I have a painless but annoying skin condition called keratosis pilaris alba and other people who have it say that Flaxseed in both ground and oil form helps. I looked over the list of foods that have omega fatty acids in them, and I probably don’t get enough in my diet (I don’t eat any fish, for example). Besides the odd obsession with oil pulling, these folks have been spot on with other things that improve it, so I began taking a suppliment on the first of the year.
But if you look at various websites about flaxseed oil, you’d think it’s a miracle cure for what ails you. Weight loss, lower blood pressure, IBD and allergy and asthma symptom relief, you name it. Funnily enough, most of these websites touting the benefits are trying to sell you really over priced capsules…
So what does adding the recommended 1000-3000mg of flaxseed oil really do to help people’s health?
An immunologist who struck me as a little too new age-y recently tried to get me to start taking flaxseed (and fish) oils, saying it would help with my eczema and asthma. My dermatologist laughed at the idea, as did another immunologist.
It wouldn’t hurt to at least try it. DHA/EPA supplementation has been demonstrated to have a clinically significant impact on some integumentary pathologies. Consuming flax seed oil is a relatively ineffective means of elevating tissue DHA/EPA levels, though. Flax seed oil only contains linolenic acid, their immediate precursor. The only significant distinction that flax seed oil has in this arena is that it is the most concentrated known naturally occurring source of α-linolenic acid. It becomes rancid at room temperature quite quickly. Moreover, it is a drying oil, which means that if heated, it will varnish the inside of the container in which it is heated. So it is best used for cold applications such as salad dressings.
Dude, I, as a person who does NOT eat the diet of his forebears, find flax superfluous. Mine wife, though, knew a gent whose parents asked that he keep a chart comparing Sticks vs Wees. He did not eat a balanced diet.
Good grief, flax. Flax is a bloody horror. If you find yourself lacking in GI distress, by all means I advise you to take it.
When I had a flare-up of ulcerative colitis a few years back, my sister encouraged me to add ground flaxseed meal to my diet, a couple of times a day. The flare was in its early stages, and she said she had some IBS issues that responded well to it. I have had good success in the past with following things that showed good response familially, so I figured what the heck.
It took me a year to figure out how gas-forming it was. Until then I figured it was the flare. After the other symptoms of the flare subsided and I was still a gas making machine, I remembered hearing from a friend who had used the oil that it caused her GI distress. I stopped using it and stopped having any problems at all, with Pentasa and Methotrexate keeping the flare under control. I am still not sure if my sister did that intentionally or not. She’s devious.
May I explain? Flax seed appeals to our German brethren. There is NOTHING, from Hitler on, they care about like our Sticks and Wees. Honest to God, IGNORE ANY food product they recommend.
PS-dropzone, more Germanic than one should admit in such a discussion.
dropzone: God, yes. My germanic grandmother (Austrian, technically, but so were Freud and Hitler) loved oranges because they’d scrrrub you out. The gleam in her eye when she laid into that ‘scrrrub’ told me everything I needed to know about Freud’s concept of anal-retentiveness. I’m not going to detail the time she fed my brothers and I ‘chocolate’ that was really Ex-Lax.
(And, to be clear, my initial post in this thread was a reference to the Illuminatus! trilogy and its flaxscrip currency.)
My bad. I thought you were using it to address your skin problem. :rolleyes:
If your goal is to enable your body to function properly, many websites suggest a daily enema. But apparently, per the posters thus far, that’s pretty much what you’ll be getting with the flaxseed oil!
Oh. (Sorry?) I still don’t quite get it, but I imagine now that what you were doing is saying that there are such websites as recommend daily enemas for health, while mocking their stupid, dangerous advice (combined with a joke about the laxative effect of flaxseed oil). Pardon my thickness.
