Do Food Labels Help Balance Your Omegas - Mental Health Awareness Month
The importance of balancing your Omega 3 & 6. Do food labels give you the right information? Omega 3 and new life!
Mental Health Awareness week Paper three
My first two mental health papers dealt with cell construction, communication and the role of fats in providing the balance needed to build flexible cell walls, essential for passing messages. My hope is that I was able to demonstrate the importance of the fats as fundamental to our mental well being.
This paper looks at just how early we have to start to consider the fats to build new life. There is no doubt that we are still Palaeolithic man in respect of the nourishment we need for life and more importantly it is the balance of fats in modern diets that are leading us to evolve into illness rather than health. The evidence is there, if we do not have that important balance then the result is clear to see, our evolution into illness will bankrupt the NHS.
So it all starts with the sperm then, our sperm is full of fatty acids and it has to be in that Stone Age balance of 1 Omega 3 to 1 Omega 6. Our western diet often provides very little Omega 3 and far too much Omega 6 therefore the balance may be out as much as 15-25 times more Omega 6. The job of passing high quality sperm is almost impossible and made more difficult by the lack of information on labels. OK, you now have great sperm but what about the next job of creating that new life? Well, our females are building these new cells and the proper balance of fats will build flexible and resilient cell membranes able to pass and receive the messages of life. Omega 3 is the only substance in the body that when pregnant, the baby will take it all and one of the results of this is post-natal depression. The brain shrinks and messages do not pass properly. There is information about folic acid and its importance, but zero information about the fats and if there is, it is often misinformation and myth.
Where should you go to find information when you want to build this healthy new life? The NHS choices website? Labels? Well No. The NHS choices website has virtually no comprehensible help or advice about fats or balance. There is a blunt statement about saturated fat, implying it leads to heart disease, this is in spite of many doctors admitting that saturated fat is not harmful for us and advice over three generations has been ill informed. This advice coupled with a low fat message has ensured a high sugar diet implicated in far worse health outcomes. To get back to the fats the NHS recommendation is to replace saturated fat with unsaturated fat, as you can see by my earlier papers this is just nonsense. Unsaturated fats are made up of the omega series of fatty acids. It is plain wrong to increase unsaturated fat without knowledge of the balance of these omega fats. It is the vast increase in the omega 6 fat in oils like sunflower, rapeseed, and oils marked vegetable that lead to inflammation and bad cell construction, a problem all through life. These oils are widely used in the food processing industry and the residue from making them are fed to livestock thereby changing the fatty acid balance of meat we eat. This, as well as margarine and the heating of oil, degrades all oils thereby turning them into an unhealthy substance not recognised by our bodies.
OK so what if the NHS did give the right advice about fats and balance for life? Would food labels help you to choose food for your brain? The answer is NO! I believe I have demonstrated that you need to know about the omega balance in food and also how the oils have been treated, for instance, have they been subjected to high temperatures? This information is not there, and of course if it was, you would not buy the food! It’s not hard to imagine some linkage between the labels not giving the information you need to make an informed choice about the food to eat and the NHS giving poor food advice. Labels should help you to choose fats needed for brain and mental health.
There is virtually no information on the role of diet in deteriorating mental health and certainly no information about prevention. This situation must be changed! It is up to us and I hope these papers will encourage everyone to understand more about fats and to put pressure on legislators to make sure we have information on labels that help us make good food decisions.
Four generations of eating the food we need to produce good mental health would see a dramatic change in the health profile of the nation.
A message from Durwin Banks a Heart Centred Farmer.
Durwin Banks
The Linseed Farm