Well, here is your chance to win $3,000.
If you live in Berkeley Springs, Paw Paw, Great Cacapon or anywhere else in Morgan County, West Virginia, you are in luck.
To celebrate National Nutrition Month in March, 2016, and Morgan County Sardine Club Week, the Morgan County Forum for Arts, Sciences and Technologies, (FAST), will award a $3,000 prize for a 800-1,000 word original essay about the Omega 3 and Omega 6 balance and how to get local residents to bring them more into balance.
In particular, the essay should be about how the ideas in two short videos — Out of Balance and — West Virginia Wellness Project — might blend into the daily lives of Morgan County residents.
The event is open to all ages as individuals or teams. Family projects are encouraged.
Essays should be typed in MS Word (or similar format) and submitted electronically by February 29, 2016 to FAST at wemlands@att.net.
Judges will weigh the entries for both substance and style.
Essays may have any literary style: mystery, adventure, technological, scientific, historical, sociological, financial.
Awardees will be announced during Morgan County Sardine Club Week, March 20-26.
FAST director and Berkeley Springs resident Bill Lands encourages local residents to eat more Omega 3 and less Omega 6.
He says that the Japanese, who eat a lot of fish with Omega 3, have a 50/50 balance of Omega 3 and Omega 6. Americans on the other hand, have an imbalance — with a four to one ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3.
“The big imbalance in the United States food system is an excessive amount of vegetable oils put into everything,” Lands told Russell Mokhiber of This Week in Morgan County. “The processed foods all have added soybean oil. Soybean is way out of balance in terms of Omega 6. Those Omega 6 nutrients make Omega 6 hormones, which are potent hormones in chronic inflammatory diseases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has pointed out that our $2 trillion expenditure for treating chronic diseases is going for something that could have been prevented.”
Lands says these diseases are preventable “if we just had a different balance of Omega 3 and Omega 6.”
“The simplest way — generally speaking — is to nix the 6 and eat the 3,” Lands said. “Stop eating so much of the foods that have negative balance scores – like soybean oil, corn oil and sesame oil and hummus and tofu and potato chips. Walnuts are marketed as a source of Omega 3, but the marketers don’t tell you there are five to six times the Omega 6 in there. Walnuts have a negative score — like minus 45 or minus 50. They are not helping at all — compared to flax, which is a plus 40 and has a lot more Omega 3 than Omega 6.”