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Lessons from Jon Barron
Polyunsaturated Fats    In this week's excerpt from Lessons from the Miracle Doctors, Jon Barron takes aim at polyunsaturated fats.
 "Unfortunately, the same government authorities and health experts who are now warning us away from trans-fats are pushing us towards polyunsaturated vegetable oils. But are these good for us? Not necessarily. Because of the quantity and quality of polyunsaturated fats in our diets, they have replaced trans-fatty acids as the number one killer in our diets—a statement that probably comes as a surprise to most of you.
First, let's talk about why essential fatty acids (EFAs), a group to which polyunsaturated oils belong, are so important. Among other things, they are the main components of all cellular membranes—inside and out—where they protect against viruses, bacteria, and allergens. They are the key building blocks of all fats and oils, both in our foods and in our bodies. They play a key role in the construction and maintenance of nerve cells and the hormone-like substances called prostaglandins and help decrease cholesterol and triglyceride levels in the blood. The bottom line is that essential fatty acids are vital to our health, the primary healing agents in the body. According to some estimates, as many as 90 percent of all people are deficient in at least one of them.
In point of fact, all fats are actually fatty acids, consisting of one part fat (which is not water soluble) and one part acid (which is). Omega-3 and omega-6 fats are not only good for you, they are, in fact, essential—your body can't produce them, which means you must get them in your diet. However, due to the extreme sensitivity of omega-3s to light and oxygen, they have been removed from virtually all processed foods so that the foods have a longer shelf life. The sad fact is that our lack of these key EFAs has been linked to many of today's diseases and afflictions, including hair loss, lack of energy, skin problems, heart and circulatory problems, and immune disorders (including arthritis).
Now let's talk about the problem associated with EFAs. For most of human existence, we have eaten foods containing omega-6 fatty acids (linoleic acid and arachidonic acid) and omega-3 fatty acids (DHA, EPA, and alphalinolenic acid) in a ratio of about 1:1 to 2:1. Over the last fifty years, however, that ratio has changed to 20:1 or 30:1, even in some cases as high as 50:1. Our diets now include huge amounts of highly refined oils that are extracted from plants and used for cooking or in prepared foods (at the insistence of medical authorities). These oils—corn, safflower, cottonseed, peanut, and soybean—are all high in omega-6s. As a consequence, we have dramatically decreased our intake of omega-3s as found previously in whole grains, beans and seeds, and seafood—and now get our omega-3s primarily as the secondary fatty acid in our highly refined bottled oils and meat, which accounts for the increasing distortion of the fatty acid balance toward omega-6s.
In other words, for most of us, we face the cruel paradox that the higher our intake of omega-3s, the worse the omega-6/omega-3 fat ratio gets in our bodies. This crops up in areas of our diet that we don't even think about. For example, grass-fed beef contains omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids in close to the healthy 2:1 ratio. But grain-fattened beef, which most people eat, contains fat in an imbalanced ratio that parallels the ratios found in the grains used to fatten them—20:1, 30:1, and even 50:1 in favor of omega-6. There are numerous studies that show how deadly this is. For example, a Korean study found that the ratios of serum omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids were highly indicative of prostate cancer risk. The researchers concluded that omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids have a tumor-promoting effect while omega-3 acids have a protective effect."
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