billion people from starvation. How can you fault diets that save a billion people? 

Taxes and education has greatly reduced smoking, While it took a while to outlaw hydrogenated oils (Tran-fats), I suspect some taxes on unhealthy foods that increase the cost of health care could be justified.  Some countries already have or are considering a fat tax. I suspect global warming and even AI may be helpful in in high Omega 6 meat. Ireland, New Zealand and California are trying to reduce their cattle number due to methane.  However there are ways rumen methane can be reduced and if cattle ate grass and other green vegetation, which people cannot eat, their milk and meat would be higher in Omega 3. Farmers are receiving pressure to reduce cattle numbers because methane is 28 times more solar warming than carbon dioxide. However this is short term as methane's half life is 7 years and very little fossil C02 released in cultivation compared to grains necessary for hog and poultry production. Furthermore science is making progress in rumen methane reduction where this would not be possible with wild animals grazing these grasslands and pastures.