Our friend Hope Sandrow sent us an article about what we feed the animals that feed us, like chickens. It’s important to remember that the food we eat has a long history before it gets to us, and we need to take care of the system that brings our food to us as well as take care of ourselves. There’s a longer article at Chickenfeed but Hope gave us some choice excerpts:
The gist of the discovery that is coming to light is that, by cleverly concentrating animal feeds using grains, instead of grasses, man has unwittingly led himself down the road to degenerative disease.
This is because our essential fatty acids, which control myriad bodily functions, fall into two families: the Omega-3’s and the Omega-6’s. The Omega3 group comes from the leaves of green plants (and plankton in the ocean), while the Omega6 group comes from the seeds (for example, grain used in animal feeds). Animals that eat quantities of green plants have very high levels of Omega3. Conversely, animals fed largely on grain, which includes virtually all American feed animals except lamb, are very high in Omega6.
We should have approximately equal amounts of Omega3 and Omega6 in our bodies, or at maximum, not much more than twice the Omega6 as Omega3. But almost all Americans have ten or twenty times more Omega6 than Omega3, a condition that leads to all sorts of degenerative disease. (See more detail at www.lionsgrip.com/omega3.html.)
The way to rectify this fatty acid imbalance is to consume animal products raised on grass or plankton. All sea life is ultimately based on plankton, so all seafood is balanced in favor of Omega3. The fattier the fish, the more Omega3. Lamb is almost all grass-fed, so that is another fine source of Omega3. Conveniently, simply adding flax seed to poultry diets increases their Omega3 concentration dramatically, and eggs from these chickens are now widely available.
The ideal is for a chicken to be free to roam grasslands that are not denuded by too many animals in one place, finding myriad bugs and eating lots of wild plants. If supplemented with grains, and especially with fish meal, these chickens will be the healthiest around, and live and lay eggs for many, many years. A poultry farmer in England says their chickens can lay for 12 years or more. Fish meal is the biggest protein source for those very healthy birds.
Chickens that are free to consume as much living grass as they want, along with the myriad other living things in a natural grassland or meadow, give significant health benefits to the consumer today, just as this poultry diet has done for the thousands of years of domestication of the chicken. Meat and eggs from grass-fed poultry, which is very low in fat, have high levels of Omega-3 fatty acids. Eggs from “pastured” (another form of “grass-fed”) poultry, high in omega-3 fatty acids, will lower one’s “bad cholesterol” and raise the “good cholesterol.” More and more consensus is emerging that grass-fed or pastured poultry eggs are good for the heart, and that not only should they not be avoided, they should be specifically included in the diet.
There are two main kinds of fatty acids, omega-3 and omega-6. We need approximately equal amounts of the O-3’s and the O-6’s in our bodies. But, because of not allowing our feed animals to eat grass (even cows don’t eat much grass any more ~ they eat largely corn), we are getting huge proportions of Omega-6 fatty acids, and very little Omega-3.
When we are oversupplied with Omega-6, our “bad cholesterol” rises, and our “good cholesterol” stays low. When we get equal amounts of Omega-3’s and -6’s, the good cholesterol rises and the bad cholesterol drops. But our diets have been so high in Omega-6 for so long, we really need to focus almost exclusively on eating Omega-3-rich foods to balance the levels out.
Strange to think that eating beef and drinking whole milk is the healthiest thing to do! That is, of course, 100% grass-fed beef and milk. See theEat Wild website for full clarification on eating Omega-3-rich foods. I myself have reduced my overall cholesterol 40 points, as well as bringing down the bad cholesterol while raising the good cholesterol over the past 2 years (2006-2008), by switching to grass-fed and naturally-raised chicken, beef, and lamb, and adding much fish to my diet. I have eaten 2 dark-yolk eggs a day during this time. Trader Joe’s, if you have one near you, offers 100% grass-fed milk (Trader Joe’s Cream Top) and butter (Irish KerryGold) and cheeses. If you phone their main number, they can tell you if a product is 100% grass-fed. As for grass-fed poultry and eggs, you really need to go to Farms That Sell Eggs, or find a grocer who has connections with health-minded poultry-farmers.
Also effective heart-health builders are all forms of wild (not farmed) seafood. Why not farmed? Because farmed fish are fed corn, which is, for the first time in the history of the world, putting Omega-6 fatty acids into the ocean’s food chains, where they’ve never been before. Pretty soon, farmed fish might be causing heart disease, just as corn-fed beef has done all these decades of our “advanced” farming methods. TV shows scientists’ efforts at creating ideal diets for farmed fish, and I greatly hope that they will re-consider the use of Omega-6 feeds in farmed fish!
Omega-3’s come from the green parts of plants, while Omega-6’s come from the seeds of plants. The entire food chain of the ocean is based on one-celled, green plankton, which is the “grass” of the sea. Plankton has no seeds, so all wild seafood has only Omega-3 fats. The oilier the fish, the more Omega-3 it has. There have never been any Omega-6 fats in ocean fish, until we started adding corn to the farmed fish diet. We have always known that people who raise cattle in the traditional manner, 100% grass-fed, have great heart health, and have the cleanest of arteries. Cattle concentrate the Omega-3’s of the grass. The amount of Omega-3 in green plants is very small; the cattle and other ruminants, which eat huge quantities of grass, concentrate the Omega-3 in their systems, imparting it to us when we consume the meat and milk.
Poultry, however, needs some grain in the diet. It is very difficult to raise 100% grass-fed poultry. Tests show that even greatly-reduced-grain ration in poultry diets, supplemented with very large free-range grass consumption, still produces meat that is relatively high in Omega-6’s compared to the meat and milk of grass-fed ruminants. These carefully-structured dietary tests, conducted by our members in Malaysia, showed that adding seafood to the chickens’ diet is what raised the Omega-3 levels by the greatest amounts.
Click to read more on Omega-3’s at Chicken-Feed
Click to read more on Omega-3’s at Eatwild.com
Jo Robinson, author of the EatWild website, and the fabulous book, Why Grass-Fed Is Best!, describes one study where 23 people ate 2 more eggs than they usually did every day. The study only lasted 18 days. One group ate eggs enriched with Omega-3’s; the other ate regular commercial eggs. Among those who added the Omega-3 eggs to their diet, their good cholesterol went up, their bad cholesterol went down, and their total cholesterol count did not change. Not so for those who ate the ordinary commerical eggs; their cholesterol levels went up. What we haven’t known until the last few years is that eggs, from properly-fed chickens, lowers the bad cholesterol and raises the good.
