In case you haven't heard . . .

. . . a growing body of scientific literature . . . touts the benefits of omega-3 supplementation. Studies show that these special fatty acids accumulate in the brain and can aid children with learning disabilities, reduce violence in prison populations, and even improve everyday mood.

We can only obtain these fats through our diet. They are essential to the development of healthy brains and other metabolically active tissues. Indeed, research from the world's top universities shows that these fats do much more than regulate our brains: They can also lower risk of heart disease, arthritis, and cancer. They even help fight wrinkles and may block fat-cell formation. . .

How could omega-3s possibly be this powerful? Scientists believe it's because Americans are suffering from a widespread deficiency. A recent study conducted by Dariush Mozaffarian, M.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health, found that the absence of these fatty acids in our diet is responsible annually for up to 96,000 premature deaths in this country. . .

Now there's real health care reform.

Every once in a while, a discovery comes along that changes everything about the way we see the world. In the early 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus had such a moment when he discovered that Earth was not the center of the universe. Our new understanding of essential fats is that kind of discovery . . .

First, let's start with omega-3s, what I'll call the spring fats. These are likely the most abundant fats in the world, but they don't originate in fish, as many believe. Rather, they are found in the green leaves of plants. Fish are full of omega-3s because they eat phytoplankton (the microscopic green plants of the ocean) and seaweed. In plants, these special fatty acids help turn sunlight into sugars, the basis of life on Earth. The spring fats speed up metabolism. They are fats that animals (humans included) use to get ready for times of activity, like the mating season. They're found in the highest concentrations in all the most active tissues: brains, eyes, hearts, the tails of sperm, the flight muscles of hummingbirds. Because fish have so many of these fats in their diets, they can be active in cold, dark waters. These fats protect our brains from neurological disorders and enable our hearts to beat billions of times without incident. But they are vanishing from our diet, and you'll soon understand why.

Well, not quite. Most of the oily fishes touted as good omega-3 sources are carnivorous. Salmon, trouts and such eat other fishes, not phytoplankton. However, the little fishes that they eat sometimes do eat phytoplankton and so the fats trickle up and concentrate in the carnivores. Sardines are good though.

Next up are the omega-6s, what I'll call the fall fats. They originate in plants as well, but in the seeds of plants rather than the leaves. The fall fats are simply storage fats for plants. Animals require both—omega-3s and omega-6s—in their diets and their tissues. But omega-6s are slower and stiffer than omega-3s. Plus, they promote blood clotting and inflammation, the underlying causes of many diseases, including heart disease and arthritis. Omega-3s, on the other hand, promote blood flow and very little inflammation, which may prevent things like heart disease. The proper mix of these two fats helps create tissue with the right amount of blood flow and inflammation. But because they're in constant competition to enter our cells, if your diet consists of too many omega-6s, your body will be deficient in omega-3s. And that is what's been happening to us as we've been eating more and more seed fats in the form of soybean, corn and other vegetable oils.

Yes, but that's not the whole problem. We have also been feeding such foods to farmed fishes (half of all fish are farmed, a figure that will increase as wild stocks disappear) and penned livestock. So, they no longer have healthful fat profiles. Their diet is as bad as ours, and when we eat them we don't get balanced fats either. It's a double dose of omega-6 for us. We get it when we eat grains and we get it in our fish and meat too.

Cows used to be raised on grass and other greens, producing meat, milk and cheese with much higher concentrations of omega-3s. These were the animal products that our grandparents and great-grandparents grew up on, before industrial feedlots replaced family farms. Now these livestock are fed corn and soy, and their tissues are swamped with omega-6s. Chickens, too, used to eat grass and grass-eating bugs. Those chickens produced eggs and meat that were high in omega-3s, but now they're full of omega-6-rich fall fats. . .

The base of our food supply has shifted from leaves to seeds, and this simple change means our bodies are storing more fat, leading to obesity and all its associated diseases.

Same for the fishes, cows and chickens. They aren't as robust and resistant as they were in the day when they had a better diet.

The article ends with a list of 10 ways to improve your diet but it omits the very best way to increase your omega-3 fats: eat dairy products from grass dairies. Milk, cheese and yogurt made from real milk from cows that eat grass gives an almost therapeutic dose of omega-3s since they are high in fats and those fats are the good ones. All the old advice about using margarine instead of butter, skimming the fat from milk and even making low fat cheese is nonsense, a way to avoid the harms done to dairy cows by their corn and soy diet. Same for chicken eggs.

This is all pretty simple and pretty obvious when you step back from the problem and look at the whole system. All the critters need a good diet, including people. But you have to be precise. Carnivorous oily fishes can't get omega-3s from phytoplankton. Omnivorous chickens, pigs and humans can't get omega-3s from eating their veggies. Chickens only get 15% of their diets from grasses when they have it free choice. Their real power food is bugs, which are full of proteins and fats, often from the greens that they ate, or that their prey ate, and so on and so forth.

Update: I didn't finish that thought. Just like chickens, other omnivores such as humans can't get much omega-3 from eating greens either. They just don't have the equipment to eat and digest that much roughage.

They all need to be together. That's why general farms and multi-species grazing works so well. When the chickens are grazed on the same pasture as cattle (or other ruminants that are master processors of vegetation due to their superior digestive systems) they eat some grass, but they also eat a lot of bugs that would otherwise plague the cattle. Everyone has a good day. Pigs fit in this scheme as well, though they will tear up a pasture rooting for grubs and tubers etc. unless they have nose rings. You can also mix ruminants since they have slightly different grazing behaviors. You can raise one goat for every three cattle on the same pasture with no loss of forage to the cattle since the goats will eat what the cattle can't. Goats have teeth to nip off forage but cattle grip forage with their rough (very rough) and nearly prehensile tongues, ripping off a mouthful.

General farming with a mix of crops and livestock is more difficult, but better in a variety of ways. Specialization can be costly, but the costs are externalized in our present ag system. I suspect that this will be true until we have human-equivalent ag bots, though we might just grow our food in vats by then, or nano-assemble it from rocks and air. We may not be able to make good farming pencil, but it seems like it would help to understand what we are doing wrong and why we do it so that we can minimize harm and get better when the pencils permit.