The Queen of Fats Why Omega 3s Were Removed from the

Western Diet and What We Can Do to Replace Them (Volume

15) (California Studies in Food and Culture)

Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:

https://cheaptodownload.com/product/the-queen-of-fats-why-omega-3s-were-removed-
from-the-western-diet-and-what-we-can-do-to-replace-them-volume-15-california-st
udies-in-food-and-culture-full-pdf-download

Click Download Now

CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN FOOD AND CULTURE
DARRA GOLDSTEIN, EDITOR
THE QUEEN OF FATS
WHY OMEGA-3s WERE REMOVED FROM THE
WESTERN DIET AND WHAT WE CAN DO TO
REPLACE THEM

SUSAN ALLPORT

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

B E R K E L EY LO S A N G E L E S LO N D O N
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished
university presses in the United States, enriches lives around
the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social
sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by
the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions
from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit
www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2006 by Susan Allport

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Allport, Susan.
The queen of fats : why omega-3s were removed from the
Western diet and what we can do to replace them / Susan All-
port.
p. cm. — (California studies in food and culture ; 15)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13, 978-0-520-24282-1 (alk. paper),
ISBN-10, 0-520-24282-3 (alk. paper)
1. Essential fatty acids in human nutrition. 2. Omega-3
fatty acids—Health aspects. 3. Omega-3 fatty acids—
Research—History. I. Title. II. Series.
QP752.O44A45 2006
612.3′97—dc22 2005035605

Manufactured in the United States of America

15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 60, containing

60% post-consumer waste, processed chlorine free; 30% de-
inked recycled fiber, elemental chlorine free; and 10% FSC-
certified virgin fiber, totally chlorine free. EcoBook 60 is acid-
free and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/astm
d5634–01 (Permanence of Paper).
 FOR THE SCIENTISTS WHO PIECED TOGETHER THIS STORY
AND FOR MY FAMILY, THE MOST NOURISHING A WRITER COULD HAVE
 CONTENTS

1. What’s for Dinner? / 1

2. A Trip to Greenland / 14
3. How the Omegas Got Their Name / 25
4. Monsieur Cholesterol / 45
5. Fishy Fats / 5 4
6. Tree Lard and Cow Oil / 68
7. The Chemist in the Kitchen / 76
8. Out of Africa . . . / 86
9. . . . and into the Membrane / 96
10. Where Have All the Omega-3s Gone? / 103
11. The Speed of Life / 120
12. Putting Omega-3s Back into Your Food Supply / 138
13. The Proof Is in the Pudding / 147

Time Line / 153

Glossary / 159
Notes / 169
Acknowledgments / 201
Index / 205
 ONE

WHAT’S FOR DINNER?

I look upon it, that he who does not mind
his belly will hardly mind anything else.
SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1763

THE YEAR 2003 WILL BE REMEMBERED AS A TIME WHEN AMERICA LOST

its dietary senses. Overnight, it seemed, this country switched
from a low-fat regime, in which people shunned every form of
visible fat, to the Atkins regime, in which fat consumption was
encouraged but carbohydrates were to be avoided. Jack Sprat,
who could eat no fat, suddenly became Sprat’s wife and could eat
no lean.
The accumulated nutritional advice from decades of research
was tossed aside like an old blanket, and grocery stores were sud-
denly filled with such gastronomical oxymora as low-carb bread
and beer. Thin women in tight jeans were overheard saying that
they loved beets and apples but had to stay away from them
because of all their carbs. Large men in business suits ordered
bunless burgers dripping with bacon grease and raved about their
diets. Anyone coming back to the United States after time spent
in Europe or Asia had an Alice-in-Wonderland experience, as
several returnees told me: black had become white and carbohy-
drates, the food that feeds most of the world’s peoples, including
the world’s leanest peoples, were suddenly the bad guys.

1
2 WHAT’S FOR DINNER?

But 2003 should be remembered not only as the year that

America lost its dietary senses (which it did) but also as the year
that the center would no longer hold. By 2003, the nutritional
advice given out to Americans by government agencies like the
United States Department of Agriculture and medical organiza-
tions like the American Heart Association had become so out of
sync with current research and biological understanding that
schisms and confusion became inevitable.
It is unfortunate that those schisms took the form of total
rejection, on the part of many Americans, of all the acquired wis-
dom about what constitutes a healthy diet. But that’s what hap-
pens when the center doesn’t hold, when the marketplace is full
of such absurdities as overly sweetened breakfast cereals, such as
Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms, being endorsed by the Ameri-
can Heart Association (because they have no cholesterol or satu-
rated fat)—when the oversimplistic, low-fat mantra of the 1980s
and 1990s made the Atkins craze almost inescapable. As a dieter
in Texas confides, “Eating low-fat guarantees that I will binge on
fried foods. Eating low-carb guarantees that I will binge on a bag
of chips.”
Much of the country is now on that fried-food, high-fat binge
(or has binged out on Atkins and moved on). Many of us are more
confused than ever about the simplest, most fundamental of
questions: What should we have for dinner?
In the midst of this confusion, I’d like to throw my hat into the
ring of nutritional advice with a tribute to one food, or family of
foods: the fatty acids popularly known as the omega-3s. Because
these fats were not recognized as being essential to human health
until the 1980s, most current recommendations and nutritional
advice took shape without them. At the same time, they were
being eliminated from many foods because their presence caused
problems with product stability and shelf life. Their absence,
 WHAT’S FOR DINNER? 3

from our foods and our guidelines, is a key, a large and growing
number of scientists believe, to many of our health problems—
and even our befuddlement about food.
I have none of the usual qualifications to write this homage. I
am neither a physician who treats the diseases to which people
who are deficient in these fats are prone nor a scientist who has
spent a lifetime researching the membranes that these fats call
home. But that may be an advantage, since scientists and physi-
cians tend to focus on the one piece of the puzzle they are look-
ing at and these fats, as it turns out, affect the entire body in many
different ways.
Rather, I am a science writer, a curious denizen of twenty-
first-century America with a long-standing interest in food and
the difficulties of being a human omnivore, and I will try to pre-
sent the big picture. Quite simply, trying to understand health
and diet without an appreciation of these fats is like trying to
understand earthquakes without knowledge of plate tectonics, or
motion without knowledge of physics. Until we revise our foods
and guidelines to incorporate all that has been learned about
omega-3 fatty acids in the past fifty years, our diet will be lacking
in a very important way.
After I introduce these fats, I think you will begin to see why
they deserve this book of their own. This introduction will involve
some chemistry, but only what is necessary and most of which will
be familiar to cooks, shoppers, and nutrition-conscious readers.
Further explanations and diagrams can be found in the glossary,
which begins on page 159. All that readers need to know from the
get-go is that fatty acids, the components of fats and cell mem-
branes, are chains of carbons and hydrogens with an acidic group
at one end. The first of the omega-3 fatty acids is alpha linolenic
acid, or ALA, the single parent of this family of fats. Found pri-
marily in the leaves and other green parts of plants, alpha linolenic
4 WHAT’S FOR DINNER?

acid is the fat associated with the complex photosynthetic machin-

ery of plants, the fat that enables plants to capture single photons
of light and turn them into sugars, the basis of all life on earth.
Alpha linolenic acid doesn’t play a significant role in animals, for
reasons I will soon discuss, but it does give rise to offspring who
do work that is every bit as important to animals as photosynthe-
sis is to plants.
Like all fatty acids, alpha linolenic acid is a weak acid—that is,
it has a slight tendency to lose a hydrogen ion and develop a neg-
ative charge. It has the same strength as a very familiar acid, vine-
gar, which is not surprising since vinegar, or acetic acid, is also a
fatty acid that is common in living tissues but too short (just two
carbons long) to be of use in storing energy or building structures.
Fatty acids lose their acidic leaning when they team up with a
molecule of glycerol to make triglycerides, the substances we
commonly call fats (the substances we cook with and that don’t
mix with water). In most contexts, we can think of fatty acids and
fats as equivalent terms. And we can think of the acidic end of a
fatty acid as the hook, or the coupling, that enables our bodies to
move these long, sticky chains of carbons and hydrogens around.
It’s also helpful to understand that all triglycerides have an iden-
tical glycerol backbone attached to three, often different, fatty
acids, sixteen to twenty-two carbons in length.

1 glycerol + 3 fatty acids → 1 triglyceride + 3 molecules water

Whether these triglycerides take the shape of butter, vegetable

oil, lard, or suet depends entirely on which fatty acids are in-
volved. Some fatty acids have straight, saturated chains (saturated
with hydrogens, that is) and produce solid fats; others have kinky,
unsaturated chains (where some of the hydrogens have been
replaced by double bonds between the carbons) and produce
liquids.
 WHAT’S FOR DINNER? 5

Acidic group
(COOH)

Carbon
Methyl group
double
(CH3)
bonds
(C=C)

Hydrogens

Carbons

FIGURE 1 DHA in one of its many conformations.

Sometimes this fatty acid curls up in a ball; sometimes
it is as straight as a ruler. Its six double bonds keep it
constantly on the move.

Alpha linolenic acid has a markedly kinky tail, and the fats in
which it is abundant—linseed, canola, and soybean oils—are liq-
uids, even at very low temperatures. But alpha linolenic acid is not
kinky enough for animals, which are faster (more mobile) than
plants, and animals lengthen and add double bonds to this
eighteen-carbon fatty acid before they put it to work in their
tissues.
Docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, is one of several offspring of
alpha linolenic acid and it is the longest, most desaturated fatty
6 WHAT’S FOR DINNER?

acid in animal tissues. It is the fat that permits animals to think

and see. DHA is found in its highest concentrations in the mem-
branes of the cells of the brain and eyes, where its ability to flip-
flop between hundreds of different shapes, billions of times per
second—the result of an extremely kinky chain with six carbon
double bonds (twice as many as in alpha linolenic acid)—enables
nerve cells to send their rapid signals. DHA is a quick-change
artist, scientists have recently learned, and its concentrated pres-
ence in cell membranes, the thin envelopes surrounding cells,
transforms those barriers from orderly guards into dancers at an
all-night rave. Its dilute presence in cells throughout the body is
like oil added to an engine.
Animals make very different use of a second, somewhat
shorter, offspring of alpha linolenic acid: eicosapentaenoic acid.
Eicosapentaenoic acid, or EPA, is one of several fatty acids, all
twenty carbons long, that animal cells release from their mem-
branes in order to communicate with each other and affect each
other’s behavior (fat signals instead of smoke signals). I’ll talk
more about these cell messengers later—how they were discov-
ered and what kinds of reactions they produce—but the reader
should know that this kind of communication is necessary in any
organism with more than one cell and that eicosapentaenoic
stands out as the mediator or peacemaker of these fat messengers.
When this omega-3 fatty acid is released from a cell, it produces
just the kind of measured reaction in its neighbors that is desir-
able in most family or neighborly interactions. It does not elicit
the extreme reactions of other fat messengers—say, arachidonic
acid, which enters the scene like a SWAT team. Sending in a
SWAT team can be useful in some situations (in fighting infec-
tion, for example), but not to coordinate everyday disagreements.
The omega-3 fats are not rare in nature, as their remarkable
behaviors might lead us to think. In fact, alpha linolenic acid,
 WHAT’S FOR DINNER? 7

found in the chloroplasts of green leaves, is the most abundant fat

on earth. Green leaves are not known for being fatty, high-
calorie foods; but the planet has more green vegetation on it than
anything else, and the small amount of fat in each leaf adds up.
DHA and eicosapentaenoic acid* are also common, since these
offspring of alpha linolenic acid accumulate in the tissues of ani-
mals that eat green leaves, as well as in the tissues of animals that
eat the animals that eat green leaves. Both DHA and eicosapen-
taenoic acid are also made by some aquatic plants.
But these fats have become rare in most Americans’ diets,
which are short on leafy greens and long on seeds and the oil

*To those wondering about my inconsistency in referring to these

fatty acids, using the acronym for docosahexaenoic acid, DHA, but writ-
ing out alpha linolenic acid and eicosapentaenoic acid—it is intentional.
I didn’t want the reader thinking of the American Library Association
(ALA) or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) every time I used
their accepted acronyms. But DHA, as far as I know, doesn’t stand for
any familiar organization, and the use of at least one acronym may be
helpful in keeping these fats straight. When I introduce the members of
the omega-6 family of fats, I will be more consistent and spell each of
them out. The abbreviation for arachidonic acid used by the scientific
community is AA, and I don’t want anyone’s mind going to Alcoholics
Anonymous. Or to Los Angeles, since LA is the abbreviation of linoleic
acid, the parent of this second family. I will be inconsistent throughout
the book, however, in using a combination of common and scientific
names for these fatty acids, whichever seems to be the most reader-
friendly. The common names reflect the discovery of these com-
pounds—oleic acid was first isolated from olive oil; linolenic acid, from
linseed oil—and are sometimes less cumbersome than their scientific
equivalents (here, octadecenoic and octadecatrienoic acid, respectively).
But the names derived from Greek or Latin—eicosapentaenoic acid, for
example—have the advantage of giving the number of carbons and dou-
ble bonds and are sometimes easier to remember.
8 WHAT’S FOR DINNER?

from seeds, including soybeans and corn. And this rarity—this

deficiency or insufficiency, as people have been calling it since
the 1980s—is now being linked to a whole host of human ills.
These include diseases of the brain, because of the high concen-
tration of DHA in healthy nervous tissue, as well as heart disease,
arthritis and other inflammatory diseases, certain kinds of can-
cers, and metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes, the dis-
eases that tend to specifically plague Western populations—the
diseases of civilization, as they have been called, without irony.
Scientists do not know everything there is to know about this
family of fats and how their absence from the human diet causes
disease—far from it. But what they do know should make physi-
cians and government agencies sit up and take notice before utter-
ing another word of dietary advice. It should cause a thorough
reevaluation of our guidelines about fats and health. Why it hasn’t
is a good question and has something to do with resistance on the
part of food industries (which have been removing omega-3s from
foods because the many double bonds in omega-3 fats make them
more easily oxidized than other fats, resulting in a shorter shelf
life for the products that contain them), as well as with the com-
plexity of the science that is involved. (Who would have ever
thought that something as lumpish as fat could be so compli-
cated?) It may also have something to do with the slow, meander-
ing history of our understanding of these fats and with our very
gradual realization that a balance of the different fats is essential
for health.
Which brings me to the reason I have written this book: that
the telling of this history may help us to see how omega-3s came
to be eliminated from both our diets and our nutritional think-
ing and to discover how to put them back. A recounting of the
ideas that shaped research and dominated medicine may reveal
where the advice given us went wrong and give us the courage to
 WHAT’S FOR DINNER? 9

make amends. This book is a tribute to the missing fats in our

diet. It is also the history of how researchers discovered that these
fats were missing—a nutritional whodunit that plays out in
Greenland, Africa, and the many Western countries whose in-
habitants first experienced this absence in the form of an epi-
demic of heart disease.
For many reasons, we have arrived at a critical time for this
history. Though for decades we have been advised to consume
diets that are low in cholesterol and saturated fat (avoiding foods
such as butter and lard, which have a high percentage of straight,
saturated chains), and though cholesterol and saturated fat have
been reduced in the American diet, heart disease continues to
afflict just as many Americans—and we’re now facing epidemics
of obesity and diabetes. Saturated fat and cholesterol were sup-
posed to be the problem, so where did we go wrong? Why are
our health woes multiplying instead of going away? Many expla-
nations for this unhealthy trend have been proposed, including
larger portion sizes, excess calories, an increase in the consump-
tion of processed carbohydrates and trans fats, and a decrease in
exercise, all of which may share some of the responsibility. But it’s
time we learned that certain fats—the fats in most of our foods—
slow down metabolism, as researchers in Australia are finding.
It’s time we learned that many companies, in processing food,
routinely eliminate the omega-3 fats that are important to both
maintaining energy balance and protecting the heart.
A new labeling policy instituted in the United States, effective
January 1, 2006, requires food producers to state the amount of
trans fats in their products. Such labels are a good thing, since
they will enable consumers to avoid these altered fats, which
result from a hydrogenation process that makes vegetable oils
more solid and stable (that is, less susceptible to oxidation). But
the labels won’t do much if food producers substitute fats that are