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You may be well aware of the health benefits of what are known as Omega 3 essential fatty acids. It’s been in the news lately and more and more people are understanding the importance of maintaining an adequate intake of the important essential fatty acids known as Omega 3, and most of us are deficient in these. But you may not have heard of Omega 6 fats and may not be aware of the importance of these to your health, and you may not have heard of the Omega 3 Omega 6 ratio.
Essential fatty acids are good fats that we need for good health every day but which we cannot manufacture in our body and so need to obtain from our diet each day. Omega 3 fats are found primarily in fish, and over 90 percent of the US population is deficient in Omega 3 essential fatty acids.
Omega 6 essential fatty acids, on the other hand, are found in other food sources, and we are not generally deficient in these. For example you find Omega6 fats in many of the oils that we eat from day to day such as corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, sesame oil and peanut oil, and soy oil is almost completely comprised of omega6 fats.
Generally these vegetable oils are extremely cheap. Because they are cheap they are used in almost all processed foods requiring oil, including margarine. Most of us eat a diet high in processed foods and cook with vegetable oils and as a result our diets are too high in Omega 6.
Scientific research has shown that in the past we had an Omega 3 Omega 6 ratio of roughly 1 to 1, or in other words we ate roughly the same amount of each of these fats in our diet. However estimates now are that the Omega3 Omega 6 ratio in the average US citizen is somewhere from 10 to 1, or even, according to some estimates up to 30 to 1. Because of our reliance on vegetable oils and processed foods we are now eating far more Omega 6 fats than we ever did in the past.
Omega 6 essential fatty acids are equally important to our health however just as important is the Omega3 Omega 6 ratio, and over the past hundred years or so this is changed dramatically. By eating too much Omega 6 and too little Omega 3 we are all exposing ourselves to a wide range of health implications including the possibility of various cancers, coronary artery disease and a range of other inflammatory 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 both Omega 3 and Omega 6 fats are important to our health most of us are deficient in our intake of Omega 3 and have an Omega 3 Omega 6 ratio that is way too high, and we need to reduce our intake of Omega 6 fats. This can be done by reducing the amounts of processed foods in our diets and by changing our cooking oils from vegetable oils to good oils such as olive oil. And we all need to be increasing our intake of Omega 3 fatty acids with daily 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.
Find out how to make this comparison between the different fish oil supplement brands on my website.