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• Improving food quality rather than food
  David Brown
  Published on: 25 April 2023

• Published on: 25 April 2023

  Improving food quality rather than food

  • David Brown, Retired Carpenter None

  The article says, "The majority of current restaurant meals consumed by American adults—70% of meals consumed from fast-food restaurants and 50% consumed from full-service restaurants—are of poor nutritional quality, and the remainder are only of intermediate nutritional quality, with very few being ideal."

  That being the case, perhaps government policy ought to focus on food quality rather than menu calorie labelling. That would have to start back on the farm. Norwegian animal science researchers suggest this approach. In a 2011 article entitled 'Animal products, diseases and drugs: a plea for better integration between agricultural sciences, human nutrition and human pharmacology' the authors wrote, "It is shown how an unnaturally high omega-6/omega-3 fatty acid concentration ratio in meat, offal and eggs (because the omega-6/omega-3 ratio of the animal diet is unnaturally high) directly leads to exacerbation of pain conditions, cardiovascular disease and probably most cancers. It should be technologically easy and fairly inexpensive to produce poultry and pork meat with much more long-chain omega-3 fatty acids and less arachidonic acid than now, at the same time as they could also have a similar selenium concentration as is common in marine fish. The health economic benefits of such products for society as a whole must be expected vastly to outweigh the direct costs for the farming sector."[1]

  Problem is, policy makers and the...

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  The article says, "The majority of current restaurant meals consumed by American adults—70% of meals consumed from fast-food restaurants and 50% consumed from full-service restaurants—are of poor nutritional quality, and the remainder are only of intermediate nutritional quality, with very few being ideal."

  That being the case, perhaps government policy ought to focus on food quality rather than menu calorie labelling. That would have to start back on the farm. Norwegian animal science researchers suggest this approach. In a 2011 article entitled 'Animal products, diseases and drugs: a plea for better integration between agricultural sciences, human nutrition and human pharmacology' the authors wrote, "It is shown how an unnaturally high omega-6/omega-3 fatty acid concentration ratio in meat, offal and eggs (because the omega-6/omega-3 ratio of the animal diet is unnaturally high) directly leads to exacerbation of pain conditions, cardiovascular disease and probably most cancers. It should be technologically easy and fairly inexpensive to produce poultry and pork meat with much more long-chain omega-3 fatty acids and less arachidonic acid than now, at the same time as they could also have a similar selenium concentration as is common in marine fish. The health economic benefits of such products for society as a whole must be expected vastly to outweigh the direct costs for the farming sector."[1]

  Problem is, policy makers and their advisors seem to be unaware of the omega-6/omega-3 fatty acid aspect of food quality. Here is why that aspect is important. "The ω-6 series of fatty acids, which includes arachidonic acid (ARA, C20:4) and its precursor linoleic acid (LA), constitute a growing part of the lipid intake in western diets for the last 40 years. The first cause of this trend is the higher consumption of animal products. White meat especially provides the highest quantities of dietary ARA."[2]

  In a 2020 BMJ article entitled 'What role should the commercial food system play in promoting health through better diet?' the authors said, A number of aspects of nutritionally poor processed foods, especially ultra-processed foods, are unhealthy (eg, excess salt or sugar). The mechanisms that lead to associations between processed foods and poor health remain largely unknown. Processed foods have some advantages—for example, their longer shelf life and convenience—and they may not inherently need to be unhealthy. Nevertheless, how to achieve healthier processed foods remains unclear.[3]

  Clearly, food policy experts haven't figured out where the hurt is coming from. Canadian animal science researchers offer this insight. "Pork is the most widely eaten meat in the world, but typical feeding practices give it a high omega-6 (n-6) to omega-3 (n-3) fatty acid ratio and make it a poor source of n-3 fatty acids."[4]

  In the United States animal science researchers are also trying to rebalance the omega-6/3 fatty acid profile of animal products. "With the incidence of obesity, heart disease and insulin resistance increasing toward epidemic proportions in the United States, people must make changes to improve their health," said Kevin Harvatine, associate professor of nutritional physiology in the Department of Animal Science. "Production of nutritionally enriched eggs and poultry meat will help consumers meet health goals and help egg and poultry producers to increase the value of their products."[5]

  It took longer for grain-fed animal products to enter Siberia. Comment by Siberian Federal University researcher. “The dietary value of the Yakutian horse meat is very high precisely due to the ideal balance of polyunsaturated omega-3 and omega-6 acids,” Makhutova explains. “The 1:1 ratio of these acids is ideal for us, but civilization is steadily shifting the balance towards the predominance of omega-6 due to the dominance of vegetable oils, cheap pork and fast food in our daily diet. We also need omega-6 acids, but in combination with the omega-3 partners, which are found mainly in fatty fish. The horse meat we tested is also very good, especially for child nutrition and the diet of people suffering from cardiovascular diseases. If the population of Yakutia starts consuming mass-market products, which are now imported abundantly into the republic, and makes a choice in favor of, let us say, semi-finished pork products, this may drastically affect people’s health. This is just the case when you should not change a time-tested balanced diet.”[6]

  In a 1996 Introduction to a symposium on arachidonic acid the authors noted that "Excessive signaling of AA metabolites has been associated with various chronic degenerative or autoimmune diseases, and intervention with the metabolism of AA is widely employed therapeutically in these afflictions. In essence, AA is the most biologically active unsaturated fatty acid in higher animals. Its concentration in membranes and its magnitude of effects depend on its amount, or that of its precursors and analogues, in the diet. The tendency of the field of nutrition to ignore the role of dietary AA will optimistically be reversed in the future."[7]

  27 years have elapsed and the field of nutrition continues to ignore the most biologically active unsaturated fatty acid in higher animals. [

  References

  01. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3031257/
  02. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27473185/
  03. https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m545
  04. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/4/12/1956
  05. https://animalscience.psu.edu/news/researchers-aim-to-further-enrich-egg...
  06. https://www.horsetalk.co.nz/2020/05/28/fatty-acids-crops-winter-survival...
  07. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8642436/
  08. https://lipidworld.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1476-511X-9-37

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  Conflict of Interest:
  None declared.

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