Imagine the kind of fat that could save your life. A fat that helps prevent cancer & heart attack, regularises blood sugars & prevents diabetes, reduces cholesterol, lowers blood pressure, fights dementia, slows down the aging process, alleviates joint pain & gives you great looking skin. That would be a good fat to have wouldn't it? Well there is a fat can do all this, better than any known drug and it is both natural and cheap. Best of all, this is no future fantasy - it's here now. Has been for quite a while in fact.
I'm talking about certain polyunsaturated natural fatty acids, whose beneficial effects have been documented in thousands of studies over the past ten years. Of crucial importance however is taking the right essential fatty acids (EFAs) and in the correct balance. The easiest and most effective means of doing this is by taking a combination of GLA & DHA, which are essential fatty acids (EFA's, derived from omegas 3 & 6 respectively). More of this later.
Everyone knows that too much of the wrong kinds of dietary fat can be dangerous. But the obsession with eating reduced fat meals has created a serious deficiency of those fatty acids that are essential to life and good health. So unless you get to know a little about fats, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't, as it were.
The Robber Barons
Years of conflicting messages about the role of fat in our diet has caused much confusion. That's hardly surprising given the unprincipled attitude of the major companies supplying packaged foods. In spite of scientific progress few commercial messages today are based on the scientific knowledge available, as it should & could be. Instead the truth is perverted and misrepresented by companies eager to sell their "fat free" and "cholesterol-free" products. Hidden are the facts that the sugar and hydrogenated fats in these products are the real culprits which increase your body's own ability to produce cholesterol & other unhealthy fats, causing exactly the kind of damage you bought their product in order to avoid. They know this, but hey! Why should they care?
If you pause for a moment and remember who actually owns some of the world's biggest processed food manufacturers you may get an idea of the level of ethics involved here. Yes folks, the worthy owners of some of our largest food companies are none other than the largest tobacco companies! These unprincipled scum will sell you anything & are masters of misleading packaging, plus the billions in cash to persuade you to buy. Whatever laws are passed & whatever consumer tastes may be, the Robber Barons will always be ahead of the game. You've just got to accept this will always be the way of it and be on your guard. There's only one way you can beat them and that is not to eat packaged processed foodstuffs at all. If you don't, that's probably the second biggest thing you can do for your overall health, after not smoking.
Fat for Life!
Fat is necessary for life. It is a key component in body chemistry and energy storage. Knowing the difference between the beneficial EFA's and the harmful fats is crucial for health & longevity. A reduced or imbalanced intake of EFA's plays a significant role in the development of cardiovascular, neurological, metabolic and other age-related disease. Research has singled out two particular beneficial fatty acids, GLA (gamma-linolenic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenioc acid) and shown that in the proper balance they protect the cardiovascular system, lowering blood pressure, LDL bad cholesterol & triglycerides, while raising HDL good cholesterol.They reduce stress reactions and ameliorate insulin resistance. GLA reverses the effect of aging on fatty acid metabolism, while DHA is essential in the development & maintenance of brain function. The richest known source of GLA is borage and evening primrose oils, while DHA is plentiful in cold water fish and extracted from various plants like flax seed.
Omega-3 & Omega-6 Oils
The reason Essential Fatty Acids (EFA's) are essential is because they cannot be manufactured in the body. You have to get them from your diet. If you don't get enough of them, saturated fats will take their place accelerating the process of aging and chronic disease.
There are two families of EFA's: Omega-3 (alpha-linolenic acid) & Omega-6 (linoleic acid) . The ideal combination of these EFA's is 2 parts omega-6 to 1 part omega-3 and when combined in this ratio the beneficial effects are greatly enhanced. If however, as often happens in a Western diet, there is too great a proportion of omega-6 this can prevent the uptake of omega-3 and lead to problems.
So to avoid confusion let's make it clear what is what.
Generally speaking saturated fats are the bad ones involved in atherosclerosis, heart disease and cancer. Broadly speaking, the unsaturated fats in unprocessed form are beneficial.
Omega-3 : alpha-linolenic acid comes from cold water fish like salmon, mackerel, herring and tuna. It also comes from flax seed, perilla, pumpkin seed, canola & walnut oils. Omega-3's are metabolised into EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid). The one you want is DHA which has been shown to be the more effective of the two. Too much fish oil can upset the stomach of some people, in which case they should go for the plant-based oils. Remember, omega-3 should not be taken by itself & must be balanced with Omega-6.
Omega-6 : linoleic acid is abundant in safflower and sunflower oil, and a lesser extent in sesame, corn and soybean oil. What you want is the derivative GLA (gamma-linolenic acid) found in Borage Seed oil and also Evening Primrose oil (EPO). When buying bear in mind that Evening Primrose oil (EPO) is about 3 x more expensive than Borage oil.
As I've said, the ideal ratio of ratio of Omega-6 to Omega-3 is 2 : 1. You need to remember this ratio if you buy EFA's, whatever their source. The best and most economical solution is to find an equal combo of GLA-DHA caps containing about 1,000mg of each. Alternatively you can buy fish oil or flax seed as a liquid and take 1 - 2 tablespoonfuls a day together with 3 - 6 caps of borage or EPO (but it's hard to find borage & EPO in liquid form).
Buying Smart
What you need to know is that it takes about 4,000mg of borage oil to produce 1,000mg of GLA and 2,000mg of fish oil to give 1,000mg of DHA. You want to take about 3 to 6 caps of these a day. Now you see why a bottle of borage or fish oil caps with 60 caps of 300mg is not going to take you very far or do you much good. And this will perhaps give you an idea of the economics of how the supplements business is played. Even if the stuff you buy on the shelves is good quality and actually is what it says it is (and 70% of it isn't), the odds are that the number of caps is nowhere near the dosage which would do you any good anyway.
There are several reasons why it's much simpler to buy the GLA-DHA in caps. It's a lot more convenient, it's cheaper but most of all the oils are protected against going rancid for a lot longer than in a bottle.
The one thing you do not want is to take rancid fats, EFA's or otherwise. To do so is actually bad for you and unfortunately most EFA's go rancid very easily. If it has a bitter aftertaste it's off, don't touch it. I'm afraid we're talking about an awful lot of the EFA's you will find in stores. All of which brings us to........
The Really Bad Fats
Top of the list is of course saturated fat from animals. Avoid wherever possible. First off, fat is where all the hormones, heavy metals & toxins are stored. Most animals have a fair share of these and eating them will just pass it on to you, where it is stored in your own fatty tissue. Eat it often and it will make you fat too. It is a great way to clog your arteries and cause heart disease. Dairy fats have most of the same problems.
There are however more pernicious manmade fats and top of this list come what are called trans-fatty acids. Hydrogenation is a drastic but common way of changing natural oils to more solid fat with longer shelf life. It profoundly alters the original biochemical properties. Valuable EFA's are destroyed by trans-fatty acid production and saturation with hydrogen. In this process hydrogen gas is bubbled through the heated oil in the presence of a nickel catalyst at high temperature. Trans-fatty acids thus become antagonists to EFA's and have been shown to increase both obesity, total & LDL cholesterol, even more than saturated fats. Look out particularly for partially hydrogenated products rich in trans-fatty acids seen in almost all packaged and processed food, margarines, shortenings and hydrogenated oils.
Even the right kinds of fats, when processed in the wrong way will cause degenerative effects. This is unfortunately the case with many Omega-6 oils, including safflower, sunflower, sesame and corn oils. In their natural and unprocessed state these oils are good. Unfortunately such oils are very vulnerable to heat and light and go rancid quickly. As a result almost all commercially offered brands are processed and lose all their beneficial effect. They actually become harmful, inhibiting absorption of good EFA's and just as bad for you as any saturated fat.
The best oil for cooking purposes are canola and olive oil. These oils are composed mainly of monounsaturated oleic acid and are more stable than the unsaturated oils.
For $15 to $20 per month getting the right combination of EFA's is probably one of the most important, easiest but most overlooked forms of supplementation there is. You don't have to be fat yourself but you certainly do need to know the fats which will keep you well and the ones which'll like as not kill you in the end.
Fat is necessary for Life. It can also clog your arteries & kill you. So unless you know a little bit about good and bad fat, you are damned either way....."
