The Nutrition Debate #286: Avoid wheat, excess fructose and excess linoleic acid (Omega 6s)

Kurt G. Harris, MD, called wheat, excess fructose and excess linoleic acid the Neolithic Agents of Disease (NAD). He was one of my early favorites in my search for a dietary regimen that could be stated as a philosophy of eating rather than by a dependency on counting calories, carbs and other micronutrients. I wrote about him and his PaNu program four years ago in The Nutrition Debate #19 here. Then he dropped out of “the nutrition debate” and later deleted his Archevore website. Today he is a diagnostic radiologist practicing in Sturgeon Bay, WI. Some of his writing is still online at Psychology Today.

Harris didn’t write for type 2 diabetics like me. He aimed his program at people who wanted to eat in a healthy way to avoid disease. Many others followed him in this goal and the field became a tangled mess, leading sadly I suspect to his premature retreat. For awhile I hoped he was writing a book. Alas, it seems not. Harris was inspired, he wrote, by Gary Taubes (as was I). His epiphany, and his openness and training in scientific method, fed his inquiring mind. He liked to write and coin words and phrases too. If this sounds like a eulogy it’s only because I fear he is lost to us, and it is our loss.

The three NADs, which he fully explains in “A Dietary Manifesto - Paleo 2.0,” are just another way of describing his 12-step program (which I list in The Nutrition Debate #19), for “getting started,” and going “as far as you can down the list…” The wheat proscription means gluten, and of course includes the other gluten grains (barley, rye, etc). That’s big.

The excess fructose NAD is also a big one, but here Harris leaves a little room if you’re not diabetic or prediabetic. Harris is infamous (in Paleo circles) for calling apples “bags of sugar” and most modern fruit “candy bars on a tree.” He concludes, however, “If you are not trying to lose fat [or are carb intolerant as in type 2 diabetes], a few pieces of fruit a day are fine.” Fructose, however, is not only found in fruit, as horfilmania (“Who Knew?” 12/21/14) recently discovered with red cabbage. Take a look at “The Nutrition Debate #97” for a list of common sweeteners, fruits and vegetables that contain fructose.

Avoiding excess linoleic acid (Omega 6s) is perhaps the hardest dietary goal of the three NADs because it is so hard to know where they hide. Harris advises, “The way to correct the modern excess of n-6 linoleic acid is to avoid the modern sources of it. Stop eating all temperate vegetable oils and veggie oil fried food- cooking and frying oils like corn, soy, canola, and flax, all of it. And go easy on the nuts and factory chicken. These are big sources of n-6, especially the nuts and nut oils.”

To put some “meat” on those recommendations, I’ve created this table using the USDA’s National Nutrient Database:

Cooking/salad oils & fats (%)	SFA	Mono	PUFA	n-6	n-3	n6/n3
Corn oil	12.9	27.6	54.7	53.2	1.2	45.8
Soybean oil	15.7	22.8	57.4	50.4	6.8	7.4
Canola oil	7.4	63.3	28.1	18.6	9.1	2.0
Olive oil	13.8	73.0	10.5	9.8	0.8	12.8
Butter (incl.+/-16% water)	51.4	21.0	3.0	2.2	0.3	6.9
Coconut oil	85.5	5.8	1.8	1.8	0	∞

All fats are combinations of saturated fatty acids (SFAs), monounsaturated fatty acids (Mono) and polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), but the composition varies enormously. Corn and soybean oil are over 50% PUFA, while butter and coconut oil are 3% and 1.8% respectively. On average, corn oil and soybean oil have over 25 times as many PUFAs as the saturated fats. Canola oil has 10 times as much; olive oil, 5 times as much. Note: The “saturated fats” still have PUFA content.

As most people know the ratio of n-6 to n-3 is also important, and Canola oil has the best and corn oil the worst ratio. But in terms of absolute numbers, the best advice is to avoid excess Omega 6s (n-6s) altogether, and that is best done by eliminating all seed and vegetable oils. Then, as Harris says in his Manifesto, “Along with n-3, the other type of PUFA, it [n-6] is technically an essential fatty acid, but the actual requirement is so small it might be better considered a micronutrient”(emphasis mine).

So, avoid all vegetable and seed oils altogether (corn, soybean, Canola, sunflower, walnut, flax, etc.), and then avoid all prepared, baked goods and foods fried in any of these oils, then go easy on nuts, nut oils and factory chicken, and maybe supplement with Omega 3 fish oils to help the balance, and you should get your ratio back into pre-Neolithic proportions. If this sounds like Paleo to you, it isn’t really. It’s just a little nostalgic look back at the “ancestral” roots of my dietary journey.