Queen of Fats Susan Allport

What exactly are omega-3s?

Omega-3s are one of two families of essential fats, which are fats we cannot make ourselves and must consume in our diets. The omega-3s originate in green leaves (of all places), and they compete with a second family of essential fats, omega-6s, fats that are much more prevalent in the seeds of plants, for positions in every cell in our body.

We’ve been taught to think of all these fats, the polyunsaturates, as one big happy family. But in fact they are two competing families with very different effects on our bodies. Omega-3s speed up the activity of cells; omega-6s slow it down. Omega-3s create little to no inflammation; omega-6s create a lot of inflammation. A balance of these two families, in our diets and our tissues, produces just the right amount of activity and inflammation and leads to optimal health.
How have omega-3s been removed from the Western Diet

Let me back up a moment and talk about where omega-3s are found and then it will be easy to see how they’ve been removed. Omega-3s originate in the green leaves of plants, not fish, as most people think. They accumulate in the tissues of animals that eat green leaves, including fish, but they originate in the chlorplasts of green leaves. A second family fats, omega-6s, are much more prevalent in the seeds of plants. Omega-6s are also essential for health but they compete with omega-3s for positions in our cell membranes so that anyone who is consuming lots of vegetable or seed oils, as most Americans are, is not going to have a lot of omega-3s in their tissues.

As our reliance on seed oils has increased since the early 1900s so has our incidence of heart disease and other ailments

Omega-3s originate in the green leaves of plants, as I said, and because green leaves are the most abundant thing on the planet, omega-3s are, in fact the most abundant fat on the planet. The only place they’re not abundant is in the tissues of Americans and other Westerners because we’re eating so many of the competing omega-6 fats.

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