{"id":864,"date":"2012-05-27T20:16:13","date_gmt":"2012-05-28T04:16:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/?p=864"},"modified":"2012-10-11T15:56:26","modified_gmt":"2012-10-11T23:56:26","slug":"omega-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/2012\/05\/27\/omega-6\/","title":{"rendered":"Omega-6"},"content":{"rendered":"

In early April I started measuring my diet fairly carefully (using CRON-O-Meter<\/a>). It is a somewhat tedious project, but it has has shown me that I’m getting too much Omega-6.<\/p>\n

Most of the discussion I’d previously noticed implied that I should improve my Omega-6\/Omega-3 ratio by consuming more Omega-3.<\/p>\n

But after finding Dave Asprey’s website<\/a> and hearing him at the Personalized Life Extension Conference<\/a>, his framing of the issue as Omega-6 poisoning led me to look more carefully at my Omega-6 consumption, and is one of the reasons I tried CRON-O-Meter.<\/p>\n

There are conflicting opinions about what ratio people ought to aim for, but those who advocate a ratio close to 1:1 seem to have a good theory (resemblance to hunter-gatherer diets), while I suspect those who advocate much higher Omega-6 levels either assume it’s hopeless to convince many people to achieve a ratio anywhere near 1:1 or have motives unrelated to Omega-fats for pushing oils with a high Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratio.<\/p>\n

So my guess is that I should aim for a ratio less than 2:1, and be concerned if my ratio exceeds 3:1.<\/p>\n

Even with fairly drastic changes to my diet (virtually eliminating canola oil and olive oil, and cutting back on my peanut addiction by an order of magnitude), I still find that it takes careful thought to keep my daily Omega-6 consumption below 10 grams.<\/p>\n

I could in principle take a dozen or more fish oil pills to offset the Omega-6, but the safety of taking over 6 grams of Omega-3<\/a> per day seems unknown.<\/p>\n

So I am working on switching to foods that have fat that’s very low in Omega-6, mainly coconut oil and butter from grass-fed cows (Kerrygold<\/a> is the widely available brand).<\/p>\n

That mostly doesn’t require eating food that’s less tasty (Kerrygold butter tastes better than most other fats), but it reduces the variety of foods I can eat. It rules out what I used to consider ordinary amounts of most nuts, and many processed foods (Trader Joes’ eggplant and red pepper spreads looked like a convenient way to get veggies until I quantified the effect of the sunflower oil that is the fourth ingredient in each).<\/p>\n

I’ll try to post some of my best recipes in a few months.<\/p>\n

For more references, see this pubmed entry<\/a> and Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In early April I started measuring my diet fairly carefully (using CRON-O-Meter). It is a somewhat tedious project, but it has has shown me that I’m getting too much Omega-6. Most of the discussion I’d previously noticed implied that I should improve my Omega-6\/Omega-3 ratio by consuming more Omega-3. But after finding Dave Asprey’s website […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[29],"tags":[108],"class_list":["post-864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","tag-diet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p80O1l-dW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=864"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":899,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864\/revisions\/899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}