Diabetes Diet

The rarest seeds and nuts are those that have a positive ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fats. Until this month I could find only two — the well-know flax seeds and the much less widely known chia seeds. I wrote about chia seeds here in 2007. None of my other articles here have garnered more comments that that article, testifying to the hunger that we have for news of healthy seeds and nuts.

And now I can bring you news of another seed that is every bit as good for us as flax and chia seeds — and tastes even better. It goes by the strange name “sacha inchi.” When my good friend and food scout called me from the local Whole Foods Market and told me of his discovery, I assumed that it came either from Russia — because of the “sacha” in the name or from East Asia, because “inchi” sounded vaguely Japanese or Korean to me. Instead sacha inchi seeds come from the Amazon rainforest, and the name may come from the language of the Chanka language of the Peruvian highlands.

The Contents of a Package of Roasted Sacha Inchi Seeds

Some people call it the Inca Peanut. Its scientific name is Plukenetia volubilis . Continue Reading

A good friend of mine who is a vegetarian wondered if meat eaters — like me — generally have higher levels of pro-inflammatory omega-6 fats in their systems than vegetarians do. I concluded that vegetarians on the whole probably do consume less omega-6s. I thought that this may go a long way to explaining why vegetarians are often pretty healthy people who sometimes are able to control their diabetes well even while they abstain from fish, which would provide them with anti-inflammatory omega-3 fats.

But now I’ve reviewed the evidence below. My conclusion is that it depends.

The first step to getting the omegas in balance, as I reviewed in my previous article here, “Cutting Back on Omega-6.” The key is to eat less of those foods high in absolute amounts of that fat.

We get the highest levels of omega-6 fats from the standard cooking oils — soybean, corn, canola, and cottonseed. We had good alternatives to those oils so they have little redeeming value.

Then come the tree nuts and ground nuts, which do have redeeming value. So we have to be ambivalent about them, and therefore the wisest course may be to eat them in moderation.

In terms of omega-6 levels, after those two food groups come meat. But not all meat and not just the meat we commonly demonize as the “red meat.” Continue Reading

Knowing what to eat so that we get enough omega-3 fats in our diet is easy. The challenge is how to cut back on omega-6.

The first step to get our levels of omega-3 and omega-6 fats in balance is to reduce how much omega-6 we eat. Most people focus instead on increasing omega-3s.

As a starter this won’t work well, however, because the ratio between these two polyunsaturated fats that most Americans have is so out of balance. Many of us have 20 times the amount of omega-6 in our systems as omega-3, while population studies indicate that ratios of twice as much omega-6 to omega-3 is ideal for our heart health. While everyone needs to protect his or her heart, people with diabetes have a special interest in our most common and most serious potential complication.

The problem is that these two fats compete to get into the cells of our bodies. When we overload on the pro-inflammatory omega 6s, the anti-inflammatory omega-3s can’t do the work that they need to do to fight the inflammation that more and more people are recognizing as a root cause of many chronic diseases, including diabetes.

The leading expert on omega-3 and omega-6 is Dr. Bill Lands, who until he retired in 2002 was a senior scientific advisor at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Dr. Lands “is credited for discovering the beneficial effects of balancing the effects of excess omega-6 fatty acids with dietary omega-3 fatty acids,” according to the Wikipedia article about him. Continue Reading