For many years, I bought into the whole idea of Omega-3=good and Omega-6=bad for a a long time. I didn’t worry a lot about how much Omega-6 was in my diet (mostly from high PUFA nuts, seeds and their oils) and instead tried to balance it out with fish oil.

About a year ago, I read what Brian Peskin had to say about fish oil. He feels that the problem is not that we have too much Omega-6 but that we have too much crap Omega-6 and that fish oil supplements are mostly junk wearing a healthy halo.

Fish have no oil glands so in order to get the oil fish have to be “juiced.” Imagine putting rejected fish (those not used to sell in restaurants and supermarkets) into a blender, sifting out all the fleshy bits and bones, then encapsulating the “juice.” Not only is this just disgusting to imagine, but fish oil in such concentrations is the worst way to get your EFAs.

While this description seems hyperbolic, I had never really thought about how fish oil was produced. Generally, any industrial processing is far worse than one might imagine. In general, I’ve found people don’t really think about it at all. How many people who eat hot dogs, for instance, want to think about how they are made?

His other articles are about how saturated fats don’t cause heart disease and how being in ketosis is not dangerous and is not the same as ketoacidosis. I certainly had heard before that most of the Omega-6 and -3 in oils or nuts are already oxidized or rancid and therefore really bad for you. It’s not much of a leap to believe that fish oil is similarly oxidized during processing and could be heavily damaged by the time it gets to you. He seems to otherwise have it together, but his idea that we need to supplement Omega-6 really left me cold. Instead of dismissing fish oil, I sought out better fish oil and tried to eat more wild-caught fish. I filed his data point away.

More recently, while looking into subclinical (as defined solely by blood tests) hypothyroidism and how hard it is to get a proper diagnosis and treatment for hypothyroidism generally, I wound up reading a lot of work by Ray Peat, PhD, Dr. Broda Barnes, Dr. Bruce Rind and even more recently, a little of Dr. Mark Starr’s work. Starr’s book hasn’t shown up yet, but there’s bits salted around the web. What all these people have in common is a dislike of the current medical tests for hypothyroidism. They think they are very inaccurate, and that the net result is that people with real metabolic problems can’t get treatment. Ray Peat also has a lot of information about curing estrogen dominance and it’s inter-relationship with everything else, including hypothyroidism. He feels that PUFAs are involved with low progesterone and low thyroid conditions, and this was very interesting to me as I have very real symptoms of both.

So, eventually, I found myself reading this article at Ray Peat’s site.

In declaring EPA and DHA to be safe, the FDA neglected to evaluate their antithyroid, immunosuppressive, lipid peroxidative (Song et al., 2000), light sensitizing, and antimitochondrial effects, their depression of glucose oxidation (Delarue et al., 2003), and their contribution to metastatic cancer (Klieveri, et al., 2000), lipofuscinosis and liver damage, among other problems.

Hey, tell us what you really think!

Peat also doesn’t believe that the so-called “Essential Fatty Acids” are at all essential. He recommends getting as much of your fats as possible from saturated sources like butter, cream and coconut oil. I used to take for granted the idea of EFAs, but I recently read Peat’s dissection of one of the core rat studies (Burr and Burr, 1929).

Over the last thirty years I have asked several prominent oil researchers what the evidence is that there is such a thing as an “essential fatty acid.” One professor cited a single publication about a solitary sick person who recovered from some sickness after being given some unsaturated fat. (If he had known of any better evidence, wouldn’t he have mentioned it?) The others (if they answered at all) cited “Burr and Burr, 1929.” The surprising thing about that answer is that these people can consider any nutritional research from 1929 to be definitive. It’s very much like quoting a 1929 opinion of a physicist regarding the procedure for making a hydrogen bomb. What was known about nutrition in 1929? Most of the B vitamins weren’t even suspected, and it had been only two or three years since “vitamin B” had been subdivided into two factors, the “antineuritic factor,” B1, and the “growth factor,” B2. Burr had no way of really understanding what deficiencies or toxicities were present in his experimental diet.

He goes on to say:

Several publications between 1936 and 1944 made it very clear that Burr’s basic animal diet was deficient in various nutrients, especially vitamin B6. The disease that appeared in Burr’s animals could be cured by fat free B-vitamin preparations, or by purified vitamin B6 when it became available. A zinc deficiency produces similar symptoms, and at the time Burr did his experiments, there was no information on the effects of fats on mineral absorption.

We all know what happened next: margarine was born.

But around that time, the seed oil industry was in crisis because the use of those oils in paints and plastics was being displaced by new compounds made from petroleum. The industry needed new markets, and discovered ways to convince the public that seed oils were better than animal fats. They were called the “heart protective oils,” though human studies soon showed the same results that the animal studies had, namely, that they were toxic to the heart and increased the incidence of cancer.

Before the supposed essentiality and heart-healthiness of PUFAs were “discovered”, they were primarily used in paints and varnishes. When they oxidize they are very sticky. You may have noticed that when vegetable oil drips on something, it gets very tacky. Its unique ability to oxidize quickly made it useful in paints and varnishes. You might also note that coconut oil and olive oil do not do this. If you drip olive oil on the *outside* of the bottle accidentally, it will remain very slippery until you wash it off there. Not so with sesame and peanut oils. I’ve always found peanut butter to be disgustingly sticky.

Since I brought up healthy halos¹, what about linseed oil?

Linseed oil can polymerize and the reaction is exothermic, and rags soaked in it can ignite spontaneously. Due to its polymer-like properties linseed oil is used on its own or blended with other oils, resins and solvents as an impregnator and varnish in wood finishing, as a pigment binder in oil paints, as a plasticizer and hardener in putty and in the manufacture of linoleum. The use of linseed oil has declined over the past several decades with the increased use of alkyd resins, which are similar but partially synthetic materials that resist yellowing.

Linseed oil is *flaxseed* oil. Sounds tasty, right?

If you’re interested in avoiding PUFAs, I have provided some tables below. I don’t worry too much about PUFAs in meat since those are locked up with other fats and keeping meat fresh specifically involves avoiding spoilage, and fats are the first thing to spoil. I do try not to rely on chicken too much (I love chicken broth made from bones and the carcass), and I only eat turkey on holidays anyway.

I’ve moved towards only using coconut oil, ghee and olive oil for cooking. There’s no commercial salad dressing or mayonnaise that isn’t full of PUFAs (unless it’s fat-free, then it’s full of HFCS). The same is true of anything found in a restaurant fryer. With the exception of white potatoes (and I’m not eating those at present), there’s really nothing coming out of a restaurant fryer that tempts me. Salad dressing is a snap to make from extra virgin olive oil, but I still haven’t come up with mayonnaise I like from olive oil, coconut oil and/or bacon fat, so I have not had mayo in quite a while. I know baconnaise sounds like it would be awesome, but I didn’t like it.

I now mostly stick to cashews, macadamia nuts and coconut products. I do eat almonds once in a while, and I would eat hazelnuts, but since I’m not eating mixed nuts right now, and I don’t like them enough to seek them out, they are not present in my diet. If I get sick of cashews and macs, maybe I’ll buy a pound of them.

¹I will NOT go off on a tangent about agave nectar…must not go off on a tangent about agave nectar.