New Consciousness Review Winter 2016 | Page 31

HEALTH When you consume the meat of an animal that has been allowed to forage naturally, you can get as much omega-3 per gram as you would find in say, wild-caught salmon. It’s really where we got all of the essential fatty acids that were responsible for building the enormous brain that we humans uniquely have as a species. Insulin will try to put the sugar into your cells initially for that burst of energy if you need it, and then it will try to store a little bit of it as glycogen in your muscles and in your liver. We can only store maybe 2,000 calories worth of that at a time, and then all the rest of it is going to go right to your liver to be converted into triglycerides which are blood fats, and then stored in places you probably rather not have it. fed nothing but grains/legumes (corn, soy, etc) for the weeks prior to slaughter are actually extremely high in omega 6’s, and may have no omega 3’s whatsoever. Omega 6s (unbalanced by insufficient omega-3’s) are far more likely to be inflammatory in effect. When you consume the meat of an animal that has been allowed to forage naturally, you can get as much omega-3 per gram as you would find in say, wild-caught salmon. It’s really where we got all of the essential fatty acids that were responsible for building the enormous brain that we humans uniquely have as a species. It was our taste for fat that caused our brains to evolve so rapidly. It’s unprecedented in the natural world. In a matter of a couple of hundred thousand years, our brain size absolutely mushroomed into this enormous and sophisticated organ that’s quite unprecedented. All the evidence seems to point to the fact that it was due to our sophisticated ability to hunt and develop tools that could crack open the femurs of the animals that we hunted and the brain casings to get at the fat-rich nourishment contained in them. Miriam: Really, our evolution in terms of our metabolism was set during a very long period, and it’s only recently, in agricultural times, and particularly very recently since industrial farming took place, that we have put it totally off balance. Nora: Yes, completely. We’ve literally spent more than 100,000 generations as an evolving species as hunter-gatherers--and primarily hunters. We actually had a very strong dietary preference for Miriam: Are you suggesting that a diet based on good fats would not be causing weight gain? Nora: Right. But there is a caveat or two. First we need to define “good fats”, and then we need to figure out what else your diet consists of. I consider “good fats” to be anything that we would be genetically adapted to consuming. In other words, dietary fat from animals that were fed a diet that was natural to them, like natural forage and fresh green grass – not grains, not the other crap that they try to feed animals in feedlots. Unfortunately, 97 percent of the meat produced in this country is produced with factory farming methods and confined animal or feed lot operations. That is not an especially healthy source of natural fat. The fats from animals that have been 31 | New Consciousness Review 97 percent of the meat produced in this country is produced with factory farming methods and confined animal or feed lot operations. That is not an especially healthy source of natural fat.