I wonder if the Tibetans and Inuits benefit from the fact that their dietary fats come from animals who lived healthy, whole lives. Much of the US consumes dairy and meat that comes from animals who were shoved into dark, overcrowded, stressful, unnatural habitat and fed strange feed that they'd normally not eat such as corn and grain.
To argue that, you'd have to demonstrate that the fats in animals raised on what you call healthy food differ chemically from the fats you'd find in animals fed otherwise.
Related example: The glucose from sugar beets is chemically identical to and indistinguishable from the glucose from sugar cane or corn. Animal fat tends to be a more complex mix, but while no expert I suspect there's only so many different lipid compounds produced and stored in animal cells. After all, the energy currency in any animal's bloodstream is mainly glucose - the source information is lost.
There are excellent _ethical_ reasons not to mistreat animals as is today often the case. I'm not sure that there are chemical reasons related to nutrition.
Most claims, however, focus on omega-3 fats, in particular alpha linolenic acid (ALA). Higher intakes of this plant-based omega-3 fatty acid are associated with a lower risk of heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and depression.
According to Dr. Richard Bazinet, a professor in the department of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto who analyzes fatty acids in beef, grass-fed beef outranks grain-fed beef when it comes to ALA.
Conventional beef has about 20 milligrams of ALA in three ounces, whereas the same amount of grass-fed beef has 50 to 100 mg. A big difference? Yes. Meaningful? That depends.
Women need 1,100 mg of ALA each day; men require 1,600 mg. Eating a six-ounce grass-fed steak three times a week provides, at most, 5 per cent to 8 per cent of your daily ALA requirement. Keep in mind that during cooking, the ALA content of meat will decrease since ALA is found in fat.
Making the switch to other grass-fed animal foods, such as pasture-raised poultry and eggs and grass-fed dairy, could conceivably make an appreciable difference towards your daily ALA needs.
Is there meaningful mass production of glucose (or dextrose) from corn? Corn syrup is higher in fructose, which is metabolized very differently from glucose.
Absolutely! The glucose mix initially produced from corn is about 50% glucose and 42% fructose, which is roughly the same ratio as you get from beets or cane. You can then _optionally_ raise the percentage of fructose to 55, 65 or even 90% fructose. The 90% stuff is usually diluted/mixed before use.
HFCS is just sugar syrup with an intentionally elevated level of fructose. There's nothing that specifically ties corn to high amounts of fructose, other than that corn is heavily subsidized in the US while other sources of sugar are hit with import tariffs. So corn is what US sugar producers will tend to use as a source.
