Copyright © 2009
by Daniel Matthew Korn

All Rights Reserved

Many people do not consume caffeine yet still do not sleep well enough to wake up easily at an early hour. An additional factor in the modern diet which contributes to sleep disturbances is the topic of this chapter. The idea that certain types of fats can cause us to gain weight is not controversial in the same way as the idea that caffeine and nutrient deficiency cause weight gain. What is not generally recognized is that certain fats can also cause sleep quality to fall and cortisol production to rise. Giving up caffeine can bring a significant improvement in a person’s sleep pattern. However, there is no evidence that this will be sufficient to return his sleep quality to that of our ancestors; something else is having an effect on it.

We are all descended from people who woke up early, often at sunrise, without needing an alarm clock. Indeed, most mammals awaken and sleep with the sun. Today we drink caffeine in order to help us feel alert at an hour when we used to be fully awake. In fact, the biggest problem many people have with quitting caffeine is that they are unable to function in the morning without it. At any coffee house in America, the busiest time of day is the morning rush of people who are on their way to work.

College students, who drink much less coffee than working adults, are also having trouble sleeping. College classes that start before 10:00 a.m. are notoriously under-attended. Students without morning classes are sleeping much later than that hour. When I was an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I visited a water treatment plant to study the technology involved in waste water purification. The same plant was also responsible for pumping fresh water into our small college town of Isla Vista. A chart showed that peak water usage, the time when most people woke up and showered, occurred at about noon. Young children, who are the lowest users of caffeine in our society, are also known to have difficulty waking up early. Sleep problems, which are predictors of weight gain, cannot be fully explained by caffeine consumption. While caffeine does appear to contribute to sleep disturbances, fat intake is another factor which we have not yet explored.

Of course, it is not a secret that caffeine can disrupt sleep, and people who have difficulty sleeping have already been encouraged to quit caffeine. Many of us continue drinking caffeine because something else in the modern world besides caffeine is impairing our sleep. One common theory is that indoor lighting is responsible. There is some evidence that electric lighting can push back our sleep cycle by about an hour, but there is no evidence that it affects sleep quality. If a lack of sufficient light in the morning and a lack of darkness at night were responsible for poor sleep quality, then we would expect light therapy to produce improvement. Light therapy involves sitting in front of an intense light in the morning and avoiding intense light in the evening. While many people have tried light therapy, it is frequently discontinued for reasons such as ineffectiveness or patient discomfort. The most common treatments for sleep disorders are drugs. Since sleep disorders have become so much more prevalent in recent times, we can assume something in the modern diet or environment is responsible.

There is a change in the modern diet that has been shown to affect sleep quality. From studies of Paleolithic nutrition, hunter-gatherer societies, and pre-industrial societies, scientists know that until the late nineteenth century omega-3 fats were eaten in amounts equal to omega-6 fats.¹ The current Western diet contains twenty to thirty times the amount of omega-6 fats as omega-3 fats. Conventional wisdom is that a high ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fats is responsible for a variety of health problems; however, many fats rich in omega-6 contain lower levels of certain nutrients than do fats rich in omega-3. First, let us look at the evidence that it is the type of fat that is affecting our health and not the lower nutritional content of the fat.

Studies have shown that increased consumption of omega-6 fats, coupled with low consumption of omega-3 fats, results in poor sleep quality.² In addition, certain omega-3 fats lower cortisol production, just as caffeine raises it. Some omega-3 fats have been found to benefit many chronic health conditions that are prevalent in the modern world, including high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, arthritis, psoriasis, acne, and more. Many people believe that the increasing rates of these chronic conditions are tied to the deficiency of omega-3 fats in the modern diet.

Wild salmon is one of the most commonly available sources of omega-3 fats in the modern diet. Unfortunately, it can also contain heavy metals and pollutants. However, much of the fish sold in the United States is raised on farms, rather than caught in the wild. This farm raised fish is not fed algae, the source from which wild fish acquire omega-3 fats, and, as such, contains no omega-3 fats. Farm raised salmon is actually brown instead of pink because of this. It has to be dyed pink to have the look of wild salmon. Restaurants and supermarkets can choose the exact shade of pink that they would like their salmon to be dyed.

The absence of fish in our diet cannot be responsible for the deterioration of our health in the modern age, because humans in earlier times did not all eat fish. Before the age of refrigeration, fish was available only to people living near bodies of water. In earlier eras, many farming communities which were far from natural bodies of water had no access to fish, yet their diet was not deficient in omega-3. They had another source of omega-3 fats.³

One of the great changes in the modern diet is not obvious from health statistics or the appearance of the food that we eat. While it may not seem significant, the fact that most farm animals are now fed corn and soy loaded with antibiotics and growth hormones, rather than being able to eat grass and hay, has profoundly altered our diet. Before the twentieth century, when meat was a luxury consumed mainly by the rich, and the lack of refrigeration and pasteurization made milk consumption much rarer, cheese and green vegetables were the main sources of omega-3 fats for most people.

Just as fish are a source of omega-3 fats when they eat green algae, milk, cheese, and meat are excellent sources of omega-3 fats, when cattle and goats are able to eat grasses, their natural food source. No animals are able to independently produce omega-3 fats; we have to get them from a plant source, usually a green plant. Fish get omega-3 fats from algae, cattle from grass, and humans from omega-3 rich dairy and meat, wild fish, or very large quantities of vegetables. Cheese, wild game, and vegetables were probably our main sources of omega-3 fats in pre-modern agrarian times.

Because most fat in our diet is from animal sources, and the amount of omega-3 fats in animal sources is dependent on what they have been fed, it is very difficult to look at the effects of omega-3 fats on large populations. Records of what animals have been fed over time in different countries are not readily available, so our best source for information about the effects of omega-3 fats is laboratory experiments. Since we have seen sleeping less causes raised cortisol levels and is a predictor of weight gain, we will focus on the connection between omega-3 fats and sleep. In addition to this connection, there is research concluding that omega-3 deficiency affects a variety of brain functions including memory, learning, mental health, and more.⁴

According to Professor Shlomo Yehuda of Bar Ilan University, “Sleep quality is a major problem in the modern society. Vast numbers of ‘healthy people’ complain about the quality of their sleep. One of the major complaints is that sleep does not refresh them enough.”⁵ Professor Yehuda goes on to describe the various studies that show, in both humans and rats, improvements in sleep quality, depth of sleep, sleep duration, daytime energy level, and time taken to fall asleep when consumption of omega-3 fats is increased. These improvements have occurred in multiple studies. The greatest improvement has occurred in individuals who have consumed no more than four times the amount of omega-6 fats as omega-3 fats.⁶

We have seen multiple examples in which high fat consumption has failed to correlate with weight gain. However, our previous analysis of those examples has not taken into account fat type or the effects of caffeine. Recall that the Inuit eating their traditional diet receive 75% of their calories from fat and gain weight only when they eat a lower fat Western diet. However, much of the fat in their traditional diet is of the omega-3 type. Wild fish are high in omega-3 fats because they feed on algae. Animals such as seals that feed on these fish are rich in omega-3 fats as well. While the Inuit consume less fat when they adopt a more Western diet, most of the fat is omega-6 fat, having come from animals that are given feed made from corn and soy.

The French consume much more fat than Americans but have a far lower obesity rate. However, the French also eat meat and dairy products with much higher levels of omega-3 fats than those consumed by Americans. French farmers have a long history of associating the quality of meat and dairy with the quality of the ingredients used to produce it. In France, there are 52 different government designations for meat to indicate the type of environment in which it has been produced. French farmers believe that quality grassland is needed to produce quality food.⁷

There is a problem with the idea that all omega-6 fats are bad for our health and only omega-3 fats are good. While it seems to hold true in many instances, there are examples to the contrary. One of the mechanisms through which omega-6 fats are hypothesized to be responsible for many chronic diseases is by increasing levels of inflammation, which is a feature of obesity, heart disease, arthritis, allergies, diabetes, cancer, asthma, Alzheimer’s disease, and many other chronic conditions. However, some omega-6 rich oils are anti-inflammatory and have considerable health benefits.

Wheat germ oil is removed from wheat during the refinement of all but 100% whole wheat flour in order to increase shelf life. This oil has a high ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fats, but it does not promote inflammation. It is a “remarkable anti-inflammatory” that in animal studies has been shown to have potential as a treatment for arthritis,⁸ to cause weight loss,⁹ and to have an almost pharmaceutical-like effect on LDL “bad” cholesterol.¹⁰ It has also been suggested that it protects against heart disease and some forms of cancer.¹¹ We will look at a possible mechanism for these actions later.

Another oil that is good for our health although it is high in omega-6 fats is rice bran oil, which has also been shown to lower LDL “bad” cholesterol in humans,¹² and in animal studies has been shown to reduce insulin resistance, thereby lowering hunger.¹³ Components of rice bran oil have been found to have significant anti-inflammatory properties.¹⁴ In Asia, rice bran oil has been used as a skin care product for thousands of years because of those properties. In the United States, rice bran oil has been sold as a skin care product and a sleep aid, although large studies have not been done to evaluate these effects.

The health benefits of high omega-6 oils like rice bran oil and wheat germ oil contradict the hypothesis that the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is what is responsible for increasing chronic inflammatory disease and possibly for sleep disturbances as well. How can we reconcile all of these studies showing omega-6 oils are bad with other studies showing certain omega-6 oils are good? There is an alternative interpretation of the data which seem to show that omega-3 fats are healthful because of the intrinsic nature of their fat. We may be confusing the effects of these oils with the effects of the nutrients and plant chemicals they contain. Nutritious foods tend to be anti-inflammatory. This is not just because of their vitamin, mineral, or fat content, but also because of less well-known compounds they contain, such as phytosterols, flavonoids, and other plant chemicals.

About 90% of the fats in our diet come from animal products. When raised using typical commercial feeds, animals are high in omega-6 fats and low in certain nutrients. For example, meats from grass-fed animals are four times higher in vitamin E than meats from conventionally fed animals. They are also higher in many other vitamins, minerals, and certain amino acids.

Most omega-6 vegetable oils in our diet are extracted using high heat and chemicals, making them very low in nutrients. Rice bran oil and wheat germ oil are usually extracted with techniques that preserve their nutrient content. Rice bran oil is the richest known source of vitamin E and phytosterols, and it contains antioxidants found in no other source. Wheat germ oil is the second best source of vitamin E and a good source of phytosterols and newly identified anti-inflammatory compounds.

It is possible that all of our experiments showing that omega-3 fats are more healthful than omega-6 fats are using omega-3 oils that are much richer in nutrients, including vitamin E, than the omega-6 fats. Vitamin E can lower stress, cortisol production, inflammation, and insulin resistance and improve some measures of sleep quality. These effects of vitamin E suggest that both removing wheat germ oil during refinement and raising animals with commercial feeds cause stress and sleep disturbances. More research is needed to determine whether all of the effects of omega-3 fats can be explained by their nutrient content, rather than by the structure of the fat molecule. Usually fats high in omega-3 are healthful while those high in omega-6 are unhealthful; three major exceptions to this are olive oil, wheat germ oil, and rice bran oil, which are all very healthful despite their high omega-6 fat content.

Although not all fats are unhealthful, most fat in the American diet is unhealthful and contributes to our rising rates of stress. It is likely that our increased stress level has led to the rise in consumption of sugary drinks. Consuming sugar releases several anti-stress hormones, and some scientists believe stress causes people to unconsciously crave sweets for their stress-lowering abilities.¹⁵ Whenever we look at studies that measure public health in the United States in terms of meat and fat consumption, we are seeing the results of consuming unhealthful fats.

In the United States, those who follow a semi-vegetarian diet have an obesity rate that is about one-quarter less than that of meat eaters. Those who both follow a vegetarian diet and avoid dairy have an obesity rate that is one-third less than that of meat eaters.¹⁶ This is not just a correlation relationship. In long-term studies, people who are instructed to eat a low fat diet gain less weight than those who are not.¹⁷ While today we have to work to eat healthful fats, for most of the post hunter-gatherer period we obtained them from fish and meat. It is likely that the changes in dietary fat in the twentieth century helped to spur increased caffeine consumption due to the effects of unhealthful fats on sleep.

We need not only to explain obesity but also to show a connection to the diseases with which it is associated. The practice of removing oil from grains during processing has certainly removed nutrients from our diet. Some of the chronic diseases we are experiencing are associated with deficiencies of nutrients found in grain oil, but not all of them. There is another relevant class of nutrients in which many of our bodies have become deficient. Interestingly, we will see that nutrient deficiency can be caused not only by removing vitamins and minerals from our foods. It appears consuming certain foods can also cause nutrient depletion in our bodies.

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