Omega-6 Fat Syndrome: Balance the Fats

Why You Need to Balance the Fats

It’s not enough to supplement your diet with fi sh oils or to eat enough omega-3 fats in your diet—it’s merely a good start. The health benefi ts of omega-3 fats depend on the balance of omega-6 fats in your diet. But that’s a big problem in the United States and many other Western nations.

We eat too much of the so-called heart-healthy omega-6 fats, which compete with and even destroy the benefi ts of omega-3 fats. To make matters worse, we don’t eat enough omega-3 fats. Consequently, most of us have a major fat imbalance in the diet.

In thisArticle you will discover why the balance of omega-6 and omega-3 fats really matters to your health. You’ll learn why just about every food you eat is inundated with omega-6 fats, and you’ll discover the impact of eating excess omega-6 fats, including increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease, asthma, cancer, heart disease, vision disorders, infl ammation disorders, learning disorders, rheumatoid arthritis, sleep disorders, and stress.

Mega Omega Problem in Our Food Supply

Today we eat fats that did not exist 100 years ago, including margarine, shortening, and cottonseed oil. As a result, we eat 10 to 20 times the amount of omega-6 fats that our forebears did. How did our fat balance get so out of whack?

It would be easy to point fingers at the food-processing industry, but we can’t only blame this easy scapegoat (although it certainly contributed). A multitude of factors, including industrialization, agribusiness, food manufacturing, and the promotion of “heart-healthy” oils, contributed to fewer omega-3 fats and too many omega-6 fats in our food supply.

Even if you reach for a food that you think contains omega-3 fats, unfortunately it may not. For example, soybean oil is stripped of its naturally occurring omega-3 fats when it is hydrogenated. Farmed salmon has a higher amount of omega-6 fats than wild salmon. Yet how could you know this, since this information is not disclosed on
food packaging?

Let’s take a closer look at these factors, so you’ll have a better idea how almost every food you eat has been penetrated with more omega-6 and shortchanged of its omega-3 fats.

The Case of the Fatted Calf

Before 1850, virtually all cattle in the United States spent four to five years grazing on grass, which naturally contains omega-3 fats, before slaughter. But today feedlot operations get a steer to slaughter in just about one year. As a result, cows have much less omega-3 in their meat today than they used to. A recent study from Ireland underscores this point; it found that the longer the cattle grazed, the higher their DHA content. Dining in the pasture also improved their fat profile, with lower levels of omega-6 fats in their meat.

Feedlot Cuisine. Today, 99 percent of cows in the United States dine in feedlots, exclusively on a corn-grain diet, which is rich in omega-6 fats and practically devoid of omega-3 fats. Consequently modern beef is fatter and has an entirely different fatty-acid profile: lower in omega-3 fatty acids, higher in omega-6 fatty acids, and higher in saturated fat. Wild animals and free-range or pasture-fed cattle do not display this unhealthy fat profile.

Commercially raised chickens, lamb, fish, and pigs also have a much lower omega-3 content in their meat and fat (think bacon here). Reports as early as 1968 showed that range-fed animals have higher amounts of omega-3 fatty acids. Foraging on grass rather than grains increases omega-3 fat accumulation in animals, as shown in Table 3.1.

The Meat (and Dairy Foods) We Eat Reflect the Diet of the Cow. The typical cow fattened on grain has 14 times more omega-6 than omega-3 fatty acids in its meat, far more than the grass-fed cow. This has a trickle-down effect in the food chain. The commercial meat and dairy products we eat also lack omega-3 fats while yielding a much higher load of omega-6 fats. This significance is aptly illustrated when you look at cheeses made from grazing cows versus feedlot-fed cows.

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