The toxicity of bad oils and the benefits of good oils
Most of us have been taught to think of fat as basically dangerous, something to he avoided for the sake of one's health. In my medical training, the chemistry of lipids, a more technical term for fats, received little attention. No other factor in nutrition has gone from such a lowly to such an exalted position as my understanding of the importance of oils to health. Fats and oils have three quite different roles in the body, two of which account for the major shift in my appreciation of the subject. The same two roles of fatty acids, as certain lipids are known, explain their enormous significance to health as exemplified in the cases I just described. After a brief description of each role of fatty acids, I will highlight a few key details.
1.The first role of fat is to hold up your pants, or otherwise provide the bulges and curves that belong to a well-rounded person. The fats and oils in your diet that become your body fat are an efficient form of stored energy. It is basically the only way the body has to store fuel that can carry you more than several hours beyond your last meal. Unlike plants, human beings do not have any way to store large amounts of carbohydrates to serve as stable reservoirs of energy. However, the liver does store some carbohydrate as glycogen that provides some energy during the initial day of a fast or during prolonged exercise. We can store fats, which some plants do as well. Nuts and seeds are the best example of plant stores of fat.
2. The second role of fat in your body is to make waterproof membranes. In this case I am not referring to membranes such as the surface of an organ or the mucous membranes lining the inner passageways of your body. I am referring to cell membranes. Your body is made of cells, which are units of life. Life goes on only in the watery environment inside cells, whose water has a special composition quite different from the water outside of cells, whether that be seawater in the case of single-cell organisms, fresh water, or the water of your blood or in the spaces between the cells of complex organisms. Every cell is enclosed in a membrane that provides the waterproofing that enables it to separate its inside water from the water of its surroundings. The cell membrane is made of an uninterrupted fabric made of oil molecules.
3. The third role of oil molecules in your body is to become hormones. Usually, when you hear the word hormone, you think of substances such as thyroid hormone or estrogen, testosterone, cortisol, and other steroid hormones. Another category of hormones is less familiar to most people, partly because these, the prostanoid hormones, were discovered more recently (in the I960s) and because they do not have an affiliation with a particular organ. Moreover, shortages of these hormones produce symptoms that do not fit as neatly into the picture of a disease as do shortages of the other well-known hormones. Prostanoid hormones are made exclusively from fatty acids.
Keep these three roles of fatty acids—energy storage, water-proofing cell membranes, and hormone synthesis—in mind as we explore the ways fatty acids can be toxic or beneficial.
You Are What You Eat
When it comes to oils, however, most of us can barely distinguish between samples of mineral oil, olive oil, safflower oil, flaxseed oil, and motor oil when they are presented to be sniffed, touched, and (except for the motor oil) tasted. I have experimented with audiences to demonstrate that we tend toward taste blindness when attempting to distinguish among the various oils. This is the reason the concept of "vegetable oil" or "salad oil" was readily accepted among Americans
In the 1950s when corn and other oils came onto a market that previously offered only olive oil, lard, butter, and margarine. Even families with a solid tradition of using culinary olive oil could be persuaded to switch to various mongrel oils sold in the supermarket. Such oils, extracted from various plant seeds by means of hot steel rollers and a process that involves dissolving and recovering the oils from a solvent similar to dry-cleaning fluid, were sold with the assumption that this clear, pure-appearing stuff was what we consumers wished to (or could be made to wish to) eat. The oils were also marketed with an eye toward shelf life, so that a bottle of vegetable oil that languished on the shelf of the general store would not go had over a period of months. Some of the oils that can he squeezed and dissolved out of, say, a corn kernel, are quite susceptible to spoilage while others are very stable. Removing the vulnerable fraction of the oil results in a product of remarkable stability. The problem is that the oils that are removed are nutritionally valuable, while the ones that remain are nutritionally undesirable or even toxic. Still, these altered oils may taste just fine. They are toxic not because they are rancid but because they have been altered to lengthen their shelf life. The result is a man-made oil that provides us with molecules we do not need and deprives us of those we do need. Our taste buds are hopeless at giving us the slightest clue that this has happened.
"Toxic oils are probably the most important issue in human health in our time, but the effects of their toxicity are quite different from those presented by the other kinds of toxicity cited in this book. All you need to understand about oils and fats derives from three simple sets of facts.
1. Whatever fats you eat become your fat. 1 have just explained that our sense of taste can't discriminate between different kinds of oils and fats. They are so interchangeable as to be listed on labels of prepared foods as "one or the other of the following." The manufacturer is then free to use whatever source of shortening is currently most available or cheapest on the market. Whatever fats you eat become your fat. Contrary to the points I made in the previous chapter, dietary fats enter the fat stores and cell membranes without being altered. If you eat chicken fat, your fat reflects the fatty acid composition of the chicken. If you were to eat only fat from olive oil, then your body's fat composition would reveal the distinctive proportions of the main fatty acids in olives.
Unlike proteins and carbohydrates, dietary fatty acids come into the body by a very direct path and are neither identified nor, for the most part, disassembled and reassembled. On the other hand, the protein of your body is distinctively yours: if you eat cow's muscle or drink cow's milk, your muscle and your secretions still retain your own distinctive human composition. The same is true for carbohydrates.
The body is capable of making all kinds of fatty molecules that are similar to the ones in your diet (except for two), but usually it does not bother to do so; it uses the fat molecules (fatty acids) that you have eaten. After you swallow your food, the fats and oils are separated from the carbohydrate and protein as they pass through the upper part of the intestine. The carbohydrate, which is broken down into sugars, and the protein, which is broken down into amino acids, pass into the liver where they can be monitored for any properties that are foreign to your nature and altered accordingly. The fatty acids in the fat you eat go by an entirely different route directly from the digestive tract into the bloodstream. This path consists of a vessel that delivers all the fats and oils of your meal directly to a large blood vessel at the base of the neck just below the collar¬bone. The whole concept of digestion is therefore different as far as fats are concerned as compared with carbohydrate and protein. In the case of fats, their digestion is nondestructive and intended only to convert the fats and oils into tiny droplets that can float into the blood.
2. The only two fats you cannot make, but have to get from food, are the raw materials for making a whole family of important hormones. This is one of the most important scientific facts I have learned since before college when Mr. Mayo-Smith began to teach me biology beginning with the notion that there are a few pivotal facts that give
leverage to thinking. To recap: when it comes to fat, you are what you eat. Although the body has the capacity to make fat molecules on its own (for example, from sugar), it generally does not do so.
However, there are two essential fatty acids that the body cannot make. The pivotal fact here is that these two fatty acid molecules are the exclusive raw materials for making all of the prostanoid hormones. Let me put it another way: the body has a constant need to synthesize and manufacture an assortment of substances called prostanoid hormones, the main vehicles for communication from cell to cell in the body. Unlike steroid hormones, which are synthesized in special glands (adrenals, ovaries, testicles), or thyroid hormones, which come exclusively from the thyroid gland, the prostanoid hormones are made by just about every cell in the body. Steroid and thyroid hormones are examples of long-distance message carriers originating in organs that are remote from the tissues throughout the body where their message is targeted. Prostanoid hormones are more involved with short-distance message carrying, and there is no special organ in the body that has the exclusive job of producing them.
A whole orchestra of prostanoid hormones is in constant production. Their combined effect is like music that cells play to their neighbors to keep their mutual efforts harmonized. All of the instruments of this music are made out of the two kinds of fat molecule that have to be eaten regularly to supply the necessary raw materials. It seems extraordinary to me that Mother Nature made us entirely dependent on our diet to supply these two molecules when we have a full capacity to produce at least a couple of dozen other molecules that differ from them in what appear to he only minor details.
The names of the two essential fatty acids are linoleic acid and alpha-linolenic acid.
Omega-3 fatty acids are the family of fatty acids we make from alpha-linolenic acid. When the manufacturers of vegetable oil developed methods for squeezing various seeds to extract their oils, and various kinds of "salad" or "cooking" oils hit the market in the 1950s, the oils were able to survive on grocery shelves for months without becoming rancid because the manufacturers removed the alpha-linolenic acid, the oil that has the greatest tendency to rancidity.
At the time, no one knew that linoleic acid and alpha-linolenic acid had crucial roles as the exclusive precursors of all of the prostanoid hormones. Prostanoid hormones would not be discovered, nor their chemistry unraveled, until more than a decade later.
3. All of the cell membranes of the body are made of fatty acids. Cell membranes need to be flexible to function. The two fatty acids we cannot make are the flexible ones. Their unique role in prostanoid hormone chemistry would be enough to place the role of fatty acids in hormone production among the top few items in my biochemical knowledge. However, the use of fatty acids for making cell membranes is a corollary fact that puts it at the very top. Life goes on in cells, not in the spaces in between. For all the cells (100,000,000,000,000 or 10" of them) to function optimally, they must he able to communicate with each other. Prostanoid hormones are one of the most important means for such communication. Each individual cell must be open to such communication while at the same time it must he closed off from the water that surrounds it. The fabric of their waterproof membranes is a velvet made of fatty acids forming the nap. Each tiny strand that forms the surface of the velvet is a fatty acid, a long skinny molecule standing on its end amidst millions of others in all directions, each nested against the other like stacked spoons. One layer of fatty acid velvet faces inward to the inside of the cell and another faces outward, like two pieces of velvet with their naps facing. The whole arrangement owes its most important property (being waterproof) to the fact that oil and water do not mix. There is water inside the membrane and water outside the membrane but the membrane itself does not get wet.
Unlike the cells of plants and fungi, the cell membrane is not a wall. It is a delicate diaphanous fabric with a flexibility more like silk than velvet. It must be so in order to accommodate one of the main functions of the membrane: communication. ... it must be able to form various kinds of pockets in which protein and carbohydrate molecules float in the fat to be receptor sites for messenger molecules coming from other cells. For the cell membrane to be flexible it must be made of flexible oils. Which are the most flexible oils?
You guessed it: linoleic acid and, especially, alpha-linolenic acid.
Alpha-linolenic acid owes its flexibility to the same property that makes it vulnerable to giving up electrons and thus becoming oxidized or rancid; it is very unsaturated. Alpha-linolenic acid is the queen of the polyunsaturated fatty acids and the mother of the omega-3 family of fatty acids.
Essentially, all of the business of the body is conducted within membranes. Those that surround the cell, however important, are part of a much larger system of membranes inside each cell that support the activities of cellular life. If you were to take the measure of the surface membrane of each cell and multiply it by the number of cells in the body, the total surface area would he as large as a tennis court or two. As for the total surface area of all the membranes inside the cells, this would be about the size of ten football fields. It takes a lot of flexible fatty acids to keep these membranes flexible; this is crucial because the stiffer they are, the less well they work.
How does this flexibility—or lack thereof—manifest itself in your health? The stiff and weakening changes in hair, skin, and nails are easy to see in terms of the effects of a lack of fatty acids that have to do with flexibility. The changes that result in hormonal imbalances and cellular damage leading to cancer, heart disease, and other major problems are more difficult to visualize. Moreover, the chain of cause and effect is more complex than, say, the way a tick toxin or an egg allergy can cause illness. The complexity of understanding cause and effect increases as you are asked to make a distinction between had fats and good fats. Simply put, the "good" fats are the thin ones that make flexible cell membranes and prostanoid hormones. The "bad" ones are the stiff ones, the altered oils from which the good fatty acids have been removed.
Fat can harm the body in three ways, two of which you cannot taste. The third, rancidity, tastes so unpleasant that your taste buds know how to protect you. Let's begin with the first two.
When vegetable oils are extracted and processed from seeds and nuts, two kinds of damage occur to their fatty acid molecules. The damage is related to two of the ways fat can go bad. In the first way, the pressure and heat of the extracting process causes some of the molecules to undergo rotation at one of their joints, where two carbon atoms have a double connection with each other. As a result, the molecules change shape. The curve that normally occurs at each double connection becomes reversed so that the molecule is straightened. Recall that in the cell membrane the molecules are nested together like stacked spoons. Straightened ones lose their capacity to fit together in the velvet of the cell membranes, just as a knife would not nest in a stack of spoons. The transformation into an unnatural, straightened fatty acid is one that technical terminology designates as a "trans" configuration. Except for those that are cold-pressed, processed oils tend to have more or less trans fatty acids, which stiffen the cell membranes. They are also unsuited for use as raw materials for making prostanoid hormones.
Margarine tends to have an especially high percentage of trans fatty acids. Margarine, however, is especially toxic for other reasons. Its oils have been intentionally altered and straightened by another process called hydrogenation. Hydrogenation consists of bubbling hydrogen through an oil under conditions in which hydrogen joins fatty acid molecules at the double connections between carbon atoms. The addition of the hydrogen atoms can occur only if half of the double connection is converted for hydrogen holding. Once the new hydrogen is added at these points, the double connections are lost as the fatty acid becomes more saturated with respect to hydrogen. The end result is an oil that has changed from thin and flexible to thick and stiff. The resulting thick and stiff oil resembles fats and oils that are naturally thick and stiff, such as one finds in fattened animals and in naturally saturated oils.
Thick and stiff oils are toxic in that they cause an unwelcome rigidity in cell membranes and do not provide suitable raw materials for making hormones. The symptoms, physical signs of dry skin or hair and the medical problems of the patients I described earlier can all be under-stood in terms of the effects of too many altered (trans or stiffened) fatty acids and an insufficiency of good, flexible oils. The reason that flaxseed oil is especially medicinal for individuals who require an oil change is that it has an exceptional concentration (about 40 percent) of the thinnest, most flexible alpha-linolenic oil of all seeds and nuts. The next closest in concentration are walnuts and rapeseed, the source of canola oil. Each of these oils has about one-fourth the concentration of flaxseed oil. Its plant source is used for making linen cloth, and its small pointed brown seeds yield their oils when pressed by old-fashioned methods available before the modern hot steel rollers used today. Antioxidants are abundant in oils that are freshly pressed by old-fashioned methods that yield a turbid product that would seem dirty looking to the eye of consumers accus-tomed to transparent "pure" oils. The apparent "impurities" in these oil!, are actually parts of the crushed seed that contain the antioxidants that permit seeds to stay fresh during prolonged storage.
{And could also cause reactions in those particularly sensitive to lectins.}
Similarly, these antioxidants, such as vitamin E, protect the unrefined oil when stored or heated in ways that are not recommended for purified oils. family members who grew up on old-fashioned flaxseed oil tell me that it would stay fresh all year without refrigeration and that its taste was much more agreeable than the flaxseed oils that are currently available in the United States. Flaxseed, or linseed, oil was used in Eastern European homes as the principal edible oil for cooking. It was also used medicinally for treating burns where its effectiveness may be due to its generous content of antioxidants. Its effectiveness in treating a wide variety of skin, hair, and nail problems and much deeper underlying medical disorders is owed to its capacity to restore flexibility to cell membranes and replenish the supply of the raw materials needed for prostaglandin hormone synthesis.
The most concise way of describing the superficial effects of restoring the body's supply of alpha-linolenic acid is to say that it gives luster. When we are in good health, we show a glow of health about us.
Such a glow is easily recognized but difficult to describe except that it has to do with the emission or reflection of light. It is no coincidence that flaxseed oil is the unique vehicle for oil paint pigments where it imparts a luster to paintings that cannot he duplicated by another oil. When a painter runs out of linseed oil, he or she does not accept substitute with olive, corn, or coconut oil. Neither should you. And, when your skin gets dull and dry, you should consider whether your oil needs changing before you reach for a cream, lotion, oil, or cosmetic to cover up the problem.
{And consider how many months or years you must consume good oils to replace all the bad oils forming the cells in your entire body. However, if you are what you eat, you have to consider if you really want to be a vegetable.}
Are there tests to measure what you are missing? Serious alterations in the kinds of fatty acids in your blood and cell membranes can be detected by ordinary quantitative tests for fatty acids. Even so, such tests are available only at special laboratories.' Early stages of fatty acid deficiency are common in North Americans, who consume mostly altered or saturated fats. The analysis of blood to detect these abnormalities is the special interest of Dr. Eduardo Siguel, who has developed the technology to measure early changes in the proportions of good and bad fatty acids including Mead acid, which the body starts to make for use in cell membranes when it runs out of alpha-linolenic acid. Mead acid lacks the proper shape and flexibility of the real thing. However, it is all the body can do in a pinch and it is one of the keys to Dr. Siguel's method for fatty acid deficiency determination.' Dr. Siguel's book' provides a comprehensive review of the subject, and several of his recent papers describe essential fatty acid deficiency as the key to coronary artery disease,' a common complication of digestive disorders,' and one of the most misunderstood aspects of various prevailing recommendations concerning a healthy diet.'
I have described three basic facts about oils: 1. you are what you eat, 2. good oils provide for the flexibility of cell membranes, and 3. they are the raw materials for making the prostanoid hormones. I have discussed two of the three ways that dietary fats can be toxic: when they are misshapen or when they are stiff. Rancidity, the remaining way that fats can be toxic, can happen before or after they enter your body. Our taste buds (actually our sense of smell) are so sensitive to rancid changes in oils and fats that we are quite well protected from consuming oils that have gone bad in this way. The same damage that constitutes rancidity can happen after fatty acid molecules have reached their destination in our bodies. It is worth understanding the details of what happens to fatty acids when they become rancid, because once you have grasped that process you will be able to understand the most globally toxic force affecting all of the molecules of the body, the enemy of youth, the ally of all diseases, and the fundamental mechanism of all Injury, deterioration, aging, and death: oxidation.
If oils are extracted in the old-fashioned way, without heat or chemicals, they retain many of the protective substances that keep them from going bad. Only when oils are filtered and refined to remove these protective substances and make them clear do they become subject to oxidation or what we know as rancidity. So far I have referred to the toxic properties of fats in terms of their texture—stiff or flexible. Because the texture of the fats in your body is completely dependent on the flexibility of the fats in your diet, it makes sense to favor flexible oils over stiff oils. Your palate may be quite blind to the different viscosity, saturation, stiffness, or omega factor of various oils but it is relatively acute when it comes to rancidity. So you may say, "What is the problem? I don't eat any rancid oils." Indeed, you have a built-in capacity to taste rancidity when it is present at a very dilute concentration in any oil that you eat. You may be quite blind to the big difference between mineral oil and vegetable oil but you have an acute sense of the difference between a fresh oil and one that has just begun to turn. However, as far as the body is concerned, rancidity's ill effect really occurs after you eat oils (which may taste perfectly fine) and they become part of cell membranes. Thus it is essential to good health not to allow the body's oils to become rancid.
The following illustrative skit will provide a metaphor for under-standing not only what happens when fats become oxidized or rancid, but also the series of events that protect fats and all of our other living molecules from undergoing the same damage. These events are important to understanding oxidation and antioxidants, which are as important as they are complex. The complexity of antioxidants may be easier for you to keep in mind if you use your visual memory; hence the following short play is offered for you to envision.
The first character is the Juggler, who represents a fatty acid molecule with its electrons in the air. The Juggler could, however, be any molecule in the body including DNA. The second character is the Rogue, who represents any kind of oxidative stress. The third is Ascorbia, the lady in white, playing the role of vitamin C. Other players will appear as the scene unfolds.
Imagine the Juggler in a crowd of tourists. He is magnificent, able to keep seven objects in the air, a swarm of sparkling items that shine like rho sequins of his costume. It almost seems as if he is casting parts of his very self into the air as the rhythmic simplicity of his juggling captivates us and compels us to give him room in the crowd. Now there is a disruption at the edge of the onlookers as a busybody emerges and violates the space around the juggler. It is the greedy young Rogue charging the juggler and shouting, "I want one, I want one." Enter Ascorbia, dressed in white, stepping from the crowd to intervene just as the Juggler begins to feel the pull of the Rogue's approach. "Don't take his," she cries, "take mine," and she holds out a sparkling article, which disappears in the grasp of the Rogue. The entertainment continues as the crowd offers grateful glances to Ascorbia who, however, is bereft of her sparkling article and looking sad until Bio Flavonoid, her companion dressed in yellow, offers her one just like it. She is soothed, but now Bio Flavonoid slips from the crowd with an air of dejection that is immediately broken by the hounding presence of a large golden retriever named Carrots, who lays a shimmering sphere at the feet of Bio Flavonoid and then runs off. If we were to follow Carrots, we would see her head straight for an old man named V. E. Shute with baggy pants and pockets glowing with replacements for the sparkling objects. Mr. Shute is visited regularly and replenished by a princely figure, Regie or reduced glutathione (RG), whom I described more fully in Chapter 8.
If the sparkling objects are electrons, then the Juggler, the members of the crowd, the lady, her companion, the dog, and the old man are all molecules. Let's replace the Juggler with a fatty acid molecule. The unruly Rogue could be any of several kinds of oxidative stress that have a common greed for electrons. Atmospheric oxygen is the most abundant of such electron-hungry substances. We use it to enable us to take electrons from the sugar and fat molecules we use for fuel. The disassembly of our fuel molecules is accomplished by the removal of their electrons. The need for oxygen to do this, however, threatens us with the prospect that the molecules we wish to keep intact are subject to oxygen's burning influence. Suffice it to say that it is oxygen and all related oxidative stresses that put our molecules at risk of losing an electron. Such a loss is a necessary part of all chemistry in which molecules participate voluntarily. All chemistry has to do with the sharing, gaining, or losing of electrons from one atom or molecule (a collection of atoms whose electrons swarm together).
The involuntary or inadvertent loss of electrons from molecules whose integrity is important to the structure of our cell membranes, DNA, the skin, or the clear substances in the eye results in damage or disease. The oxidative stress may be physical trauma, exposure to chemicals or heavy metals such as mercury or lead, the wear and tear of aging, or a burn, which is oxidation in its most extreme form.
The fire from a candle flame aptly illustrates oxidation in which the electrons of the candle wax are ripped off by oxygen in the atmosphere with the resulting, self-perpetuating release of light and heat. If a fatty acid molecule gets its electron ripped off by oxygen in the air, it is damaged. If the fatty acid molecule is a pat of butter or olive oil, we call the damage rancidity. If the fatty acid molecule is nested among millions of others in the velvety pile of our cell membranes, we call the damage oxidative damage or peroxidation. If one cell membrane fatty acid molecule loses its electron, its neighbors feel the suction of the loss and a collective destabilization occurs so that the whole area of the membrane becomes more easily oxidized and thus damaged, altered, misshapen, and stiffened.
Enter vitamin C, an antioxidant whose companions, the bioflavonoids, aid in the transfer of a replacement electron. Beta-carotene is a necessary bridge in the transfer of a new electron from vitamin E, which is replenished in turn by glutathione. In the end the replacements are supplied by a nutrient-rich diet. However, the path from dietary intake to antioxidant protection through the generosity of vitamin C is dependent on an inflexible sequence that is very much like a bucket brigade and it quenches a problem that is very much like a fire.
Another firefighter's instrument, a ladder, is an even better image than a bucket brigade for understanding antioxidants. It is an especially good metaphor to underline the flaws in various research efforts that cast doubt on the value or safety of particular antioxidants. A recent study- of vitamin E and beta-carotene in heavy smokers in Finland suggested that beta-carotene might be dangerous because of its statistical association with a higher incidence of lung cancer in men who took supplements of beta-carotene as part of a long-term experiment studying the effects of vitamin E and/or beta-carotene supplementation. The antioxidant brigade is like a ladder: it depends on the presence of all of the rungs for its safe operation. Modern scientific thinking favors experiments in which a very limited number of variables are studied while all the other circumstances are controlled. That approach translates into selecting a single drug, nutrient, or other intervention to be studied, avoiding the confusion that would result from the introduction of several variables at once.
The same question comes up every day in my practice. After taking a history and doing tests that indicate a lack of certain nutrients and/or the presence of certain allergens or toxins, I suggest that my patient undertake several remedial steps at once. These may also include advice to exercise, learn diaphragmatic breathing, meditate, or verbalize strong feelings such as anger or grief. "But how will we know what is working?" asks an occasional patient. It you get better, you may be quite confused. It is preferable to be confused and better than to be so selective that progress may be impossible. Remember that if you are sitting on two tacks and you remove just one, you will not feel 50 percent better.
Chronic illness is multifactorial. It is downright negligent to focus so exclusively on a single treatment that you fail to address the whole picture.
What about the Finnish smokers? The researchers who carried out the experiment followed an understandable, but in this case, inappropriate, instinct to be selective. They chose to study only one or two antioxidants that function as members of a team of many. One, beta-carotene, becomes toxic itself if it cannot become replenished by vitamin E, which in turn, runs short if sufficient supplies of riboflavin (vitamin B1) are not available. It is as if a study were designed to validate that ladders are useful tools for firefighters to climb to put out a fire by breaking the ladder down to its components and testing each one individually. Such a study would prove that a long ladder with many rungs missing is not only useless, but potentially dangerous. The experiment of the Finnish smokers was conducted with scientific precision. Its flaw was a fundamental ignorance of antioxidant chemistry. Antioxidants do not work alone.
Fat is arguably the most important material in the body. It is responsible for the packaging of every cell, the membranous support most cellular activity, and the raw material for making the hormones that communicate between cells. As this picture has emerged over the past thirty years, it was a revelation to me. When I went to medical school the chemistry of fat was glossed over as dull and unimportant. It is even more surprising to me that the cholesterol frenzy of recent years has taken precedence over the significance of good fatty acids. By good fatty acids I mean not only alpha-linolenic and linoleic acids, but the avoidance of factors that introduce stiffness and flaws into the fabric of our fatty membrane acreage. Eating stiff (saturated) or altered (trans, hydrogenated) fats is a problem because the palate is absolutely no help in protecting us from the toxicity of these molecules. I reemphasize that rancid fats are a problem not because we tend to eat so much of them, but because oxidation threatens our fatty acid molecules after they are eaten and have already taken up their proper place in our membranes. Oxidative damage is a threat to nearly all molecules in our body, but the threat to fatty acids has a special twist. Remember that when they are membrane molecules, fatty acid jugglers are not alone in a crowd but are members of a continuous formation of jugglers packed together like a marching band in tight formation. Oxidative damage affects them more than other molecules in the body because of the domino effect that occurs when one of their fatty acids becomes oxidized.
There is a big molecule, superoxide dismutase, that can actually grab and subdue oxidative stress before vitamin C comes to the rescue. For the most part, however, the protection of our fatty acid membranes and other important molecules is a quintessentially cooperative enterprise in which hundreds of molecules that are not ordinarily considered antioxidants can lend a hand (or an electron) when the need arises. The failure of antioxidant protection yields a toxic effect on molecules of all kinds. The molecules that are the most precious jewels of our chemistry are the DNA that carry the instructions that maintain our identity in each of the cells as well as our ancestral identity.
Fatty Acids
What can you can do to improve your fatty acids? The stakes are enormous and the rules are simple. The stakes have to do with lowering your risk or improving your health in just about every way you can name. Stories and studies show how fatty acid supplementation can help this or that disease or condition. I hope, however, that what you have read in this chapter helps you understand that fatty acids work at such a deep layer in body chemistry that they are good for everyone, but in different degrees and different ways. Individuality is the key to most good medical treatment of chronic conditions. More than any other sphere of nutrition, fatty acids are, however, a kind of panacea in the modern world in which deficiency of omega-3 oils is nearly universal. ...
By now I feel very well in ketosis, and when I lost to much weight I adjust my intake of carbs up to 2 – 3 bread units (approx 70gr) per day, or I eat more fatty meat and eggs and together with the supplements and the other diet changes this works very well. I use keto stics to test the ketone bodies in the urine to have an overview. 
