
Polyunsaturated Fatty-Acids or PUFAs are very important fats which are essential for our health. We need to deep-dive a bit more though and understand how best to incoporate them into our diet for optimal benefits.
In the recent years our diet has changed quite a lot and unfortunately not for the better. This has mostly to do with the rapid increase of the world population and hence the demand for food. The transition from a hunter-gatherer diet to an agriculture based diet meant we begun to rely more and more on grains and also to cheaper sources of food. This has actually been reflected to a huge increase in omega-6 mainly from linoleic acid in industrial seed oils, such as soybean, corn, sunflower oils and at the same time a decrease of omega-3 fats (ALA, EPA, DHA).
What is most important though is that stability of those fats under heat. Saturated fats have a higher smoking point and better suited than polyunstaturated fats which you want to avoid for cooking since they are highly oxidised when heated. We need to make a special notes on vegetables oils since they are very highly processed and should be avoided at all costs.
Polyunsaturated fats though are essential for health and since the body can’t create them the amount needed we need to get these essential nutrients from food.
Omega-3 fats are a key family of polyunsaturated fats. There are three main omega-3s:
Omega-6 fats are also healthy unsaturated fats. Just like omega-3 fats, we need to get omega-6 fats from food in our diet. There are four types of omega-6 fats:
Healthy populations, such as in Japan, have a low omega 6:to:3 ratio of around 4:1 or less, which can be achieved on a diet of whole, unprocessed foods. However this ratio has been scewed in the last decades with the increase of demand for faster and cheeper food. This has given raise to processed oil and meat from animals that have been very poorly fed. Currently the
Industrial seed oils are not as healthy as they are reported to be. In fact you should avoid them. You should also avoid.
The point of attention here is Linoleic acid (LA), which although is considered essential it should comprise of only 1% of our total diet intake. However currently the average consumption is about 7 to 8 times that amount.
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