The Good Fats are as Important to Our Health as Vitamins
by Leonard Pigott, BA, BSA

Nowadays we are ever more aware of how diet affects our health. Most people are already making changes to regain or maintain their health. Yet it is puzzling that despite these changes, we are still struggling with health issues such as obesity, heart disease, cancer, and others. One of the missing pieces may be the fact that fatty acids ("the good fats") are as important to our health as vitamins.

Fatty acids are a group of compounds found in our diet which, like vitamins, are vital to our health. It is unfortunate they have been given the name, "fatty acids," because the word fat has become a negative word in our dietary vocabulary. In essence, it should not be.

The fatty acids are: linoleic, omega-3, and omega-6. Linoleic fatty acid is found in most grasses, and the ruminants (cows, sheep, buffalo, goats, and deer) that eat these grasses have bacteria in their stomachs which converts linoleic acid into conjugated linoleic acid (CLA). Scientists are just now finding out that CLA is a very important compound in our diets.

Thirty to fifty years ago, prior to our change in diet, deficiencies of this CLA compound in our diets were not common because we ate meat from animals that only consumed grass. Since then there has been an increase in consumption of grain-fed meat because of the increase in confinement feeding of animals. It is another story why confinement feeding proliferated, but suffice it to say there was a much quicker increase in weight for animals fed higher concentrations of grain. The higher the grain content of the animal’s diet the lower the CLA content.

The exact mechanism of how CLA works is, as yet, unrevealed, but it has been proven that dietary fat must enter cells to provide energy and to build muscle tissue. Without adequate amounts of CLA the dietary fat cannot enter the cells. Instead it gets stored as new fat cells. So, in some unknown way, CLA is helping dietary fat enter the cells.

For example, you feel low in energy and hungry, and you eat something that has some fat in it. If you are deficient in CLA this fat is stored, not used, and you are still low in energy. When our diet contains adequate amounts of CLA, we can utilize the fat and get all of the energy out of the food we are eating. We can lose weight, do more, and prevent disease. Yippee!

In addition to improving weight loss, CLA has implications for other health issues. Studies done on animals have shown that CLA helped reduce tumour growth, as well as reducing the development of prostate and breast cancer. It has also been shown in studies that CLA helps prevent and treat diabetes. In other animal studies it was shown to help lower LDL-cholesterol levels, which is a factor in heart and arterial disease. Immune deficiency and osteoporosis are two other diseases which CLA may help to reduce.

Omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids have a similar story. Both are very necessary in our diets but only in the proper ratio. For example, meats from animals fed on a grass-based diet have almost a one-to-one ratio of these two fatty acids, whereas any grain-fed meats have higher concentrations of the omega-6 fatty acid, with the ratio sometimes as high as 20:1, which is not healthy for us.

The omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids are involved in transporting other dietary fats across the cell membranes for energy and building muscle tissue. The presence of these fatty acids in our diet also appears to help prevent cancer, treat diabetes, improve heart and arterial disease, assist the immune system, and prevent osteoporosis.

Linoleic, omega-3, and omega-6 fatty acids can be found in health food stores but the most natural way to get it is through producers growing and finishing animals on grass-based (grass-fed) diets. This is not the same as animals fed organically. While organic meat is good, it may still have been fed organic grain to fatten the animal, thus lowering the CLA and omega-3 content.

If any readers are plagued with obesity, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or osteoporosis you may wish to investigate this factor. This information is very new and there will be much more news coming out about this in the near future so stay alert to this and stay healthy.

References: This article contains information from Why Grassfed is Best by Jo Robinson and Alternatives Magazine.

Leonard Pigott has land and is a Registered Educator on Holistic Management. He lives with his wife Janet near Dysart, Sask. Together they raise cows and chickens with their daughter and her family. They can be reached at (306) 432-4583, email: jlpigott@sasktel.net, or www.wholebeefranch.ca.