Is This the Worst Thing You’re Eating?

At Mercola.com, Dr. Joseph Mercola suggests that linoleic acid is the most destructive ingredient in your diet. He writes:

Fats — which are water-insoluble biological molecules also known as lipids¹ — are the primary building block of your cell membranes. This is one of the reasons why eating the right types of fat is so important for your health and longevity.

Well, after three grueling rounds of peer review over the last three months, my paper on the hazards of linoleic acid (LA), an omega-6 polyunsaturated fat (PUFA), is now published in the high impact Nutrition journal Nutrients and available for free download, here.²

Please download the article and save it on your hard drive as you never know what will happen with a future crisis. You can send it to doctors who don’t yet believe how dangerous seed oils are, but truthfully, the video above is likely better for your friends.

I couldn’t have done it without my co-author Dr. Chris D’Adamo who skillfully and diplomatically helped to navigate the minefield of peer review. Our next paper will likely be on reductive stress which is one of the most important foundational and unknown concepts in health. It helps explains why LA is so devastating to your health at a molecular biological level.

Lowering your LA is the single most important strategy you can take to not only lower reductive stress in your mitochondria, but improve your overall health. It took me over six months to create the video above and I would strongly encourage each of you to watch is several times so you embed in your brain how important avoiding LA is for your long-term health so you can develop unconscious reflex behaviors to avoid this pernicious fat.

Fatty Acid Basics

What distinguishes one fat from another is the specific combination of fatty acids it’s composed of, and the properties of fats and fatty acids depend on their hydrogen saturation and the length of their molecules, also referred to as “chain length.”

There are two basic types of fatty acids, based on how many of their carbon bonds are paired with hydrogen:³

•Saturated fats are fully loaded with hydrogen atoms forming straight chains, and are typically solid at room temperature (examples include butter and coconut oil)

•Unsaturated fats have lost at least one of the pairs of hydrogen atoms from their carbon chain and come in two varieties:

◦Monounsaturated fats, which are missing one pair of hydrogen atoms

◦Polyunsaturated Fats (PUFAs), which are missing more than one pair of hydrogen atoms, hence the name “poly”

The loss of hydrogen results in molecules that kink or bend at each double bond. The more hydrogen pairs that are missing, the more bent the molecules, which causes the molecules to occupy more space. This is what makes the fat a liquid oil at room temperature.

In addition to varying levels of hydrogen saturation, fats also vary in the length of their carbon chains, leading to another classification scheme based on their number of carbon atoms:⁴

• Short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) — Two to four carbon atoms
• Medium-chain fatty acids (MCFAs) — Six to 10 carbon atoms
• Long-chain fatty acids (LCFAs) — 12 to 26 carbon atoms
• Very-long-chain fatty acids⁵ (VLCFAs) — 26 to 30 carbon atoms

The chain length and hydrogen saturation level control a fat’s melting point. As chain length increases, melting point increases. Likewise, fats that are solid at room temperature (butter, coconut oil) have longer chain lengths than fats that are liquid at room temperature (fish oil, olive oil). With chain lengths being equal, the polyunsaturated fats found in seeds oils have lower melting points than saturated fats.

Omega-3 and Omega-6 Basics

PUFAs can also be subdivided into omega-3 and omega-6 fats. The end of the fatty acid chain that is opposite the acid end is the “omega end.” The location of the first double bond from the omega end dictates whether a fatty acid is an omega-3, omega-6, omega-9 (oleic acid) or another member of the omega family.

The most pernicious toxin in the modern diet, and the fat you need to minimize consumption of, is the omega-6 fat linoleic acid (LA). LA makes up 60% to 80% of omega-6 fats and is the primary contributor to chronic disease.

To be clear, it’s only toxic when consumed in excessive quantities, but the vast majority of people nowadays consuming far more than the ideal amounts. The history of how seed oils ended up replacing far healthier animal fats is detailed in the video above.

Many still believe that if you have a distorted omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, the solution is simply to consume more omega-3, but that’s a serious mistake. While you certainly need a certain amount of omega-3s for good health, adding excessive omega-3s is a prescription for disaster, as omega-3 is also a PUFA.

So, when consumed in excessive quantities, omega-3 will cause metabolic damage similar to that of LA, as it breaks down into dangerous metabolites known as ALEs (advanced lipoxidation end products).

Read more here.