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Dr. Dae explains that most people today are not consuming enough omega-3s and recalls some food packed with this essential fatty acid.
Dr. Dae:
Omega-3 fatty acids are very, very important for a woman’s body. It’s important for our skin; it’s important for our hair; it’s important for our female hormones; it’s important for our stress hormones, so our adrenal glands, which produce cortisol. So omega-3 fatty acids are essential fatty acids, which means that we have to get them from the foods that we are eating.
Omega-3 fatty acids are very important because we have to have a balance of omega-3, omega-6, and omega-9 fatty acids, which are, people may be familiar with essential fatty acids, and those are the three most important.
We get a lot of omega-6 fatty acids from many things that we eat and we are not getting as many omega-3, and we need to have the balance. There have been estimates when we looked at people’s diets; 200, 300, 400 years ago, we used to have more of a balance of a 1:1 for our omega-3 fatty acids and our omega-6 fatty acids.
Now through the foods that we are eating, we get about a ratio of 20:1 and so, how do we start to balance, that is we focus on foods that have omega-3 fatty acids. And so those are sardines or tuna or salmon, which is a favorite for people, avocado, walnuts, flaxseed oil, which is an oil that’s produced from a plant. And so those specifically are things that have omega-3 and as we include those in our diets, we start to bring our balance of our omega-3 fatty acids and our omega-6 fatty acids into appropriate balance, and the reason why it’s important is because we use those for our, like I said, our female hormones, our skin, which is very important for women.
People come in all the time, “I am breaking out,” or “I am having rashes,” or “I am having these kinds of issues,” and then, “I don’t feel as pretty. I don’t feel as sexy. I don’t feel as confident when my skin is not glowing.” So, we want to make sure that that’s happening for us and the way that that happens is to balance that and our hormonal, our hormones, particularly the ones that come from cholesterol, which are hormones that come from cholesterol are extremely important, can go into our adrenal glands, our cortisol, our stress hormones.
They can go into our female hormones and there’s a competition between the two. So we have to make sure that we have our omega-3 and omega-6 and we are getting enough of them so that we can go and handle the stress of our daily activities. We can make sure that our female hormones are balanced, that our body is balanced as a whole, and so we want to make sure that we have a good balance. And that’s why omega-3 in particular are important, but it’s important to make sure that we get all of our essential fatty acids.
You want to eat good oils, important oils, and you want to avoid fried foods or trans fatty acids or saturated fats, which are kind of our bad oils, which take away from these good oils that are important for our bodies.
About Dr. Daemon Jones, N.D.:
Dr. Daemon Jones completed her undergraduate education in economics at Northwestern University (graduated 1992). She completed her naturopathic medical training at University of Bridgeport’s College of Naturopathic Medicine (2002). Dr. Jones founded Healthydaes Naturopathic Medical Center in Silver Spring, MD (2003. As a naturopathic physician, Dr. Jones is turning her life’s passion – the pursuit of vibrant health – into her life’s mission for others. She uses private consultations, cooking demonstrations, lectures and workshops as a hands-on way to help people enjoy learning about improving their health. She is a faculty member of Smith Farms Center for Healing and the Arts and Food As Medicine Professional Training program.
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