Taka: "Omega-6s cause your body to produce prostaglandins that turn on your immunity to cause inflammation, while omega-3s turn down your immunity to reduce inflammation."
I found that omega-3 (flax oil) made my immune system very weak while eating a raw diet with raw milk, raw cheese, raw cream, raw eggs, raw meat, unheated honey, and raw green vegetable juice. I used less than 1 tbsp of flax oil a day and I developed a rough sore throat that lasted about a month. My sore throat vanished immediately when I stopped taking the flax oil. Maybe you need more omega-6 when eating a diet with raw meat, so your body can fend off the bacteria.
"For more than 2 million years, humans have eaten diets that have a ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s of about two to one."
The problem with this line of reasoning is that they don't also consider other factors, like the vast increase in total PUFAs. People 100 years ago wouldn't have eaten more than 10% PUFAs at the very most, given a mixed diet. If they focused more on beef and dairy, they would have had <4% PUFAs. Meanwhile, corn and soybean oil are like 60% PUFAs. The talk about ratios is unscientific, unless you also address the total amount of PUFAs in the modern diet. Maybe if people ate a low PUFA diet (ex: coconut oil, butter, beef fat, cocoa butter, mac oil), the ratio wouldn't matter.
"However, over the last 100 years, humans have added extracted vegetable oils to other foods that they eat and increased the ratio to 12 to one and perhaps as high as 20 to one. This increase in the ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s is a cause of inflammation."
So maybe the whole problem is the high PUFA oils and not the ratio at all. It is unscientific to talk about omega-6/3 fatty acid ratio without considering the total amount of PUFAs or the ratio of MUFA/PUFA, SFA/PUFA, etc. Maybe if you had lots of SFAs and/or MUFAs, with very little PUFAs, it would not matter how high the ratio was. As HSWS has noted, the coconut oil has no omega-3, so it should cause a deficiency if we really do need omeag-3. If a diet of coconut oil doesn't cause inflammatory problems, then we would know that this omega-6/3 ratio is a just a useless distraction from the real issue, that people eat way too much PUFAs.
Bruce |
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