Combining the linseed at the farm 2009

Wednesday 12th January 2011

Linseed Why Linseed

The first time you see the beautiful blue flower of linseed or flax in the countryside you may think, I do not remember seeing a lake there last year.

The last thing you think is, there is a field of fat growing, the truth is linseed contains the most important essential fats for us to use in the diet.

Essential fats are so called because we do not make them in our bodies and they have to be in the diet, the food we eat.

How does it get into food?, Well one way in the past, linseed oil was used in many industrial and domestic products, to name a few, paint, putty and probably one of the most common was linoleum for a floor covering .Incidentally the linoleum has antibacterial properties and was used on the floors in hospitals, after its removal it seems we have more infection control problems.

These many uses of linseed oil gave rise to a by product, linseed oil cake, this was used by farmers, mixed with their own cereals to form the ration for almost all farm animals. So, until the mid fifties as linoleum fell out of use to be replaced by vinyl, livestock were far better fed and resembled the wild animals we used to hunt as ancient people, they had a better balance of essential fats for us. You may have seen omega 3 eggs advertised this is an example of feeding linseed oil in the ration.

Today, changes in how livestock are fed and the influence of the industrial food producers has so altered our own diet so that we spend ten billion pounds treating food related illness in the NHS and tax ourselves to get the money, why do we do it? If, there was more understanding generally about the role of oils and fats in the body we would be better able to construct a diet to keep us healthy.

The essential fats that linseed gives us are omega 3 and omega 6 and also omega 9. The first two are those essential fats referred to earlier the last one omega 9 is not called an essential fat because your body can make it for itself.

Fats have many roles, but a balance of them makes up every cell membrane

in our body, so they are also part of the electrical system, as every cell talks to every other cell through that membrane, these are buildings blocks of life.

Omega 3 and omega 6 are the precursors to all the hormones the body makes

and in this role omega 3 makes anti inflammatory hormones and omega 6 pro inflammatory hormones. The question to ask is what sort of diseases are we suffering from? The answer is, more that begin with inflammation, the most common disease people think of is probably arthritis but all sorts of other problems have their roots firmly planted in an inflammatory cycle.

Investigation reveals that the most common and widely used oils, sunflower, soya, corn and rapeseed have large quantities of omega 6 and are found in many manufactured products. Rarer oils like linseed need to be fresh and contain more omega 3, they are sort our systems are designed to utilise and we make the fish sort of omega3 from it, so it follows that the fish omega3 is not an essential fat but it is a necessary one.

It is hard not to be duped but many products that advertise ‘contains omega 3’ but we have no way of knowing the source of the omega 3 or if it has been altered by heating. Another route by which or diet is upset is the idea that saturated fat is bad, have vegetable oil spreads instead, human breast milk is 58% saturated fat so this cannot be true. I think we all know if we are not working hard and burning of the extra calories we must have less of the saturated fats. With oil, we do not have a dipstick like a car to check the balance so the only warning that we have upset the delicate balance of oils and fats in the body is when something starts to go wrong and the chance is that inflammation is at bottom of it.

I hope that I have shown that to understand and to be in control of the oils and fats that go into the body is the single most important thing we can do for a healthy life.

Durwin Banks
High Barn Oils

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