Hello all, this is a question I had the other day when thinking about fats.
We all know that it is healthy to eat a 3:1 ratio of omega-3’s to omega-6’s. However, one can supplement with concentrated fish oils and get much much more than the recommended daily dose of DHA/EPA in well under 10 grams of total Omega-3’s. It is my understanding that it is these compounds that make Omega-3’s so healthy in the first place.
This leads me to my question, does the ratio matter or does it really boil down to the total amount of EPA/DHA consumed? What if ones ratio is 1:1, or worse 0.5:1, but you are still consuming 4-6grams of EPA/DHA daily?
Basically, is the ratio only there because it represents a volume of omega 3’s that will let you reach your EPA/DHA RDI or does it go deeper than that?
Asked LL the same question, his response was “Ratio matters most”. 10:1 for N-6:N-3 is acceptable in literature.
So if consuming 100g of fat daily and target 33% Sat/33% Mon/33% Poly. The 33g of polyunsaturated fat, no more than 30g of N-6, it would be great to 17/33 of N-6, by consuming flax, walmut, canola, switching to grass fed beef, free range chickens/eggs and fish oil to make up the rest.
Barry Sears discusses in Omega Rx getting blood work done to determine AA/EPA ratio and strive for a certain ratio, it is highlighted in Berardi’s SWIS Conference review in which he calls Sears “Silk”. The ratio can be drawn until certain not so positive effects appear such as diarrhea.
Uh not exactly. The ratio of 3s to 6s should not be worse than 1:4 at the most. The closer to 1:1, the better. Actually, our ancestor’s diet was like that before we started introducing food crap into our diet 100 years ago thanks to vegetable oils and the way we raised animals. Grass feed animals have more omega 3s than omega 6s. Grain feed animals is the other way around. We didn’t exactly consume that much PUFA back then but we did eat nuts and fishes. Canola oil isn’t that great as advertised. I digged some infomation on that and it turns out that it’s processed like vegetable oils so they’re bound to have some trans-fats. It’s hard to find true grass feed meat&eggs so that’s why i would recommend taking flax oil and fish oil for omega 3s to balance out the ratio of 3s to 6s.