You Are What You Eat | How Omega-3 Impacts Your Cells

For information on omega-3 and omega-3 supplements see www.cardiotabs.com

Omega-3 fats nourish the cells of the skin, hair, nerves, brain, heart, and virtually all of the tissues and organs. You are what you eat. This overused cliché is literally true when we are talking about the type of fats we consume. The membranes of the cells throughout your body are mostly composed of lipids (fats).

Omega-3 fats were plentiful in our natural food chain. Countless generations before us ate a high omega-3 diet of wild game, leafy greens, nuts, and especially fish. Unfortunately modern food manufacturers have squeezed the omega-3s out of our diet and replaced them with harmful saturated and trans fats.

Salmon swimming in the frigid waters of the Arctic Ocean are perfectly soft and supple even though their body temperature is just a few degrees above freezing because the lipids in their cell membranes are mostly omega-3 fats. These fats remain liquid even down to temperatures below the freezing point of water (32 degrees Fahrenheit). Imagine you raised these fish in a warm farm pond in Florida and fed them nothing but French fries, stick margarine, doughnuts, and other foods high in trans fats. If you then transported them to the Arctic, upon release they would be transformed to the rigid consistency of a stick of margarine floating in ice water.

The melting point of trans fats and saturated fats are much higher and thus they are solid at room temperature. When you eat a diet high in these lipids your cell membranes become stiff and dysfunctional. You may not notice the hardening as dramatically as the salmon in our story because you have the advantage of being warm-blooded. But the type of fat incorporated into your cell membranes profoundly affects your tissues, especially the electrically sensitive ones like your brain, eyes, and heart. To support healthy tissues, provide them with the preferred fats to incorporate into their cell membranes.

In Good Health,

Dr. James O’Keefe