What Is The Omega3 Omega 6 Ratio And Why Should You Care?
Author: Peter Clark Date posted: Nov 30, 2009 Article views: 93 Wordcount: 542 Ezine Ready
You may know all about the health benefits of Omega 3 essential fatty acids, it's been in the news lately and many people are now beginning to understand about the importance of supplementing their diet with the essential fatty acids. We're all deficient in these. But what are Omega 6 fats and what is the Omega 3 Omega 6 ratio?
Essential fatty acids are important for good health. We cannot manufacture these in our body and so we rely on a daily intake of these in our diet. Omega 3 fats are primarily found in fish and research has shown that most of us are deficient in omega3 in our diets.
Omega 6 fatty acids, on the other hand, are found in only plant based sources. They are found in vegetable oils like peanut oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil and corn oil are high in Omega 6 and soy oil is almost totally comprised of Omega 6 fat.
Because many of these vegetable oils are very cheap they are used extensively in processed foods, particularly in margarine, for this reason our intake of Omega 6 fats, though important for our diet in limited amounts, is excessive.
In the past, according to research, we ate roughly as much omega3 as Omega 6 fats. This produced an Omega 3 Omega 6 ratio around 1 to 1. But because of our dietary reliance on food sources such as vegetable oils and processed foods there are estimates suggesting that our Omega 6 Omega 3 ratio has changed to around 10 to 1, and some estimates are that it is now as high as 30 to 1. Most of us are eating way too much Omega 6 fatty acids.
Whilst 6 is important to our health increasing the ratio between the 2 as we have done over the last hundred or so years is not. There are a range of health implications from eating too much Omega 6 fatty acids and too little Omega 3. In particular it is thought that we are exposing ourselves to an increased range of lifestyle diseases including cancer, coronary artery disease and various inflammatory related diseases such as arthritis.
Combine this with the fact that in the past most of our meat came from animals which were grass fed, and which therefore had a reasonable level of Omega3 fats, but most of our animals are now grain fed which reduces the levels of omega3 fats and increases the level of Omega 6 and you can see that there is no need at all for supplementation with 6.
Whilst it is extremely important to get an adequate intake of Omega 3 fatty acids in our diet, and most of us are deficient in these, it is equally important to ensure that we reduce our intake of Omega 6 fats to maintain a healthy Omega 3 Omega 6 ratio. We can do this by reducing the amount of processed foods and vegetable oils in our diet and changing to healthier oils for cooking such as olive oil. And equally important is to increase our intake of essential fatty acids by dietary supplementation with fish oil supplements.
It is important to understand however that not all fish oil supplements are as good as others, some having far more of the important fats than others, and you need to know how to compare the different fish oil supplements available to make an informed choice.
