What’s all the buzz surrounding Omega-3 fatty acids? Is this just another fad that will soon go the way of the grapefruit diet? The choice is yours, but if you want to understand some of the positive effects that Omega-3s may have on your health, you’ll have to study a bit of science.
Inflammation is our bodies’ response to foreign substances that are bad for us. A number of those foreign substances come from the wrong foods. Linoleic acid (found in oils like corn, safflower, and soybean), which our bodies convert to Omega-6 fatty acids, has played a greater role in our diets in the past 20 years as the Food Guide Pyramid steered us away from the saturated fats found in meat and eggs, and toward the supposedly healthy polyunsaturated fats containing Omega-6 fatty acids. At that time, science didn’t know that too much Omega-6 in our diets causes inflammation.
Here’s how it works: our bodies react to fats by producing three different types of prostaglandins. Prostaglandins are hormone-like compounds that have powerful effects on our health. Series 1 and 3 prostaglandins reduce inflammation. Series 2 prostaglandins increase inflammation. We need Series 2 prostaglandins for certain things—they help with blood clotting when we have a cut, for instance. But you can see how a compound that makes our blood sticky might have adverse effects on our health if it gets out of hand. Researchers are right now looking to the effects of Series 2 on common diseases like heart attack, stroke, arthritis, cancer, and Alzheimer’s.
Omega-6 fats can take one of two metabolic pathways as they’re absorbed into our cells. In the presence of Omega 3s, they take the “good” pathway and produce series 1 and 3 prostaglandins. If the ratio of Omega 6 fats is too high compared to Omega 3 fats, the Omega-6s will take the “bad” pathway and turn into arachidonic acid, which is a series-2 prostaglandin.
When humans lived in caves, we ate roughly equal amounts of Omega-6 and Omega-3 fats. Today, however, we’re eating 20 times more Omega-6s than Omega-3s. Although research is still in progress, this radical change in the human diet for the first time in history could solve the mystery of why obesity and disease are on the increase even as more people replace supposedly unhealthy saturated fat with supposedly healthy Omega-6 polyunsaturated fat.
Nutritionists are now recommending that we keep our ratio of Omega-6 to Omega-3 consumption at about 4-to-1. Omega-3s are found in fish oil, flax seed oil, and to a lesser degree, cold water fish, although exposure to the heat of cooking destroys most of the Omega-3s found in food. There has been a gradual return to consuming a reasonable amount of saturated fat found in animal protein, as more studies come out showing that it’s not the cholesterol in saturated fat that’s the problem—it’s the other stuff we eat that makes our blood so sticky that the cholesterol sticks to our arteries.
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