Black walnuts are better than English…
What do you think of these nuts?
LeCheffre
(Banting & Yudkin & Atkins & Eadeses & Cordain & Taubes & Volek & Naiman & Bikman )
#46
Give the 6 blockade on ALA conversion, and the general lack of utility for unconverted ALA, I’m not sure that Flax is a better answer than just buying better eggs, finding a fish that works for you (shrimp is my jam, but I’m told Swordfish is not terribly fishy) or otherwise he ting it from animals that eat the precursor ALA and covert it for you.
Eggs. The good ones. From pastured chickens. The only real super food anyone ever needs.
LeCheffre
(Banting & Yudkin & Atkins & Eadeses & Cordain & Taubes & Volek & Naiman & Bikman )
#49
ALA is listed as essential, because you cannot make it. You can convert it to the two useful Omega 3 oils, EPA and DHA. EPA and DHA won’t go backwards into ALA, ergo, ALA is essential, according to the folks who make such determinations. At peak conversion, if you’re a woman, you’re talking 30% from ALA to one, and 9% to the other, which is downstream. I get it flipped, but that’s WAY more flax than I’m going to ever want to consume, to get whatever dose folks are recommending to restore balance and ensure proper brain function. Brain too important to trust to low conversion rates.
Pre-agriculture man ate: Fish and oysters if he lived near waterways, wild game and eggs if he didn’t. They ate the bugs, made the conjugation. Pre-ag man certainly didn’t eat a lot of flax seed. It’s worth looking at something like Weston A. Price’s investigation into diets around the world to get at it, but seriously, pre-ag man ate bugs directly, which, like fish, are good sources of conjugated omega 3.
Bacon may be more delicious than eggs, but it does not compare in nutrition to eggs… not by a wide margin. Butter lacks protein, and would not be anything like a sustainable monodiet because of the lack of protein. It’s also vit/min deficient compared to eggs. Again, maybe tastier, but if I had to eat one thing daily for optimal health, and oysters were out, it would be eggs.
LeCheffre
(Banting & Yudkin & Atkins & Eadeses & Cordain & Taubes & Volek & Naiman & Bikman )
#53
Butter and bacon are the best “Power” foods for ketosis.
Maybe ketosis is the goal for you. I won’t judge, but improved health is my goal. And just pounding butter doesn’t get me there.
Omega enriched eggs are not GMO. They are laid by hens who are fed, you guessed it, Flaxseed. Which they partially conjugate for the end user. And some are fed additional fish oil to add more DHA to the yolk mix.
But I wasn’t even talking about enriched eggs. I’m only talking about pasture raised eggs. Eggs that wander a field, maybe follow cows around, eat bugs and such. Lead happier lives than sad chickens in mass coops. The price bump at my grocery from the eggs of confined chickens to pastured eggs is a buck or two per dozen. Averaged per pair of eggs, it’s really negligible, and yeah, $.50/egg is not remotely exorbitant.
You have a funny idea on animal agriculture, but probably don’t give a flying F about the treatment of the cows that make your butter or the pigs that produce your bacon. Here’s a thought for you, every piece of bacon you’ve ever eaten was from a pig who was raised to have a fat belly and die before it’s natural lifespan. How is grain feeding cattle to produce faster growth and higher dairy yield any different from feeding hens flax?
Lastly, Omega-6 is actually essential to life. You need a certain amount. The dose is the poison.
I’m trying not to go for people on personal grounds, but when you named yourself ketoloco, you were on the mark. Loco.
PaulL
(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing)
#58
The essential fats are the ω-3’s and the ω-6’s, some of which are better than others (DHA is one, I think; I find it hard to keep the names straight). Both are essential, but ω-6’s are inflammatory in quantity, so we want to limit them by avoiding seed oils as much as possible. Also, the two types compete for the same receptors, so they need to be in balance to the extent possible. Neither type of fat is needed in any great quantity
Other PUFA’s should be avoided to the extent possible; the body will make any that it happens to need. Saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids are much, much better for us.
Not quite true, if you’ll forgive a correction. The magic of a well-formulated ketogenic diet lies in the lowering of serum insulin that results from the lowering of dietary carbohydrate. Glucose and insulin in any quantity in the bloodstream cause all sorts of damage; moreover, insulin is the primary fat-storage hormone, because the excess glucose needs to go somewhere, and the muscles can’t always metabolize it all (plus, there’s a limit to how much glycogen they can store).
The reason we emphasize eating fat as part of a well-formulated ketogenic diet is that fat causes minimal stimulation of insulin secretion, so it is the safest source of calories to replace the calories lost when we stop eating carbohydrate. Other than that, fat has no mystical weight-loss properties per se. Apart from the minimal quantity we require of the two essential fatty acids, fats are primarily valuable as a source of calories. At twice the number of calories per gram, compared with protein and carbohydrate, fat is particularly satiating.
Although protein stimulates insulin secretion, albeit at half the rate at which carbohydrate does, it is essential to the human diet and needed in substantial quantity. For one thing, there is always loss of nitrogen that needs to be replaced; for another, there are nine essential amino acids that the body cannot manufacture (as opposed to the two types of essential fatty acids). The stimulation of insulin is also necessary to maintain the proper level of serum insulin (we don’t want too much, but we must have enough—otherwise, we would starve to death, no matter how many calories we were to eat).
For that matter, a ketogenic diet is not a weight-loss diet so much as it is a weight-normalization diet. Its primary value lies in the metabolic healing it promotes, and since obesity is one of the symptoms of metabolic derangement (along with dental caries, hypertension, gout, diabetes, cardiovascular impairment, Alzheimer’s disease, systemic inflammation, visceral fat deposits, insulin resistance in the muscle, adipose, and organic tissues, etc., etc.), it tends to be resolved as part of the general healing. Many people come to this way of eating because its the only effective way for them to persuade their bodies to part with their store of excess fat, so it has become identified with weight loss. We forget at our peril, however, that the underweight will also gain on a ketogenic diet. There are many cases of women who gain muscle and bone density on keto, even as they lose excess stored fat.
PaulL
(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing)
#60
LeCheffre
(Banting & Yudkin & Atkins & Eadeses & Cordain & Taubes & Volek & Naiman & Bikman )
#62
Conversion matters though.
Flax has no DHA or EPA. It’s all ALA. Which even the best converter (women do it better than men, other factors not well understood).
So, sure, in isolation, flax has a better 3:6 ratio.
In a larger diet context, fish wins because more of the 3 is ready to use without a 70% reduction in usable quantities. There are lots of reasons why folks who eat fish out do all sorts of things relative to us non fish eaters.
I’m not anti-flax. I’m just saying it’s not as pure N-3 as folks make it out to be, due to limitations in our body’s capacity to covert it.
And again, if you’re not gonna eat fish, would you rather: eat flax or eat the nice eggs? Answer will vary from person to person, obviously.
PaulL
(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing)
#63
Argh! This kind of blunder seems all too common in nutritional research. (Apart from the cases of outright bias and fraud, of course.) 
Dantheman
(In Rochester NY USA, lovin life)
#64
Thank you guys for the excellent information, much appreciated, I’m still wondering tho, is it better to have a good O6/O3 ratio or to have a lesser amount of O6 overall? in other words, I think I can offset a small excess of O6 by getting more O3, for instance flax seems spectactular
Total Omega-3 fatty acids
38325 mg
Total Omega-6 fatty acids
9931 mg
but then you got ten tons of O6 circulating.
originally, I purchased flax because of the ratio but stopped using it because of the estrogenic effects. just google flax estrogen men
PaulL
(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing)
#65
Since too much ω-6 causes inflammation, it pays to limit it. But the ratio is also important to getting enough of each, since they compete for the same receptors.