How Asian diets shifted from omega-balanced to omega-6 heavy

Two generations ago, this wasn't a problem.

My grandmother cooked with lard. Or coconut oil. Sometimes peanut oil. The fish on her table was small and wild — ikan bilis, kembung, sardines. Vegetables came from a market that opened at dawn.

Her omega-6:3 ratio was probably around 5:1. Maybe lower. Without trying.

Mine, before I changed things, was much higher.

What changed

Three forces, in roughly this order:

1. Industrial seed oils became cheap (1970s–1990s)

Refining technology made it possible to extract oil from soybeans, sunflowers, corn, and palm at industrial scale. Suddenly the cheapest cooking fat per kilogram wasn't lard or coconut — it was vegetable oil. Restaurants switched. Packaged foods switched. School canteens switched.

Nobody chose this on health grounds. It was a price decision.

2. Fast and convenience food scaled (1990s–2010s)

Mamak, fast food chains, instant noodles, kerepek, biscuits, frozen snacks — all built around the cheap oil supply. A typical urban Malaysian today eats outside the home or from packaged sources for 50–70% of meals. Almost all of those calories are cooked in or contain seed oils.

Your home kitchen choices matter less than they used to.

3. The fish on our plates changed (2000s onward)

Aquaculture exploded. Farmed fish dominates supermarkets now. The problem: farmed fish are usually fed grain-based feed (corn, soy) instead of the algae and small fish their wild counterparts eat. A farmed salmon today has meaningfully less omega-3 than a wild one.

Meanwhile, wild small fish (ikan bilis, kembung, selar) — which are still excellent omega-3 sources — quietly fell out of fashion as "low status" food.

The triple shift

So in two generations:

• Cooking oil pivoted from balanced to omega-6 dominant
• Eating-out culture exploded, multiplying that exposure
• The fish we got the most omega-3 from got either farmed or fell out of favour

No single villain. No conspiracy. Just three independent shifts that together moved the needle.

Why this matters for the way forward

If the problem is structural and cultural, the solution can't be "eat one extra serving of fish per week." That's marginal change against a tide.

The realistic levers, in order of impact:

1. Cut frequency of food cooked in seed oil (eat in more, choose restaurants more carefully)
2. Add concentrated omega-3 (oily fish 2–3× a week, or a quality supplement)
3. Track your number so you know if your changes are actually moving anything

Notice: option 1 is by far the most impactful, and it's the one nobody wants to do. Option 2 alone won't undo it.

If your grandmother had to taste your kitchen and read the labels of what's in your fridge — would she recognize the food? Mine wouldn't. That's part of why I started taking this seriously.