Omega 6s, Earl Butz and a Side of Corn

Salon.com just posted a fantastic interview with Steven J.C. Gaulin about the new book he co-authored with William Lassek. I’m not going to get to the title just yet because it would imply that one sex might find the information less compelling than the other. That may be true for the book (I don’t know) but certainly not for the interview, which I recommend following the link below to read.

First of all, some interesting historical context to why food in North America is what it is from Gaulin (this is lifted straight from the article):

After Dwight Eisenhower had a major heart attack, when the American public became much more focused on heart health and nutrition, a popular nutritionist by the name of Ansel Keys made a lot of impact. He was committed to the notion that saturated fat was the culprit in the heart disease epidemic in the U.S. He advised Americans to replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fats, in particular corn and soybean oils.

Meanwhile Earl Butz, Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, had been tasked to get food prices lower. He decided to heavily subsidize and commoditize corn and soybeans in order to make them really cheap. So corn and soybeans became the basis of our entire food production system. And it continues today. The amount of these oils in the American diet increases significantly every year.

That brings us up to the present state of the agriculture industry. We’ve since learned that dietary fat is not the primary culprit in heart disease. We now know that dietary cholesterol can actually have very little bearing on your blood cholesterol. We also know that it is really (truly) hard to go wrong with food that comes straight out of the ground. When humans start messing with things, though, the ratios go funny and bodies start reacting badly.

When it comes to healthy fat intake you may already be aware that it’s the omega-3 fatty acids that you need to actively search out and that you may actually need to avoid omega-6s. This isn’t because omega-6 fatty acids are inherently problematic. It’s because the typical North American’s intake of omega-6s is already disproportionately high. There’s a reason for this and it’s not their presence in corn and soybeans, per se. When food processors extract and concentrate oil, you’re left with a lot of omega-6s.

Omega 6s pack an awesomely fattening 1-2 punch of promoting fat storage in the body and being the precursors for endocannabinoids (munchy-inducing signaling molecules that tell us to eat more). Omega-6s are so effective in triggering fat-storage that many studies in the U.S. and other countries show that the single best predictor of how much a woman will weigh is how much omega-6 is in her diet.

Links to the interview and to the opening of Food Inc. (which really should be required viewing for everyone who’s not a corn lobbyist) are below. A link to Krista Scott-Dixon’s newest e-tome, Fuck Calories is also included for good measure.