Chances Are, You’re Not Eating Enough of This

When people ask me what the key is to the paleo diet, I don’t say, ‘protein’, or ‘no carbs’, or ‘no grains’.  I say, ‘omega 6-omega 3 imbalance’.  For some, that’s a hard to understand without explanation, so that’s what I’m going to provide here.  After all, research, information, facts, studies, it all helps understand why a paleo diet makes you healthier.  Anthropologists say caveman ate a diet with an omega 6/3 ratio of 1:1.  The Western diet has an omega 6/3 ratio of closer to 15:1.  That means we eat foods high in omega 6 fats and very little food with omega 3 fat.  What foods are high in omega 6 fats?  Grains, and legumes.  What foods are high in omega 3 fats?  Fish.  From everything I’ve read, plant based omega 3 does not contribute to this ratio the same way that fish based omega 3 does.  You can research that on your own, but for now, when we talk about omega 3 fat, we mean fish.  So if we know all grains like wheat and corn are high in omega 6 fat, along with legumes like peanuts, lentils, and kidney beans, the more we eat, the higher our omega 6 intake is.  How much fish are we eating to balance out all that omega 6?  If you’re eating grains at every meal, like most people not on the paleo diet do, it’s easy to see how the Western diet is at a 15:1 ratio.  Toast and cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, pasta for dinner, is not out of the ordinary.  Every chain restaurant is based on grains.  Read about the importance of omega 6/3, along with the dangers of corn, and sugar, on my Favorite Links page.  How much fish is enough fish?  Can you list the past 10 times you ate a serving of fish?  And if you can, how many in the last 7 days?  5 ounces of peanuts has 22,000 mg of omega 6 fat, whereas 6 ounces of salmon has about 4,000 mg of omega 3.  See how easy it is to consume too much omega 6?  Get rid of the grains and legumes and eat more fish!

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