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June 15, 2026 · 9 min read

Fat of The Land - Part 5 - The Balance We Lost

By Raiden DeLuca

The series so far has worked through the four kinds of fat and spent a whole post on the one we never should have made. This one goes back into the polyunsaturated family, the many-bend fats, for the two that matter most, because they are the only two your body cannot build for itself. You have to eat them. They are omega-3 and omega-6, and the real story here is not about either one on its own. It is about the balance between them, and how modern food tipped that balance in one direction without most of us noticing.

The two you cannot skip

A quick refresher from the earlier posts, since this builds straight on the shapes. A fat gets called omega-3 or omega-6 based on where its first bend sits, counting from the tail of the chain: a bend at the third carbon makes it an omega-3, at the sixth makes it an omega-6. That is the whole naming rule. What matters is that these are the two fats your body cannot make from scratch, so nutrition calls them essential, which means you have no choice but to get them from food.

You eat them as their parent forms, alpha-linolenic acid for omega-3 and linoleic acid for omega-6, and your body builds the rest from there. On the omega-3 side, the parent comes from plants like flax, chia, and walnuts. Your body can turn that plant form into the two omega-3s that do the work, EPA and DHA, but it does the conversion poorly, and only a small fraction ever makes it across. So the reliable way to get EPA and DHA is to eat them already made, and the two best sources of the ready-made forms are fatty fish and, as the next post gets into, the fat of animals raised on grass. That is why fish matters so much here. On the omega-6 side, the parent turns up naturally in nuts and seeds, but overwhelmingly today it comes from the refined seed oils poured into just about everything.

The ratio, and the balance we lost

The ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in the diet is the number everything here comes back to. For most of human history, as best anyone can estimate it, that ratio sat somewhere around 1:1, maybe up toward 4:1. People ate fish, game, and wild plants, and the two fats arrived in rough balance. The modern Western diet runs closer to 15:1 or 20:1. We are swimming in omega-6 and starved of omega-3, and what flipped it was not some natural drift. It was the flood of cheap industrial seed oil into the food supply over the last century, the same oils I will come back to in their own post. They are the single biggest reason the balance tipped.

Where the hype gets ahead of the truth

This is one of the most overhyped corners of all of nutrition, so it is worth slowing down and separating what the science shows from what gets shouted online.

The popular story goes like this: omega-6 is pro-inflammatory, omega-3 is anti-inflammatory, so a diet drowning in omega-6 keeps your whole body inflamed. And there is a real mechanism under it. Your body can turn omega-6 into signaling molecules that drive inflammation, while omega-3 feeds the side that calms things down and resolves it. On paper, tilt the ratio toward omega-6 and you tilt toward inflammation.

The trouble is that when researchers test it, by feeding people more omega-6, specifically more linoleic acid, the inflammation does not show up. The bulk of the controlled human trials find no meaningful rise in inflammatory markers. The pathway that looks so convincing in a diagram does not reliably play out in a living body, partly because most of the linoleic acid you eat just stays linoleic acid, and only a trickle ever gets converted into the inflammatory stuff.

So omega-6 itself is not poisoning you, whatever the internet says. It is essential, you need it, and in whole foods it is good for you.

It helps to split that scary headline into the three different claims hiding inside it. The first, that omega-6 can feed inflammation in a test tube, is true. The second, that eating more linoleic acid inflames actual people, is weak, because the trials do not show it. The third, that most of us would be better off with more omega-3, is well supported, and it is the one worth acting on. There is a fourth worry that often gets jammed into the same breath and should not be, that the refined seed oils delivering most of our omega-6 are fragile and oxidize. That part is real, but it is an oxidation problem, not an omega-6 problem, and I am saving it for the seed oil post rather than blurring the two together here.

The half that holds up

Strip away the hype and what is left is the more useful half of the story, because the omega-3 side is where the solid, well-supported benefit lives. More omega-3, especially the EPA and DHA from fish, is tied to better heart health, lower triglycerides, and a body that handles inflammation the way it is supposed to, ramping up to fight when it needs to and then standing back down. The piece that surprised me most when I studied it was the immune angle, that omega-3 seems to help the immune system stay regulated, reacting when it should without getting stuck in the low, constant, overactive state so much of modern life pushes us toward. Whatever the ratio debate eventually settles on, raising your omega-3 is the move almost nobody argues against.

What I do

Here is what that looks like in my own life.

I take fish oil. I am allergic to shellfish, which rules out krill oil, so I use a fish-based one, Sports Research Triple Strength, made from wild Alaska pollock in a low-oxidation, third-party-tested form, which matters given everything I just said about how fragile these fats are. I keep mine in the fridge for the same reason, since the cold slows oxidation and a fish oil that has gone off is doing the opposite of what you bought it for, so if you take one, store it cold. The bottle calls for one softgel a day, a little under a gram of EPA and DHA. I take more than that, usually two to four.

There are limits worth knowing, though. The FDA treats up to three grams of EPA and DHA a day as generally safe for everyday use, and the European authorities put the ceiling around five. Going above three grams is not a good idea if you are on blood thinners or have a heart condition, since high doses thin the blood a little and carry a small bump in the risk of an irregular heartbeat. My own dose comes from the research I have read, not a hunch, and even so, more is not automatically better, because the benefit levels off as the dose climbs. For most people, about a gram of EPA and DHA a day, or a couple of servings of fatty fish a week, is plenty. The catch is that most of us do not get even that, which is a big part of how the ratio drifted as far as it did.

Past the supplement, I do my best to steer around oxidized and refined seed oils, while admitting I am nowhere close to perfect. I still love a good Sonic blast now and then. The point was never purity, it was tilting the balance back in the right direction more often than not.

And then there are my dogs. I started adding a sardine or two to their dinner every night, because the little oily fish are about the cleanest omega-3 you can get and they are supposed to be great for a dog’s coat and joints. So even the dogs in our house are on omega-3 now. The honest part is that I cannot stomach a sardine to save my life, while the two of them inhale a couple every night without blinking, which I am fairly sure makes them tougher than me.

How we were meant to eat

Step back and this fits the pattern under the whole blog. The balance was never something we had to engineer. It came built into the way people ate for almost all of history, fish and game and wild plants delivering the two fats in close to the proportion the body was designed around. What broke it was not nature. It was us, flooding the food supply with a cheap manufactured oil that tipped a balance God had already set. The fix is mostly a matter of getting back toward the way we were always meant to eat.

There is a detail here I find fun. Fish runs all through the Gospels. Jesus called fishermen to follow Him, multiplied a few fish to feed thousands, and after the resurrection sat down and ate a piece of broiled fish in front of His disciples. He was not thinking about EPA and DHA, obviously. But the food at the center of so much of that story turns out to be the very thing the modern diet is starving for. The One who made the body knew what it ran on long before we figured out how to measure it. God knows how He designed us to live and to eat, and the longer I do this, the more I find it is wiser to trust His design than the things we engineered to replace it.

So the practical version, plainly. Get more omega-3, from fatty fish a couple of times a week, or a clean supplement if you cannot manage the fish. Get your omega-6 from whole foods, nuts and seeds, rather than a jug of refined oil. And lean away from the oxidized seed oils where you reasonably can. You do not need to chase a perfect ratio or fear a whole category of fat. You just need to nudge the balance back toward the one we lost.

Next I want to look at where a lot of this balance is won or lost before the food ever reaches your plate, in how the animal itself was raised, because a cow finished on grass and a cow finished on grain do not carry the same fat at all. That is where we go next.

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