From http://food.change.org/

A Thought About Diet and Heart Disease

by Jill Richardson

Published May 09, 2009 @ 03:40AM PST

Recently I posted about an amazing book I read, The Queen of Fats by Susan Allport. She wrote about scientific findings that the rise in heart disease over the last century is linked to an increase in omega-6 fatty acids and a decrease in omega-3 fatty acids. (And yes, unfortunately, saturated fats are still bad for you... I got kinda hopeful while I read the book that maybe the new information meant that I get to eat a lot of butter, but it isn't so.) Omega-3s are often highest in leafy greens and animals that ate leafy greens or grazed on pasture. Omega-6s are often highest in seeds and animals that ate a lot of seeds. And omega-6s are higher in hydrogenated oils (trans fats) than non-hydrogenated oils.

So what does that mean to us? It means that eating lots of green veggies is really good for us, as we already knew. And we already knew that factory farming was bad, but now we know WHY it's so bad. In addition to the MANY environmental reasons why it's bad, it's bad because it decreases omega-3s in meat, dairy, and eggs, and increases omega-6s. And often it also means that we humans eat more oils from seeds too (in the case of soy, nearly all soy grown in this country is crushed for oil for human consumption, and factory farmed animals eat the resulting meal).