The Omega 3s

These products are the stars of the media circus around the essential fatty acids (EFAs). It seems like everyone is selling a superior fish oil these days. Although these EFAs are especially important in growing children for healthy brain development through the formative years, they are much less important in the adult. If we keep in mind that the brain is 60% fat by weight, having adequate EFAs for brain development is obvious. In infants and children, the brain is in a state of rapid growth and development, whereas in adults, the need for these Omega 3 EFAs decreases enormously. Although all our organs and tissues need the Omega 3 EFAs, compared to the requirements for brain healing and development, the need is small.

The Omega 6s

These EFAs are the real unheralded heros, but they are in such abundance in the diet that they get short shrift in the literature. Unfortunately for us, our FDA has allowed food manufacturers to process these Omega 6 EFAs to eliminate spoilage and increase shelf life. Many manufactured foods that contain processed EFAs can sit on a shelf for years without spoiling: the Twinky is a good example. The Omega 6 family of EFAs are the most abundant in our diet, and now we know that they are also the most important. It’s the adulteration/processing of these Omega 6 EFAs that plays such a huge role in cancer.

The Ratios Tell The Story

What really matters is the ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3, not only in the brain and nervous system, but in all of the body organs and tissues. In the brain and nervous system, the ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3 EFAs is one to one. In every other organ and tissue, the Omega 6′s are much more important. In muscle, which makes up about half of our adult solid weight, the necessary healthy ratio is between seven and eight to one, Omega 6 to Omega 3. In lining tissue, that would be skin, sinuses, lungs, stomach, small & large intestines, urogenital system, joints and the lining of the blood vessels, etc., the ratio is one thousand to one, Omega 6 to Omega 3. That’s correct, one thousand to one, Omega 6 to Omega 3.

Where’s The Fat?

Of course we know that fat can be found in adipose tissue, but that’s storage fat, and when was the last time you heard of a cancer in adipose tissue? Exactly! So where are the rest of these EFAs found, and what’s their job?

The cell membrane surrounds the cell and then convolutes about throughout the cell contributing to its shape and size. This cell membrane structure is made up of an outer coating of protein, a middle layer of EFAs, and an inner layer of protein. That’s kind of like a sandwich with fat in the middle and protein on the outside. Fat also plays many other important roles, but for this discussion, the EFAs that make up the middle layer of the cell wall structure are the ones of interest.

These middle layer EFAs are the cells oxygen magnets. Otto Warburg, M.D., Ph.D., researched, discovered and published his findings regarding a major underlying cause of cancer as far back as the 1950s. This work is popular in Germany where he practiced and did his research, but is just coming to the attention of the establishment in this country. Warburg demonstrated unequivocally that lining tissue cells deprived of oxygen eventually begin to create their energy by combusting more sugar than oxygen, by the process of glycolysis. In time, this leads to a cancer cell. Although this sugar-cancer connection was established over half a century ago, most oncologists are still unaware of this research. Simply put, cancer lives on sugar.

Oxygen in the lungs is drawn through the lining of the lungs, the lining of the tiny capillaries in the lungs, and into the hemoglobin molecule within the red blood cell (RBC). It’s safe to say that this hemoglobin molecule has a very powerful attraction for oxygen. When that RBC reaches the lining tissue and again is squeezing through a narrow capillary, something must have a greater attraction for that oxygen molecule than hemoglobin to pull the oxygen from the RBC and into the lining tissue cell. The something that has this tremendous attraction for oxygen is fat. The EFAs that make up the middle layer of the cell wall structure are what pull the oxygen from the RBC, and in this case we’re talking about the Omega 6 EFAs, mostly the parent oil, Linoleic Acid.

The Crux Of The Problem

Once food is processed to keep its shelf life, the fat has been changed into a different form that no longer has an attraction for oxygen. One of the processes, and the most utilized until recently, was the hydrogenation of fat, converting healthy fat into trans fatty acids that have no oxygen attracting ability. Now that the consumer is becoming aware of the damage done by trans fatty acids causing cancer and heart disease, the big food processors have devised other means to preserve shelf life. Unfortunately, anything that interferes with the oxygen attracting ability of fat will be just as dangerous as trans fatty acids/hydrogenated fats.

How Big Is The Problem?

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), eighty-five percent (85%) of the cancer found in the industrialized world is lining tissue cancer, or Adenocarcinoma. They make up the bulk of the breast, prostate, lung, sinus, mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine and colon cancers, as well as most cancers of the urogenital system. Before World War II, when consumers ate mostly fresh foods and few processed foods, cancer was a much smaller problem. In fact, before the Second World War, relatively few people died of cancer. By 1971, the government declared a war on cancer, and now cancer has surpassed heart disease as the number one killer in the USA. Obviously, medical science isn’t winning this war, so if we want to protect our families, we will have to take action for ourselves.

What’s The Solution?

Well, there isn’t just one solution to reducing cancer risk, but a big contributor is reducing the processed fat we get in our diets. Given time and a good supplemental dosage of the parent essential oils the body will replace the damaged fat that has been incorporated into our lining tissue cell walls with healthy Omega 6 EFAs that have oxygen attracting capacity. This can take many months but is worth the effort. This is, very possibly, the biggest nutritional breakthrough since I started studying and practicing nutrition over forty years ago.

What’s The Test?

Obviously, we need a test to let us know we have accomplished our goal. Most medical tests are expensive, this one isn’t. Just pay attention to your poop. That’s right, if your stools float, it means a little bit of fat is getting through your gut and therefore not being absorbed. I usually suggest starting at four YES parent essential oil capsules a day for three months. If your stools haven’t begun to float, you increase the dosage to five capsules per day for another month. If they still don’t float you increase the dosage to six capsules per day for another month, etc. Once you get floating stools, you stay at that dosage for a month before cutting the dosage back by one capsule per day for a month. If after a month, your stools are still floating you cut back another capsule per day for another month. If your stools start sinking again, you simply add back one YES parent essential oil capsule until you once again have floaters. This way each person is adjusting his/her dosage to individual need.

Who’s Responsible?

Most of this work is the result of impeccable research by Professor Brian Peskin. Brian Peskin can be Googled. His books are the talk of the alternative/complimentary medical community and can be comprehended by most people with a solid high school education.

Availability

YES parent essential oils are available through Preventics and can be found on our price list, the order order blank and on the online order form – listed as Parent Essential Fatty Acids under Essential Oils & Fatty Acids. This product is still patent protected, so unfortunately Preventics is unable to have it made at a considerable discount. The YES parent essential oil supplement supplies 120 capsules (725 mg each), for $49.95. Hopefully, in time, our purchases will become large enough to get a significant discount from the manufacturer, which we will then be able to pass on to you.

120 tablets – Retail Price: $49.95 – Your Price: $33.00

For more on Parent Essential Fatty Acids see:

• An Update On The Importance Of The Good Fats, Or How Fat Foils Cancer
• The Importance Of Fat …and The Misinformation Surrounding It

Order Parent Essential Fatty Acids Now!

Since the advent of the high carbohydrate diet (also called the low fat diet), all the sugar related diseases have increased significantly, overweight is epidemic, and the food processors and food manufacturers are laughing all the way to the bank. Protein and fat are both essential, as are vitamins and minerals. There are no essential carbohydrates.

When you limit packaged and processed foods (pasta is a good example), weight control becomes less of a dilemma. Eating locally grown foods in season makes staying trim a much easier task. My nurse/receptionist has told me I need to let everyone know that I was green before green was fashionable — actually, forty years before green was fashionable, but eating smart really hasn’t changed, you just have to ignore the nonsense in the media, paid for by the same agribusiness and food producing interests that are making all of us sick. I often tell my patients, “If you see it advertized on TV, don’t eat it.”

In the next issue, I’ll talk to you about the fallacy of counting calories. That’s going to put holes in a lot of balloons.

Update: Eat Your Way Thin… Here are the four articles which are in the series.

• Part 1 – Protein Is Our Most Misunderstood Food
• Part 2 – The Importance Of Fat… And The Misinformation Surrounding It
• Part 3 – Carbohydrates
• Part 4 – Let’s Talk About Weight Loss

A Functional Diet Explained

For years, Americans have been gaining weight because we have been told that fat isn’t good for us and we should be eating low fat diets. This erroneous advice and behavior has transformed our bodies into primary glucose-based burning metabolisms when we are actually designed to have primary fat-based burning metabolisms. A glucose-based metabolism is for sudden bursts of energy, while a fat-based burning metabolism is the preferred method by the body for the long term. Fat-based metabolisms are more efficient and healthy. All the popular diets that are effective are built on fat based metabolic principals.

Leptin is a fat hormone that tells the brain to eat and it also tells the brain when to stop eating. Leptin is responsible for fat deposition. Experiments have shown that mice with low Leptin levels are obese and hungry. A few years ago, the pharmaceutical industry was enthusiastic about producing Leptin in an attempt to help people lose weight. What they found was that obese human beings already had elevated Leptin. This sounds contradictory, but what happened is that Leptin has lost its ability to function well — this is called “Leptin Resistance.” When a person becomes Leptin resistant, it takes more and more Leptin to tell the brain it’s satisfied and that you don’t need more food. Therefore, it takes more and more food to feel satisfied. The brain, unable to appropriately respond to Leptin, frantically signals for more and more fat to be stored. Since Leptin is made by fat cells, you have to make more fat to produce enough Leptin to finally get the message across to the brain to stop being hungry and stop storing fat.

The foods that trigger Leptin resistance are exactly the foods that the Federal government has designated as the foundation of the food pyramid, such as breads, grains, cereal, pasta and starchy vegetables. These starchy foods lead to higher blood sugar levels and the inability of insulin to function properly. This is known as insulin resistance or dysinsulinism. We now find ourselves in a position whereby our bodies are aging more rapidly because high blood sugar levels are the hallmark of aging. When sugar combines with proteins in your body (glycation), it triggers chemical reactions that can promote free radicals, unstable oxygen molecules, which can damage cells. The objective of this diet is to burn fat for energy. Good fat burns Leptin. Eating fat does not make you fat or unhealthy. Not being able to burn fat does. Good fat lowers Leptin levels. Leptin resistance desensitizes your taste buds to sugar and makes you crave more sweet foods.

Sugar that isn’t burned is made into saturated fat which is resistant to burning. It is stored as fat and produces even more Leptin in response to sugar which worsens Leptin resistance. Grain fed animals produce more saturated fat than normal. If you are eating sugar (or foods that turn into sugar) and fat together, the body will burn the sugar and store the fat. A great example of this is buttered toast.

There are many different types of fats — there are fats that are good for you and fats that are bad for you.

Polyunsaturated fat is liquid at room temperature. Examples of this are vegetable oils, which contain Omega-6 fatty acids, such as soy, sesame, safflower, corn and peanut oils. Other examples are Omega-3 polyunsaturated oils such as fish oils. All unsaturated fats are unstable and easily oxidized and can easily promote free radical formation. Frying polyunsaturated oils in a pan accelerates the formation of free radicals. Asian restaurants use soy oil because it is inexpensive. Trans-fats and hydrogenated fats are particularly unhealthy and should be avoided completely.

Saturated fats are hard at room temperature. Saturated fats are found in grain fed beef, lamb and dairy products (milk, cheese, lard, etc). Coconut oil is also a saturated fat. Consider the fat in grain fed animals as second generation carbohydrates. Most of the fat stored in your body is saturated fat.

Monounsaturated fats are the Omega-9′s. Examples of these are olive oil and avocado and nuts. The Omega 9′s are part of the Mediterranean diet which is known to decrease the risk of heart disease and some cancers. I would, therefore, like you to use olive oil or avocado or canola oil.

Essential fatty acids are polyunsaturated fats that cannot be produced by the body. Examples of these are the Omega-3 unsaturated fatty acids which include DHA and EPA. DHA has been shown to decrease depression. Today’s modern diet is high in the Omega-6′s, and this throws off the balance between the Omega-6 and Omega-3 fatty acids. We used to have a ratio of 5:1 of Omega-6 to Omega-3 and today we have a ratio of 24:1 in the average American diet. Omega-3 fats help improve insulin and Leptin sensitivity. Flax does not contain EPA or DHA, but does contain alpha linoleic acid which can be converted to EPA or DHA, but many of us do not have the enzymes necessary to promote this conversion.

The objective of our diet is to restore Leptin sensitivity. Once Leptin sensitivity is restored, your cells will also become more sensitized to hormones, such as insulin, which is healthy.

The diet will be divided into essentially two different levels. Level 1 will last three weeks and will teach your metabolism to burn fat instead of sugar. During this time, you will have no starchy or sugary carbohydrates and will eat foods high in good fat and vegetables that are high in fiber. Individual supplement programs will be based upon biochemical individuality. In level 2, you will be allowed to have some of the starchy and sugary foods introduced into your diet, but will be limited based upon your sensitivity to Leptin levels.

We will emphasize the need to stick to the diet because when sugar reacts with protein in your body, it damages the protein. Sugar damaged proteins are called advanced glycation end products, a.k.a. AGES for short. These end products promote inflammation, and glycation is the major reason that diabetics tend to look older than non-diabetics. Glycation has also been linked to abnormal structure in nerve cells and can eventually lead to Alzheimer’s.

I’d like to share a few new thoughts with you about your new diet. Fats make food taste great and fats make you feel satiated. On this diet you will be allowed to have up to 4 oz. of red wine daily. We will not be looking at carbohydrates as simple vs. complex, but rather as carbohydrates containing high fiber vs. low fiber. Fiber can’t be broken down into sugar. Non fiber carbohydrates create a huge surge of Leptin and insulin. You must also eliminate or drastically reduce grain fed beef, lamb and pork for the first three weeks unless it is grass fed and grass finished (feedlots fatten up cattle before slaughter with simple carbohydrates). Almond butter and cashew butter will be fine. You may have protein shakes with your breakfast. Your major sources of protein will be meat, fish, poultry and dairy. For the first three weeks, you are allowed only foods on the “A” list. The “B” list contains foods that you can have on an occasional basis when you are at level 2. Avoid all foods on the “C” list.