Want to live longer? Get your Omega 3 fats.

Mangoaddict

updated 5:17 a.m. PT, Tues., Feb. 24, 2009

At the end of a residential cul-de-sac in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, a driveway winds up a hill to the headquarters of Ocean Nutrition, a complex of buildings of mid-century vintage overlooking the tall-masted schooners and gray-hulled Canadian Navy destroyers in Halifax Harbour.

Down the road, semi-trailers loaded with drums of oily yellow liquid pull up outside a newly built factory. Inside cavernous galvanized-steel hangars, the oil is blended with deionized water in 6,500-gallon tanks. The resulting slurry of micro-encapsulated oil is then pumped through a five-story spray-drier to remove the moisture.

The final product is a fine-grained beige substance that looks like flour but is, in fact, a triumph of technology: smelly fish oil, transformed by industry into a tasteless, odorless powder. It will be used to spike everything from infant formula in China to the Wonder Bread and Tropicana orange juice on our supermarket shelves.

Ocean Nutrition is not manufacturing some Soylent Green for the new millennium.

After seven years and $50 million of research, the company's 45 technicians and 14 Ph.D.s have found a high-tech way of getting a crucial set of nutrients back into our bodies — compounds that, thanks to the industrialization of agriculture over the past half century, have been thoroughly stripped from our food supply without, until recently, it being realized by anyone.

Now, an ever-growing body of research is showing that the epidemic of diseases associated with the Western diet — cancer, heart disease, depression, and much more — might be curtailed simply by restoring something we never should have removed from our diets in the first place: omega-3 fatty acids.

The great mistake
We are, it is often — and accurately — said, what we eat. Recent diet trends, from Atkins to South Beach, have put the emphasis on upping our intake of protein or cutting out carbohydrates. Meanwhile, cholesterol, saturated fats, and trans fats have been stigmatized, leading to the belief that waging a total war on fat is the best way to get a slimmer waistline and a longer life. But fats are as crucial to a healthy body as protein is; they end up holstered into the heart, protecting organs, and building the cells of the brain, an organ that is itself 60 percent fat. The key to good health lies not in ruthlessly striking fat from our diets, but in eating the best possible fats for our bodies. And a growing chorus of nutritionists agrees that those fats are omega-3s.

Certainly, you've read headlines trumpeting the ability of omega-3 fatty acids to boost brain function and protect against coronary heart disease. Hedging your bets, you may already have tweaked your diet, substituting beef or poultry for salmon or some other oily fish a few times a week. But, as a jaded observer of food trends, you may have wondered whether the new "heart-healthy" fats touted on the packaging of eggs, margarine, spaghetti, and frozen waffles are just a marketing ploy — the latest in a long line of miracle nutrients that, a few months or years hence, will prove to be nothing more than hype.

Lose the skepticism. This isn't the next oat bran.

Omega-3 molecules are a by-product of the happy meeting of sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide in the chloroplasts of terrestrial plants and marine algae. Not long ago, these fatty acids were an inescapable component of our diet. Back in the early 1900s — long before the arrival of bovine growth hormone and patented transgenic seeds — American family farms were perfect factories for producing omega-3s.

Bucolic, sun-drenched pastures supported a complex array of grasses, and cattle used their sensitive tongues to pick and choose the ripest patches of clover, millet, and sweet grass; their rumens then turned the cellulose that humans can't digest into foods that we can: milk, butter, cheese, and, eventually, beef, all of them rich in omega-3s. Cattle used to spend four to five carefree years grazing on grass, but now they are fattened on grain in feedlots and reach slaughter weight in about a year, all the while pumped full of antibiotics to fight off the diseases caused by the close quarters of factory farms.

Likewise, a few generations ago, chickens roamed those same farms, foraging on grasses, purslane, and grubs, providing humans with drumsticks, breasts, and eggs that were rich in grass-derived omega-3s. Today, most American chickens are now a single hybrid breed — the Cornish — and are raised in cages, treated with antibiotics, and stuffed full of corn.

Our animal fats were once derived from leafy greens, and now our livestock are fattened with corn, soybeans, and other seed oils. (Even the majority of the salmon, catfish, and shrimp in our supermarkets are raised on farms and fattened with soy-enriched pellets.) So not only have good fats been stricken from our diets, but these cheap, widely available seed oils are the source of another, far less healthy family of fatty acids called omega-6s, which compete with omega-3s for space in our cell membranes. Omega-6s are essentially more rigid fatty acids that give our cells structure, while omega-3s are more fluid and help our bodies fight inflammation. Our ancestors ate a ratio of dietary omega-6s to omega-3s of approximately 1:1. The Western diet (the modern American and European eating pattern characterized by high intakes of red meat, sugar, and refined carbohydrates) has a ratio of about 20:1.

"The shift from a food chain with green plants at its base to one based on seeds may be the most far reaching of all," writes Michael Pollan in his prescriptive manifesto In Defense of Food. "From leaves to seeds: It's almost, if not quite, A Theory of Everything."


Click for related content
9 foods to eat for a killer immunity
Got hay fever? Be sure to check your plate
New treatment for peanut allergies promising


This shift began in earnest in the 1960s. Research on the links between cholesterol and saturated fats and coronary heart disease led health authorities to demonize lard, dairy products, and other animal-derived sources of fat. Meanwhile, new health guidelines lionized the polyunsaturated fats in vegetable oils and margarine (which is merely vegetable oil solidified via hydrogenation, a process that creates the dreaded trans fats).

Food processors were happy to play along: Polyunsaturated seed oils did not go rancid as quickly as omega-3s, which meant a longer shelf life for packaged foods. One form of fat in particular, omega-6-rich soybean oil, is now ubiquitous in processed foods. Soybeans, originally an import from East Asia, have become the second most valuable food crop in the United States. Genetically modified to resist pests, they are crushed to make high-protein meal for livestock, and the heavily subsidized industry has found ingenious ways of moving its product in the form of "soy isoflavones," "textured vegetable protein," "soy protein isolate," and the other novel ingredients lurking on the labels of processed foods.

Look around your kitchen and you'll find soybean oil in everything from salad dressing to Crisco, from processed cheese to granola bars. If you are eating a processed food, chances are it contains soy. Twenty percent of Americans' calories now come from soybeans; the average person eats 25 pounds of the stuff a year. Just four seed oils — soybean, corn, cottonseed, and canola oil — account for 96 percent of the vegetable oil eaten in America today.

The spread of the seed-oil-rich Western diet around the world has been tracked by a statistical rise in the so-called diseases of civilization: asthma and arthritis, depression and Alzheimer's, heart disease and cancer, as well as metabolic disorders such as diabetes and obesity.

Living longer on a 'poor man's diet'
Okinawans, of Japan, once had the longest life expectancy in the world. But with postwar American administration, which didn't end until 1972, residents of the Japanese prefecture switched to a Western diet rich in meat and seed-based vegetable oils (think Spam, McDonald's hamburgers, and margarine). As a result, they experienced a precipitous rise in cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases. Western eating habits proved hard to shake, and 47 percent of Okinawan men are still considered obese, twice the rate of the rest of Japan.

According to a 2003 study published in the World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics, urban Indians who have adopted seed-oil-rich diets succumb to heart disease and chronic illnesses at a much higher rate than village dwellers who eat a "poor man's diet" that is high in mustard oil, which is relatively high in omega-3s. It is believed that, in the 1960s, Israelis enthusiastically adopted an ostensibly heart-healthy diet rich in polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils; now heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes are ubiquitous, and rates of cancer are higher than in the United States.

In 1970, intrigued by reports that Eskimos rarely die from heart disease, two Danish scientists flew to Greenland and charmed blood samples from 130 volunteers. Hans Olaf Bang and Jørn Dyerberg discovered that the Inuit people still got most of their calories from fish, seal, and whale meat. Despite their high cholesterol intake, the Inuit had a death rate from coronary disease that was one-tenth that of the Danes, enthusiastic pork eaters who have been known to butter even their cheese. And diabetes was almost non-existent among the Inuit.

Bang and Dyerberg found strikingly high levels of omega-3s and relatively low amounts of omega-6s in the Inuit blood samples. In 1978, they published a groundbreaking paper in The Lancet, establishing the link between omega-3 consumption and lower rates of coronary heart disease. It initiated a paradigm shift among nutritionists, one that is only now truly influencing official dietary policy around the world.

"There has been a thousandfold increase in the consumption of soybean oil over the past hundred years," says Joseph Hibbeln, MD, acting chief of the section on nutritional neurosciences at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The result, he states, is an unplanned experiment in brain and heart chemistry, one whose subject is the entire population of the developed world. In a series of epidemiological studies, Dr. Hibbeln showed that populations that consume high levels of omega-3s in the form of seafood are the least afflicted by the major diseases associated with the Western diet.

Among the Japanese, who each eat an average of 145 pounds of fish a year, rates of depression and homicide are strikingly low. Meanwhile, men who live in landlocked nations such as Austria and Hungary, where fish consumption is respectively 25 pounds and nine pounds per capita, top the global charts in suicide and depression. Despite the fact that the Japanese smoke like fiends, struggle with high blood pressure, and eat a hundred more cholesterol-rich eggs a year per person than Americans do, they boast enviably low rates of cardiovascular disease, as well as the longest life span on the planet, an average of 81 years... three years longer than that of Americans.

And while it's true that the Japanese consume soy in the form of tofu, miso, and soy sauce, the way it is prepared — precipitated or fermented — is far healthier than the raw, mineral-blocking phytate estrogen and omega-6-rich versions consumed by Americans.

Dr. Hibbeln is convinced that the key to the average Japanese citizen's longevity is omega-3 fatty acids; levels in Japanese bloodstreams average 60 percent of all polyunsaturates. After half a century of favoring seed-based vegetable oils, the level of omega-3s in American bloodstreams has fallen to 20 percent of polyunsaturates. "We have changed the composition of people's bodies and brains," says Dr. Hibbeln. "A very interesting question, to which we don't yet know the answer, is to what degree has the dietary change altered overall behavior in our society?"

Lately, the answers have been coming in thick and fast. In one study of 231 inmates medicated with fish oil in a British prison, assaults dropped by a third. Comparing homicide rates in five countries, Dr. Hibbeln found that the rising consumption of omega-6 fatty acids correlated with a hundredfold increase in death by homicide, even though access to firearms went down in all the countries surveyed except the United States. A paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that even a modest increase in the consumption of omega-3-rich fish reduced the risk of coronary death by 36 percent. A 2007 study by the National Institutes of Health found a positive correlation between mothers' consumption of omega-3s during pregnancy and the fine motor skills and verbal IQs of their children.

Increasing the amount of omega-3s in your diet might even reverse obesity: Omega-6s are, in the words of one researcher, "remarkable boosters of adipogenesis," which is to say the formation of fatty tissues. Animals that are fed diets high in omega-6s gain far more weight from the same amount of calories than their grass-fed counterparts, and that hard-to-lose fat in the middle-aged paunch, it turns out, is mostly omega-6s. A higher intake of omega-3 has been shown to positively affect ailments as diverse as stroke, allergies, dementia, and dyslexia.

Mangoaddict

updated 5:17 a.m. PT, Tues., Feb. 24, 2009

At the end of a residential cul-de-sac in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, a driveway winds up a hill to the headquarters of Ocean Nutrition, a complex of buildings of mid-century vintage overlooking the tall-masted schooners and gray-hulled Canadian Navy destroyers in Halifax Harbour.

Down the road, semi-trailers loaded with drums of oily yellow liquid pull up outside a newly built factory. Inside cavernous galvanized-steel hangars, the oil is blended with deionized water in 6,500-gallon tanks. The resulting slurry of micro-encapsulated oil is then pumped through a five-story spray-drier to remove the moisture.

The final product is a fine-grained beige substance that looks like flour but is, in fact, a triumph of technology: smelly fish oil, transformed by industry into a tasteless, odorless powder. It will be used to spike everything from infant formula in China to the Wonder Bread and Tropicana orange juice on our supermarket shelves.

Ocean Nutrition is not manufacturing some Soylent Green for the new millennium.

After seven years and $50 million of research, the company's 45 technicians and 14 Ph.D.s have found a high-tech way of getting a crucial set of nutrients back into our bodies — compounds that, thanks to the industrialization of agriculture over the past half century, have been thoroughly stripped from our food supply without, until recently, it being realized by anyone.

Now, an ever-growing body of research is showing that the epidemic of diseases associated with the Western diet — cancer, heart disease, depression, and much more — might be curtailed simply by restoring something we never should have removed from our diets in the first place: omega-3 fatty acids.

The great mistake
We are, it is often — and accurately — said, what we eat. Recent diet trends, from Atkins to South Beach, have put the emphasis on upping our intake of protein or cutting out carbohydrates. Meanwhile, cholesterol, saturated fats, and trans fats have been stigmatized, leading to the belief that waging a total war on fat is the best way to get a slimmer waistline and a longer life. But fats are as crucial to a healthy body as protein is; they end up holstered into the heart, protecting organs, and building the cells of the brain, an organ that is itself 60 percent fat. The key to good health lies not in ruthlessly striking fat from our diets, but in eating the best possible fats for our bodies. And a growing chorus of nutritionists agrees that those fats are omega-3s.

Certainly, you've read headlines trumpeting the ability of omega-3 fatty acids to boost brain function and protect against coronary heart disease. Hedging your bets, you may already have tweaked your diet, substituting beef or poultry for salmon or some other oily fish a few times a week. But, as a jaded observer of food trends, you may have wondered whether the new "heart-healthy" fats touted on the packaging of eggs, margarine, spaghetti, and frozen waffles are just a marketing ploy — the latest in a long line of miracle nutrients that, a few months or years hence, will prove to be nothing more than hype.

Lose the skepticism. This isn't the next oat bran.

Omega-3 molecules are a by-product of the happy meeting of sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide in the chloroplasts of terrestrial plants and marine algae. Not long ago, these fatty acids were an inescapable component of our diet. Back in the early 1900s — long before the arrival of bovine growth hormone and patented transgenic seeds — American family farms were perfect factories for producing omega-3s.

Bucolic, sun-drenched pastures supported a complex array of grasses, and cattle used their sensitive tongues to pick and choose the ripest patches of clover, millet, and sweet grass; their rumens then turned the cellulose that humans can't digest into foods that we can: milk, butter, cheese, and, eventually, beef, all of them rich in omega-3s. Cattle used to spend four to five carefree years grazing on grass, but now they are fattened on grain in feedlots and reach slaughter weight in about a year, all the while pumped full of antibiotics to fight off the diseases caused by the close quarters of factory farms.

Likewise, a few generations ago, chickens roamed those same farms, foraging on grasses, purslane, and grubs, providing humans with drumsticks, breasts, and eggs that were rich in grass-derived omega-3s. Today, most American chickens are now a single hybrid breed — the Cornish — and are raised in cages, treated with antibiotics, and stuffed full of corn.

Our animal fats were once derived from leafy greens, and now our livestock are fattened with corn, soybeans, and other seed oils. (Even the majority of the salmon, catfish, and shrimp in our supermarkets are raised on farms and fattened with soy-enriched pellets.) So not only have good fats been stricken from our diets, but these cheap, widely available seed oils are the source of another, far less healthy family of fatty acids called omega-6s, which compete with omega-3s for space in our cell membranes. Omega-6s are essentially more rigid fatty acids that give our cells structure, while omega-3s are more fluid and help our bodies fight inflammation. Our ancestors ate a ratio of dietary omega-6s to omega-3s of approximately 1:1. The Western diet (the modern American and European eating pattern characterized by high intakes of red meat, sugar, and refined carbohydrates) has a ratio of about 20:1.

"The shift from a food chain with green plants at its base to one based on seeds may be the most far reaching of all," writes Michael Pollan in his prescriptive manifesto In Defense of Food. "From leaves to seeds: It's almost, if not quite, A Theory of Everything."


Click for related content
9 foods to eat for a killer immunity
Got hay fever? Be sure to check your plate
New treatment for peanut allergies promising


This shift began in earnest in the 1960s. Research on the links between cholesterol and saturated fats and coronary heart disease led health authorities to demonize lard, dairy products, and other animal-derived sources of fat. Meanwhile, new health guidelines lionized the polyunsaturated fats in vegetable oils and margarine (which is merely vegetable oil solidified via hydrogenation, a process that creates the dreaded trans fats).

Food processors were happy to play along: Polyunsaturated seed oils did not go rancid as quickly as omega-3s, which meant a longer shelf life for packaged foods. One form of fat in particular, omega-6-rich soybean oil, is now ubiquitous in processed foods. Soybeans, originally an import from East Asia, have become the second most valuable food crop in the United States. Genetically modified to resist pests, they are crushed to make high-protein meal for livestock, and the heavily subsidized industry has found ingenious ways of moving its product in the form of "soy isoflavones," "textured vegetable protein," "soy protein isolate," and the other novel ingredients lurking on the labels of processed foods.

Look around your kitchen and you'll find soybean oil in everything from salad dressing to Crisco, from processed cheese to granola bars. If you are eating a processed food, chances are it contains soy. Twenty percent of Americans' calories now come from soybeans; the average person eats 25 pounds of the stuff a year. Just four seed oils — soybean, corn, cottonseed, and canola oil — account for 96 percent of the vegetable oil eaten in America today.

The spread of the seed-oil-rich Western diet around the world has been tracked by a statistical rise in the so-called diseases of civilization: asthma and arthritis, depression and Alzheimer's, heart disease and cancer, as well as metabolic disorders such as diabetes and obesity.

Living longer on a 'poor man's diet'
Okinawans, of Japan, once had the longest life expectancy in the world. But with postwar American administration, which didn't end until 1972, residents of the Japanese prefecture switched to a Western diet rich in meat and seed-based vegetable oils (think Spam, McDonald's hamburgers, and margarine). As a result, they experienced a precipitous rise in cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases. Western eating habits proved hard to shake, and 47 percent of Okinawan men are still considered obese, twice the rate of the rest of Japan.

According to a 2003 study published in the World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics, urban Indians who have adopted seed-oil-rich diets succumb to heart disease and chronic illnesses at a much higher rate than village dwellers who eat a "poor man's diet" that is high in mustard oil, which is relatively high in omega-3s. It is believed that, in the 1960s, Israelis enthusiastically adopted an ostensibly heart-healthy diet rich in polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils; now heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes are ubiquitous, and rates of cancer are higher than in the United States.

In 1970, intrigued by reports that Eskimos rarely die from heart disease, two Danish scientists flew to Greenland and charmed blood samples from 130 volunteers. Hans Olaf Bang and Jørn Dyerberg discovered that the Inuit people still got most of their calories from fish, seal, and whale meat. Despite their high cholesterol intake, the Inuit had a death rate from coronary disease that was one-tenth that of the Danes, enthusiastic pork eaters who have been known to butter even their cheese. And diabetes was almost non-existent among the Inuit.

Bang and Dyerberg found strikingly high levels of omega-3s and relatively low amounts of omega-6s in the Inuit blood samples. In 1978, they published a groundbreaking paper in The Lancet, establishing the link between omega-3 consumption and lower rates of coronary heart disease. It initiated a paradigm shift among nutritionists, one that is only now truly influencing official dietary policy around the world.

"There has been a thousandfold increase in the consumption of soybean oil over the past hundred years," says Joseph Hibbeln, MD, acting chief of the section on nutritional neurosciences at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The result, he states, is an unplanned experiment in brain and heart chemistry, one whose subject is the entire population of the developed world. In a series of epidemiological studies, Dr. Hibbeln showed that populations that consume high levels of omega-3s in the form of seafood are the least afflicted by the major diseases associated with the Western diet.

Among the Japanese, who each eat an average of 145 pounds of fish a year, rates of depression and homicide are strikingly low. Meanwhile, men who live in landlocked nations such as Austria and Hungary, where fish consumption is respectively 25 pounds and nine pounds per capita, top the global charts in suicide and depression. Despite the fact that the Japanese smoke like fiends, struggle with high blood pressure, and eat a hundred more cholesterol-rich eggs a year per person than Americans do, they boast enviably low rates of cardiovascular disease, as well as the longest life span on the planet, an average of 81 years... three years longer than that of Americans.

And while it's true that the Japanese consume soy in the form of tofu, miso, and soy sauce, the way it is prepared — precipitated or fermented — is far healthier than the raw, mineral-blocking phytate estrogen and omega-6-rich versions consumed by Americans.

Dr. Hibbeln is convinced that the key to the average Japanese citizen's longevity is omega-3 fatty acids; levels in Japanese bloodstreams average 60 percent of all polyunsaturates. After half a century of favoring seed-based vegetable oils, the level of omega-3s in American bloodstreams has fallen to 20 percent of polyunsaturates. "We have changed the composition of people's bodies and brains," says Dr. Hibbeln. "A very interesting question, to which we don't yet know the answer, is to what degree has the dietary change altered overall behavior in our society?"

Lately, the answers have been coming in thick and fast. In one study of 231 inmates medicated with fish oil in a British prison, assaults dropped by a third. Comparing homicide rates in five countries, Dr. Hibbeln found that the rising consumption of omega-6 fatty acids correlated with a hundredfold increase in death by homicide, even though access to firearms went down in all the countries surveyed except the United States. A paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that even a modest increase in the consumption of omega-3-rich fish reduced the risk of coronary death by 36 percent. A 2007 study by the National Institutes of Health found a positive correlation between mothers' consumption of omega-3s during pregnancy and the fine motor skills and verbal IQs of their children.

Increasing the amount of omega-3s in your diet might even reverse obesity: Omega-6s are, in the words of one researcher, "remarkable boosters of adipogenesis," which is to say the formation of fatty tissues. Animals that are fed diets high in omega-6s gain far more weight from the same amount of calories than their grass-fed counterparts, and that hard-to-lose fat in the middle-aged paunch, it turns out, is mostly omega-6s. A higher intake of omega-3 has been shown to positively affect ailments as diverse as stroke, allergies, dementia, and dyslexia.

EducatedVegan

Wow what a great article!

yellow_pepper

And buckle your safety belt. Don't drink and drive. Don't smoke. Wear sunscreen.