The Western diet has been associated, over time, with many ailments, to which chronic pain has recently been added.
Fats provide important health benefits, but their presence in the diet does not always have a positive result. Most people consume too much omega-6 fat and too little omega-3 fat. A recent study looked at the influence of omega-6 fats on neuropathic pain in people with diabetes and other conditions.
A team of researchers at the University of Texas Health Center in the United States of America studied the effects of omega-6 fatty acids by evaluating the role of these dietary lipids in chronic pain and found that these substances appear to cause them. discomfort and inflammation.
The abundance of polyunsaturated omega-6 fats, prominent in the typical Western diet, “was a significant risk factor for both (types) of pain, inflammatory and neuropathic,” said the study’s authors in a statement issued by the university.
Diabetes, autoimmune diseases and cardiovascular disease are known to be influenced by nutritional choices, the researchers said. However, excessive consumption of omega-6 fats, which are largely found in processed and frequently consumed foods, have not been studied in terms of the impact of fatty acids and their specific role in pain.
A team from the departments of biomedical sciences, chemistry and neurology at the South Texas Veterans Health Care System (STVHCS), led by Dr. Jacob Boyd, studied the impact of polyunsaturated fatty acids on mice and humans.
Both omega-6 and omega-3 fats are essential for health, but according to the new study, the preponderance of the first type could have harmful effects, reports DPA taken over by Agerpres.
The study, conducted for five years, was published in the journal Nature Metabolism.
Omega-6 fats are mainly present in foods with vegetable oils and are beneficial to an extent. “Western diets, however, associated with obesity, are characterized by much higher levels of those acids in food, from corn chips to onion rings, compared to healthy omega-3 fats, which are present in fish and sources such as flax seeds and nuts “, the researchers said in a statement.
“In general, unhealthy foods high in omega-6 fats include, among other things, processed snacks, fast food, cakes and fatty and canned meat,” they said. Giving up those eating habits and increasing your omega-3 fat intake “significantly reduced these chronic pains,” the researchers found.
The authors also demonstrated that cutaneous omega-6 lipid levels in patients with neuropathic pain caused by type 2 diabetes were associated with
felt pain and the need to take analgesic drugs “, the statement reads.
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