Fatty Acid Ratios in Free-Living and Domestic Animals

• Human physiology during evolution would have been adapted to the nature of wild foods, yet there is a striking qualitative and quantitative difference between the fat in wild or extensive meat consumption compared to what we eat today. • The total proportion of ω-3 has fallen 10-fold from a range of 12–16% of the fatty acids in wild bovids to 1.0–2.6% in currently sold meat. • The intensively reared animal carcass ratio is >1 often with between four and nine times the calories coming from fat compared to protein so that a chicken thigh eaten today provides the consumer with 100 more calories from fat than it did in the 1970s. • Most of the fat is of a saturated type and there is a discernable loss of ω-3 fatty acids in the meat of beef and poultry so that the ω6/ω-3 ratio in chickens as purchased was found to be about 9 compared to wild birds in which it is approximately 2. • A high level of fat infiltration in muscle which is purchased as meat has happened because of the intensive conditions of high-energy diets, growth promotion and absence of exercise which encourages weight gain as fat and fat infiltration at the expense of muscle loss. • Human physiology is adapted to wild foods; so drift from the genetic adaptation background contributed to the rise in the Western cluster of non-communicable diseases and the current concern with obesity, metabolic syndrome and mental ill health.