Have you heard of Zero Acre Farms? They have engineered an ultra-low-LA cooking oil that they advocate for all purposes, including deep frying. I'm not sure what to think of it, but it definitely takes the "low ω-6" idea to its limit.
The crazy thing is that they engineered this oil from fermented sugar cane, which is about the most environmentally sustainable way to create it, since sugar cane is one of the highest-yielding plants per acre known to man.
I haven't tried it yet, but it looks really interesting.
I'm kind of pro and con on that. It does make for a good evolutionary biology type narrative and explanation. Why would you want your metabolism to slow?! Winter.
On the other hand, I'm not sure the metaphor or whatever of torpor holds as much as Brad believes, e.g. he seems super convinced there's magic in starch/carbs which I just don't believe beyond "they contain energy."
My thought is that if we compare wild olives (small, dry, and bitter with oleuropein) with cultivated olives (big, juicy, oily, sweet) it's obvious that our pre-agricultural ancestors didn't have access to anything like modern olive oil. While this itself doesn't allow any firm conclusions ("...and therefore olive oil bad"), in my head homer simpson is reading from a card, 'always do the opposite of what nutritionists say'. If they tell me olive oil is good, it must be bad. Brad's 'signaling torpor' gives me a bridge from obvious observations about prehistory to my modern conspiracy-theorist bias.
We're such a high percentage oleic acid ourselves anyway, I have a hard time believing it could ever be necessary to add more. If a person is lean and metabolically healthy, and really wants to dress a salad with an oil that's liquid at somewhat below room temperature, sure oleic acid I guess. The human studies that show olive oil being neutral or beneficial likely didn't control the diets in question well enough to really tease out an effect.
Honestly, not sure. I personally sure don't use olive oil (or avocado oil) for cooking. The pasta sauce I use has some olive oil, but only 7g total fat per 125g of sauce and I use less than that per day. So maybe I'm getting 5g of fat from olive oil per day, but there will be much more MUFA in the tallow I'm using to cook with. Even cream has a bunch of MUFA.
Study wise, I don't know what to believe. It's one of those like o3/o6 where I try to just avoid the question altogether because I don't see either side having good enough arguments to convince me.
I’m quite sad that many of my favorite foods are high in (non-seed-oil) ω-6: I eat peanut butter, almonds, and pistachios pretty much every single day. Now I’m not sure what to replace them with.
I relate to this very strongly -- a couple of months ago it used to be a battle to make a jar of almond butter last more than two days. After two weeks on the potato diet I put all my almonds, pistachios, and nut butters in two shopping bags, and after another week gave them all to a friend who refused to give up such things. Now I don't miss them. There's something fucky going on with seeds the way they make us crave them.
I'm coming back to this after making it 60% of the way through the book so far. It's excellent; one of those "life-changing" books for me. I'm also reading "The Queen of Fats" which the Omega Balance author highly recommended.
One thing that is becoming abundantly clear to me, especially after having just read "Ultra Processed People" is that the main reason ω-6's rule the day in Western diets is because they are exceptionally shelf-stable while ω-3's are not. (ω-6's may be as shelf-stable as SFA's but they are much cheaper to produce.) This means it will be really difficult for food manufacturers to pivot to a better omega balance even if consumers demand it. Basically, the fact that ω-3's go rancid so easily puts a forcing function on not eating very much processed food if one is trying to maximize ω-3 consumption.
To me, the key ideas from the book as it relates to the obesity epidemic are:
1. Cell membrane activity is important for metabolism, and cell membranes play a vital role in regulating nutrient uptake, insulin sensitivity, and signaling pathways that influence energy balance and body weight.
2. Membrane fatty acid composition is homeostatically regulated, with the brain and eyes being the most tightly regulated.
3. Arachidonic Acid (AA) is crucial for membrane function, but too much AA causes inflammation and other Bad Things. The enzyme involved in AA production has a preference for the ω-3 Alpha Linolenic Acid (ALA). When ALA is present in sufficient amounts, it can help keep AA levels in check, preventing Bad Things from happening. A diet omega balance of 95% (even if implausibly large) would be great because AA can be produced from ALA.
What I don't think came through in the book is that the omega balance is still a function of the weight of the food! So, yes, spinach has an omega balance of like 84% but in 3 cups of spinach there is <0.2 g of PUFA. Meanwhile, an 8 oz filet mignon has an omega balance of 7% but also contains very little PUFA: <1.2g per 8 oz. So if I eat steak and spinach for dinner, my omega balance becomes (84*0.2 + 7*1.2)/(0.2 + 1.2) = 18%. That's above the 15% threshold but well below the recommended 25%-50% range. It's also easy to see how omega balance can be more about eliminating excess ω-6 compared to adding in ω-3.
Yea agreed on that last point. His rec to eat salads is ridiculous - you'd need to eat 100lbs of lettuce to counter a single peanut, probably.
This combined with "we don't actually eat 1 single food but a combination diet" makes his advice largely miss the point, I think. He also recommends Canola (not sure if in the book, but in the Tucker Goodrich podcast) which I'm obviously against. It might have a good omega balance, but fuck no.
I'm also not sure if the balance is actually that important causally, or just a marker - it's easily influenced in the short term and your LA can still be way too high.
I'm on day 24 of ex115salmon (wild caught) and I'm UP one pound. Not at all what I expected, to be honest.
Just finished Queen of Fats and she suggests the same things as Hulbert. I suspect he took his advice section from her book.
That said, I did just buy a big bag of ground flaxseed and will be mixing it in with my kefir everyday for lunch. It’s not bad and if it’s as high in omega-3 as the Foodulator™ suggests it is, it seems to be low-hanging fruit. (80% omega balance with over 18g of alpha lineolenic acid per 2 Tbsp!)
It’s more or less the same thing. I found it helpful to read them in parallel because the ideas of one reinforced the other. (And other ideas from Tucker and Brad.) QOF is much shorter (I listened to it in <4 hours) so it was easy for me to tack on.
Here’s what I learned in QOF that I didn’t (as much) in OB:
• Omega 3’s weren’t discovered to be essential until after the Food Guide Pyramid was created (so this absolves the USDA of some of the blame for missing the boat on them)
• The real reason omega-3’s are vanishing from the food supply is that they aren’t at all shelf stable. Makes it impossible to include them in processed foods.
• A lot more of the backstory on the Danish guys who went to Greenland and studied the Inuit there.
• Omega balance also seems to affect blood clotting. Excess arachidonic acid in the plasma causes blood to clot. This is why Inuits bleed easily and get lots of nosebleeds. It’s also a huge reason why Americans get heart attacks. (I know OB covered this, but I didn’t get the idea as clearly.)
• Fat gives food their flavors because aroma molecules are fat soluble, not water soluble. This is why fat is so key to processed foods
• Hydrogenation selectively destroys omega-3’s
• Not only has the food supply directly been favoring more and more omega-6, but it has also indirectly been favoring it with plants being bred to have lower levels of alpha-linolenic acid (e.g. spinach, soybeans, rapeseed). This implies that, looking over time within commodities, the omega balance has been going in the wrong direction over time.
• Fish are more sensitive to diet omega balance because they require more omega 3’s than other animals
• Even though QOF was written over 20 years ago, its truth has not spread because of economic incentives by food manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies.
• This is definitely a “Brad” idea, but QOF discussed that wild animals shift their diet omega balance towards omega 6’s prior to hibernation so that they can fatten up. A researcher at CU Boulder tried feeding yellow bellied marmots a high omega-3 diet right before hibernation, and they didn’t go into hibernation.
Well, just got a DEXA and it's lowest bf% ever, but I apparently gained 2lbs of lean mass last month. Probably just water retention, but maybe it's a false alert and the salmon is fine?
This goes back a few years but interesting in the context “Zooming back to present day, Allport has walked her talk. By switching from omega-3 fats to omega-6 for just 30 days, she demonstrated a slowing of her own metabolism and a change in body composition from lean mass to fat.” https://www.cbass.com/Omega6.htm
I spent today looking through the "What We Eat in America" tables produced by USDA (which are taken from food diary data from NHANES), and the average omega balance (= ω-3/(ω-3+ω-6)) has held steady at about 10% for both adult men and women from 2001-2019.
I thought it would be getting worse over time (since soybean oil consumption seems to be continuing to increase). But if Hulbert is right, a steady 10% seems to be low enough to do a lot of damage over time.
Another explanation could be that people are systematically under-reporting the high-ω-6 foods in their diaries (and these have been getting worse over time).
Interesting! Yea many potential issues with epidemiology. I've been thinking about that with "PUFAcation" in general, not just the balance.
If there is indeed a threshold, let's say 3% LA from kcals, then you could have various weird artifacts in population-wide statistics.
E.g.you could have a population where everybody is at 2.9% and you see no issues. You increase total population wide consumption a little bit, and suddenly you see tons of issues.
On the other hand, maybe 75% of the population are at 10% and 25% are at 2%. If the 75% increase their consumption, not much more might happen. You might conclude that LA is not a culprit, because it went up but problems did not.
Add that the threshold is probably somewhat different between individuals, that a lot of the damage is done cumulatively over time, and so on, and it's just a really, really rough guide.
I think epidemiology is better at ruling out certain things.
E.g. Asians eating 85%+ rice diets for millennia and being healthy/skinny kind of disproves that carbs per se are always the bad guy. I mean, either not in everyone (are some more adapted to starch?) or it's just sugar/fructose, not glucose (the Lustig position), or maybe something else happened *wink nudge* since that made us not tolerate carbs any more..
Similarly, if the obesity epidemic started in 1910 but seed oils were only invented in 1960, I'd be hard pressed (ha, seed oil pun!) to believe they caused it.
There is more detailed data about the distributions of PUFA intake on a different set of tables at that website, but I’m not going to dig into them right now.
I'm glad you adressed the Peat question -- also known as the omega-3 question. On the one hand, Peat's infamous article has many kind convincing studies (which however I haven't checked thoroughly for statistical errors and biases). On the other end, there are Hubert's claims.
The thing is I don't see how the n-6/n-3 ratio discourse is helpful. The problem is that there is no world where it's applicable. The only valid oil is linseed oil, which is disgusting. If rancidity is a concern then it's all the more of a concern with n-3s, which are even more prone to oxydation. It leads people to take fish oil capsules and weird vegetable oil combination because it's marketed as healthy. Canola oil as a supposedly "excellent" ratio too (aside from the fact that it's also disgusting), at least that's what everyone think. The appropriate ratio is probably like 1:1 if not less.
As you said on this question the better heuristic is the Knobbe argument: just eat like your ancestors, that's the evolutionary consistent thing to do, eating the lowest amounts of PUFA possible, grass-fed animals and maybe some wild fish/mammal brain.
The fact that they are everywhere also renders moot the question of whether they are essential or not. Surely it's good to get some minimal amount of long-chain n-3 (and not from capsules) but should alpha-linolenic really be seen as essential? Very unclear. The Japanese, famous for their diet rich in fish (but still low-fat), already had notable rates of strokes before the introduction of modern diets, so even n-3 can be questionned I guess.
And to be clear, the weight loss is not what interests me (never needed it) but the believable mental health argument that Hubert makes has me very intrigued.
I'm in France and it's rare to find 100% grass-fed cattle, but we do have a variety of label imposing strict rules on animal welfare -- should be outside most of the time and grass-fed as much as possible, though they resort to canola "cakes" often, still not as bad as soybean. So I've come to the same conclusion has you: some seafood, grass-fed meat, maybe some brains and some wild canned salmon from time to time, and ditch all the vegetable oils.
> The thing is I don't see how the n-6/n-3 ratio discourse is helpful.
I think that it's largely been used as an excuse to just keep eating what you're eating and just take some fish oil capsules.
I'm quite convinced this is nonsense. One of the many reasons paleo never worked: "Eat lean meat, vegetables, NUTS & SEEDS, and take some fish oil." So you're actively eating more o6 cause it's "natural" and you're trying to counter it with the o3 from the fish oil. That can't work, mathematically, unless you go super nuts (haha) on the fish oil.
Sry this comment does not have anything to do with this article but I could not login on the site on my browser.
Could you update the foodulator ?
If that isn't too much work.
I was thinking about a way to select any nutrient and than list all foods from max-to-min in the same way like before. Maybe list the contents in the same table.
That would make it easier to find foods high in certain things or low in others.
That's a pretty common request. I think one of the issues is that I think the data would be largely useless. I've run that query a couple of times and you get 100,000 zeros before the first values show up, and then another 100,000 vegetables that have practically zero anything.
There are 24 million entries in the USDA database.
Not even repeated access, it'd just be a terrible user interface. I'd show you a page of 24 million entries, 79% of which are 0 or close on any given value.
Maybe it's more useful than I imagine, at least with some added filtering, I don't know.
There is no way to filter "unprocessed foods." There is technically a list of "base foods" in the USDA database but it's very small and lacks many of the results I was actually interested in. The larger DB is just mostly them going out, buying random stuff at random stores, and throwing it in the lab. You can even see what store and what date they bought it! Very interesting, if not necessarily useful.
Here I can typically find sardines w/o added oils. But yea, "in seed oils" is the default, "in olive oil" is the fancy alternative, and then only some brands will have them "in water."
When I was doing sardines I ordered boxes of Season brand online. I think Wild Planet is also supposed to be good?
This is a quibble, but the following phrase has a mistake: “Hulbert would like to see us average just about as high as possible across our diet, probably aiming for at least 25% and trying to get closer to 50%. This would be equivalent to an ω-6:ω-3 ratio of 2:1 or even 1:1.”
3:1 would be 25%, 2:1 would be 33% and 1:1 would be 50%.
Have you heard of Zero Acre Farms? They have engineered an ultra-low-LA cooking oil that they advocate for all purposes, including deep frying. I'm not sure what to think of it, but it definitely takes the "low ω-6" idea to its limit.
The crazy thing is that they engineered this oil from fermented sugar cane, which is about the most environmentally sustainable way to create it, since sugar cane is one of the highest-yielding plants per acre known to man.
I haven't tried it yet, but it looks really interesting.
(see here: https://www.zeroacre.com/blog/vegetable-oil-substitutes;
key image here: https://images.ctfassets.net/stnv4edzz8v3/1qCgYakNmwGf4DfNMTkcZW/f39bd4d6e869d2a16fdd91e347da507d/Linoleic_Acid_Content_of_Cooking_Oils.png)
Yea I've heard about it, Tucker Goodrich is an advisor for them I believe.
Personally I don't think I'd ever use it, I love butter and I'm the kind of guy who renders his own suet tallow.
But that's not 99% of the people, and especially not restaurants, so if it's better, good?
I am a little worried that there will be unforeseen consequences, but maybe there won't..
Yes, I worry about the unforeseen consequences as well.
As much as I'm a techno-optimist, our track record in nutrition isn't exactly stellar lol
Brilliant concept, I'm impressed with their ingenuity. But isn't that mostly oleic acid? It's not toxic, but it's signaling torpor.
Brad and Tucker had a big debate about that a while ago.
Whenever I hear "signaling torpor" I automatically think of Brad.
You and me both lol
Yeah, I like his phrasing better than 'slows down your metabolism', which is what I'd have said before hearing him on the topic.
I'm kind of pro and con on that. It does make for a good evolutionary biology type narrative and explanation. Why would you want your metabolism to slow?! Winter.
On the other hand, I'm not sure the metaphor or whatever of torpor holds as much as Brad believes, e.g. he seems super convinced there's magic in starch/carbs which I just don't believe beyond "they contain energy."
Did you find Tucker more convincing?
My thought is that if we compare wild olives (small, dry, and bitter with oleuropein) with cultivated olives (big, juicy, oily, sweet) it's obvious that our pre-agricultural ancestors didn't have access to anything like modern olive oil. While this itself doesn't allow any firm conclusions ("...and therefore olive oil bad"), in my head homer simpson is reading from a card, 'always do the opposite of what nutritionists say'. If they tell me olive oil is good, it must be bad. Brad's 'signaling torpor' gives me a bridge from obvious observations about prehistory to my modern conspiracy-theorist bias.
We're such a high percentage oleic acid ourselves anyway, I have a hard time believing it could ever be necessary to add more. If a person is lean and metabolically healthy, and really wants to dress a salad with an oil that's liquid at somewhat below room temperature, sure oleic acid I guess. The human studies that show olive oil being neutral or beneficial likely didn't control the diets in question well enough to really tease out an effect.
Honestly, not sure. I personally sure don't use olive oil (or avocado oil) for cooking. The pasta sauce I use has some olive oil, but only 7g total fat per 125g of sauce and I use less than that per day. So maybe I'm getting 5g of fat from olive oil per day, but there will be much more MUFA in the tallow I'm using to cook with. Even cream has a bunch of MUFA.
Study wise, I don't know what to believe. It's one of those like o3/o6 where I try to just avoid the question altogether because I don't see either side having good enough arguments to convince me.
Some cute models for you
Stearic Acid (straight as an arrow)
https://chemapps.stolaf.edu/jmol/jmol.php?model=CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC%28%3DO%29O
Oleic Acid (same but with a cis-bond, bent)
https://chemapps.stolaf.edu/jmol/jmol.php?model=CCCCCCCC%5CC%3DC%2FCCCCCCCC%28O%29%3DO
Elaidic Acid(same but with a trans-bond, slightly bent)
https://chemapps.stolaf.edu/jmol/jmol.php?model=O%3DC%28O%29CCCCCCC%2FC%3DC%2FCCCCCCCC
And here's your favourite Docosahexaenoic Acid (an acid of twists and turns)
https://chemapps.stolaf.edu/jmol/jmol.php?model=O%3DC%28O%29CC%5CC%3DC%2FC%2FC%3DC%5CC%5CC%3DC%2FC%5CC%3DC%2FC%5CC%3DC%2FC%5CC%3DC%2FCC
Oh, that's very cool. Really helpful to visualize them.
I’m quite sad that many of my favorite foods are high in (non-seed-oil) ω-6: I eat peanut butter, almonds, and pistachios pretty much every single day. Now I’m not sure what to replace them with.
Man, when I went low-carb/keto I stuffed so many nuts down... nut butters, too.
Even when Paleo. I remember CrossFitters and other Paleo gurus posting videos of themselves eating jars of nut butter, lol.
I ended up not replacing them. I dunno, the desire just went away. I guess dark chocolate is similar?
I relate to this very strongly -- a couple of months ago it used to be a battle to make a jar of almond butter last more than two days. After two weeks on the potato diet I put all my almonds, pistachios, and nut butters in two shopping bags, and after another week gave them all to a friend who refused to give up such things. Now I don't miss them. There's something fucky going on with seeds the way they make us crave them.
Right?! It goes away! Almost drug-like.
I'm coming back to this after making it 60% of the way through the book so far. It's excellent; one of those "life-changing" books for me. I'm also reading "The Queen of Fats" which the Omega Balance author highly recommended.
One thing that is becoming abundantly clear to me, especially after having just read "Ultra Processed People" is that the main reason ω-6's rule the day in Western diets is because they are exceptionally shelf-stable while ω-3's are not. (ω-6's may be as shelf-stable as SFA's but they are much cheaper to produce.) This means it will be really difficult for food manufacturers to pivot to a better omega balance even if consumers demand it. Basically, the fact that ω-3's go rancid so easily puts a forcing function on not eating very much processed food if one is trying to maximize ω-3 consumption.
To me, the key ideas from the book as it relates to the obesity epidemic are:
1. Cell membrane activity is important for metabolism, and cell membranes play a vital role in regulating nutrient uptake, insulin sensitivity, and signaling pathways that influence energy balance and body weight.
2. Membrane fatty acid composition is homeostatically regulated, with the brain and eyes being the most tightly regulated.
3. Arachidonic Acid (AA) is crucial for membrane function, but too much AA causes inflammation and other Bad Things. The enzyme involved in AA production has a preference for the ω-3 Alpha Linolenic Acid (ALA). When ALA is present in sufficient amounts, it can help keep AA levels in check, preventing Bad Things from happening. A diet omega balance of 95% (even if implausibly large) would be great because AA can be produced from ALA.
What I don't think came through in the book is that the omega balance is still a function of the weight of the food! So, yes, spinach has an omega balance of like 84% but in 3 cups of spinach there is <0.2 g of PUFA. Meanwhile, an 8 oz filet mignon has an omega balance of 7% but also contains very little PUFA: <1.2g per 8 oz. So if I eat steak and spinach for dinner, my omega balance becomes (84*0.2 + 7*1.2)/(0.2 + 1.2) = 18%. That's above the 15% threshold but well below the recommended 25%-50% range. It's also easy to see how omega balance can be more about eliminating excess ω-6 compared to adding in ω-3.
Yea agreed on that last point. His rec to eat salads is ridiculous - you'd need to eat 100lbs of lettuce to counter a single peanut, probably.
This combined with "we don't actually eat 1 single food but a combination diet" makes his advice largely miss the point, I think. He also recommends Canola (not sure if in the book, but in the Tucker Goodrich podcast) which I'm obviously against. It might have a good omega balance, but fuck no.
I'm also not sure if the balance is actually that important causally, or just a marker - it's easily influenced in the short term and your LA can still be way too high.
I'm on day 24 of ex115salmon (wild caught) and I'm UP one pound. Not at all what I expected, to be honest.
Just finished Queen of Fats and she suggests the same things as Hulbert. I suspect he took his advice section from her book.
That said, I did just buy a big bag of ground flaxseed and will be mixing it in with my kefir everyday for lunch. It’s not bad and if it’s as high in omega-3 as the Foodulator™ suggests it is, it seems to be low-hanging fruit. (80% omega balance with over 18g of alpha lineolenic acid per 2 Tbsp!)
Do you recommend QoF? Would I learn much after reading OB?
It’s more or less the same thing. I found it helpful to read them in parallel because the ideas of one reinforced the other. (And other ideas from Tucker and Brad.) QOF is much shorter (I listened to it in <4 hours) so it was easy for me to tack on.
Here’s what I learned in QOF that I didn’t (as much) in OB:
• Omega 3’s weren’t discovered to be essential until after the Food Guide Pyramid was created (so this absolves the USDA of some of the blame for missing the boat on them)
• The real reason omega-3’s are vanishing from the food supply is that they aren’t at all shelf stable. Makes it impossible to include them in processed foods.
• A lot more of the backstory on the Danish guys who went to Greenland and studied the Inuit there.
• Omega balance also seems to affect blood clotting. Excess arachidonic acid in the plasma causes blood to clot. This is why Inuits bleed easily and get lots of nosebleeds. It’s also a huge reason why Americans get heart attacks. (I know OB covered this, but I didn’t get the idea as clearly.)
• Fat gives food their flavors because aroma molecules are fat soluble, not water soluble. This is why fat is so key to processed foods
• Hydrogenation selectively destroys omega-3’s
• Not only has the food supply directly been favoring more and more omega-6, but it has also indirectly been favoring it with plants being bred to have lower levels of alpha-linolenic acid (e.g. spinach, soybeans, rapeseed). This implies that, looking over time within commodities, the omega balance has been going in the wrong direction over time.
• Fish are more sensitive to diet omega balance because they require more omega 3’s than other animals
• Even though QOF was written over 20 years ago, its truth has not spread because of economic incentives by food manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies.
• This is definitely a “Brad” idea, but QOF discussed that wild animals shift their diet omega balance towards omega 6’s prior to hibernation so that they can fatten up. A researcher at CU Boulder tried feeding yellow bellied marmots a high omega-3 diet right before hibernation, and they didn’t go into hibernation.
Very interesting, thanks!
Wow! I’m surprised by the weight gain. Looking forward to reading the de-briefing post in the near future!
And, yes, he does mention canola oil in the book. I agree with you on that one.
You and me both! Maybe those grizzlies are eating the salmon to fatten up for winter lol.
Torpor alert!!
Well, just got a DEXA and it's lowest bf% ever, but I apparently gained 2lbs of lean mass last month. Probably just water retention, but maybe it's a false alert and the salmon is fine?
That’s cool that the body fat percentage is still dropping! Maybe there are other health benefits even if the scale doesn’t show any difference 🤷🏼♂️
This goes back a few years but interesting in the context “Zooming back to present day, Allport has walked her talk. By switching from omega-3 fats to omega-6 for just 30 days, she demonstrated a slowing of her own metabolism and a change in body composition from lean mass to fat.” https://www.cbass.com/Omega6.htm
Great n=1 experiment, yea! Plus it shows you can't out-balance a high-omega 6 diet.
Nice review!
Thank you Sir!
I spent today looking through the "What We Eat in America" tables produced by USDA (which are taken from food diary data from NHANES), and the average omega balance (= ω-3/(ω-3+ω-6)) has held steady at about 10% for both adult men and women from 2001-2019.
I thought it would be getting worse over time (since soybean oil consumption seems to be continuing to increase). But if Hulbert is right, a steady 10% seems to be low enough to do a lot of damage over time.
Another explanation could be that people are systematically under-reporting the high-ω-6 foods in their diaries (and these have been getting worse over time).
Source:
https://www.ars.usda.gov/northeast-area/beltsville-md-bhnrc/beltsville-human-nutrition-research-center/food-surveys-research-group/docs/wweia-data-tables/
Steps:
• Grab Table 1 from each year
• Define omega6 = "PFA 18:2" + "PFA 20:4" (Linoleic + Arachidonic; but basically this is all Linoleic)
• Define omega3 = "PFA 18:3" + "PFA 18:4" + "PFA 20:5" + "PFA 22:5" + "PFA 22:6" (ALA + SDA + EPA + DPA + DHA)
• Compute omega balance = omega3/(omega3+omega6)
Interesting! Yea many potential issues with epidemiology. I've been thinking about that with "PUFAcation" in general, not just the balance.
If there is indeed a threshold, let's say 3% LA from kcals, then you could have various weird artifacts in population-wide statistics.
E.g.you could have a population where everybody is at 2.9% and you see no issues. You increase total population wide consumption a little bit, and suddenly you see tons of issues.
On the other hand, maybe 75% of the population are at 10% and 25% are at 2%. If the 75% increase their consumption, not much more might happen. You might conclude that LA is not a culprit, because it went up but problems did not.
Add that the threshold is probably somewhat different between individuals, that a lot of the damage is done cumulatively over time, and so on, and it's just a really, really rough guide.
I think epidemiology is better at ruling out certain things.
E.g. Asians eating 85%+ rice diets for millennia and being healthy/skinny kind of disproves that carbs per se are always the bad guy. I mean, either not in everyone (are some more adapted to starch?) or it's just sugar/fructose, not glucose (the Lustig position), or maybe something else happened *wink nudge* since that made us not tolerate carbs any more..
Similarly, if the obesity epidemic started in 1910 but seed oils were only invented in 1960, I'd be hard pressed (ha, seed oil pun!) to believe they caused it.
There is more detailed data about the distributions of PUFA intake on a different set of tables at that website, but I’m not going to dig into them right now.
You make some valid points!
Great review! I'm definitely purchasing this.
I'm glad you adressed the Peat question -- also known as the omega-3 question. On the one hand, Peat's infamous article has many kind convincing studies (which however I haven't checked thoroughly for statistical errors and biases). On the other end, there are Hubert's claims.
The thing is I don't see how the n-6/n-3 ratio discourse is helpful. The problem is that there is no world where it's applicable. The only valid oil is linseed oil, which is disgusting. If rancidity is a concern then it's all the more of a concern with n-3s, which are even more prone to oxydation. It leads people to take fish oil capsules and weird vegetable oil combination because it's marketed as healthy. Canola oil as a supposedly "excellent" ratio too (aside from the fact that it's also disgusting), at least that's what everyone think. The appropriate ratio is probably like 1:1 if not less.
As you said on this question the better heuristic is the Knobbe argument: just eat like your ancestors, that's the evolutionary consistent thing to do, eating the lowest amounts of PUFA possible, grass-fed animals and maybe some wild fish/mammal brain.
The fact that they are everywhere also renders moot the question of whether they are essential or not. Surely it's good to get some minimal amount of long-chain n-3 (and not from capsules) but should alpha-linolenic really be seen as essential? Very unclear. The Japanese, famous for their diet rich in fish (but still low-fat), already had notable rates of strokes before the introduction of modern diets, so even n-3 can be questionned I guess.
And to be clear, the weight loss is not what interests me (never needed it) but the believable mental health argument that Hubert makes has me very intrigued.
I'm in France and it's rare to find 100% grass-fed cattle, but we do have a variety of label imposing strict rules on animal welfare -- should be outside most of the time and grass-fed as much as possible, though they resort to canola "cakes" often, still not as bad as soybean. So I've come to the same conclusion has you: some seafood, grass-fed meat, maybe some brains and some wild canned salmon from time to time, and ditch all the vegetable oils.
> The thing is I don't see how the n-6/n-3 ratio discourse is helpful.
I think that it's largely been used as an excuse to just keep eating what you're eating and just take some fish oil capsules.
I'm quite convinced this is nonsense. One of the many reasons paleo never worked: "Eat lean meat, vegetables, NUTS & SEEDS, and take some fish oil." So you're actively eating more o6 cause it's "natural" and you're trying to counter it with the o3 from the fish oil. That can't work, mathematically, unless you go super nuts (haha) on the fish oil.
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Could you update the foodulator ?
If that isn't too much work.
I was thinking about a way to select any nutrient and than list all foods from max-to-min in the same way like before. Maybe list the contents in the same table.
That would make it easier to find foods high in certain things or low in others.
That's a pretty common request. I think one of the issues is that I think the data would be largely useless. I've run that query a couple of times and you get 100,000 zeros before the first values show up, and then another 100,000 vegetables that have practically zero anything.
There are 24 million entries in the USDA database.
Thanks. So it's not the sorting and filtering. Just the repeated access of the database to find anything or something like that. mehh
You can't access only a part of the data thats like "unprocessed individual foods (basic foods)" xD
Edit: Also i could not find a single sardinecan without added seeed oils. At least in the biggest market here for now.
Not even repeated access, it'd just be a terrible user interface. I'd show you a page of 24 million entries, 79% of which are 0 or close on any given value.
Maybe it's more useful than I imagine, at least with some added filtering, I don't know.
There is no way to filter "unprocessed foods." There is technically a list of "base foods" in the USDA database but it's very small and lacks many of the results I was actually interested in. The larger DB is just mostly them going out, buying random stuff at random stores, and throwing it in the lab. You can even see what store and what date they bought it! Very interesting, if not necessarily useful.
Here I can typically find sardines w/o added oils. But yea, "in seed oils" is the default, "in olive oil" is the fancy alternative, and then only some brands will have them "in water."
When I was doing sardines I ordered boxes of Season brand online. I think Wild Planet is also supposed to be good?
This is a quibble, but the following phrase has a mistake: “Hulbert would like to see us average just about as high as possible across our diet, probably aiming for at least 25% and trying to get closer to 50%. This would be equivalent to an ω-6:ω-3 ratio of 2:1 or even 1:1.”
3:1 would be 25%, 2:1 would be 33% and 1:1 would be 50%.
Duh, of course! Thank you.