Dr. Bill Harris
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
But in the area of depression, supplementation studies have shown some benefits on decreasing symptomatology of depression. Those studies can never be really very long. They're not years long, which is what you'd really want. For that kind of perspective, we look at blood levels as blood levels predicting risk for developing dementia, or I mean depression.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And those typically show higher levels of omega-3 associated with lower risk for developing depression. Okay, that makes sense too. There's been some evidence that EPA might be a little better for depression than DHA. The two long chain omega-3s in fish, so maybe we could get in that if you want to, but there's certainly a link.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
I mean, is the omega-3 supplementation going to do just as well as an antidepressant? Yeah, maybe not, but we're talking about nutrition here. We're not talking about, and usually it helps with the drug, taking them together. But there's strong evidence. Like you said, I'm a scientist, and I try not to get too emotionally excited or too I don't want to speak beyond the data.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
So I see that because I'm aware of studies where they didn't see an effect. of omega-3 and of course studies that do see an effect. So I have to be a little balanced. And the thing is with omega-3 and this goes across all of our discussions is they are completely safe, completely safe. There is no downside.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Obviously, you wait long enough, everybody dies.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
to taking omega-3s and there's lots and lots and lots of potential upsides, some strongly confirmed, some strongly suggested. But when I always look at risk benefit ratios to anything you do in life, if the risk is virtually zero and the benefit is potential and strong, I think it's a favorable ratio. That's why I go for it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Just to be clear on that. Right. We are not, this is not immortality we're talking about, but it does seem to make you live on a higher omega-3 is associated. I have to be careful. I'm not saying the effect of omega-3 is to make you live longer because we haven't. done that intervention study, supplementation study, and nobody ever will do that study.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah. But like you said, what matters is what happens to you.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Right. And, you know, people can try this and maybe they'll start eating fish and they don't feel any different. OK, no harm, no foul. But the odds are it's going to make a difference. And it made a difference, particularly if you start really low like you did.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, we do. And we just published a couple of weeks ago, maybe a large study looking at, again, that what we typically do, omega-3 levels in the blood, DHA, I believe was our primary focus on that one, and looked at risk for developing dementia or Alzheimer's disease. This was in a large group of people in England.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And we found the same story we found in other and others have found to the highest people with the highest levels of omega-3 at the beginning of the study, which is typically put people in their 50s, 40s or 50s when these studies start. The risk for developing dementia is reduced and nobody's going to prevent dementia. Alzheimer's disease. They're not going to prevent dementia.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
They're going to put it off until you die of something else. That's the best you can ever hope for. People talk about preventing the disease. What they mean is delaying the disease. And that's what we all want to do. That's increasing your health span. And so the omega-3s are certainly strongly linked with a reduced risk for developing them.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
since we have no treatment, whatever, for these debilitating conditions that we all know about and we all fear more than we fear heart attacks by and large, definitely take more omega-3 to help reduce your risk for that. That's a no-brainer, pardon the pun.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Best brainer.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
But all the evidence is pointing to the association between high omega-3 and longer life, healthier life, better health span, as you said.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, in that category, the studies have looked... The ones that have been most effective have used pretty high intakes of EPA and DHA, maybe three to four grams a day, which is the typical American, just for perspective, typical Americans eating that's not taking a fish oil supplement is getting maybe... 0.1 to 0.2 grams a day of EPA DHA, 100 to 200 milligrams a day in their diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And we're talking about doses here that I just mentioned for blood pressure in the 1,000 to 2,000 milligram a day, which is a very easy to get dose, but it's a higher dose than maybe just triglyceride lowering might give you, which we might talk about later. It's doable. It's a minor. It's not a major effect on blood pressure. It's a sign that your blood vessels are healthier.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Your blood vessels are more compliant, more flexible, more able to respond to the heart pushing all that blood out. You don't end up with a high blood pressure. So it's good for blood pressure as well as a variety of other things we'll talk about here.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
yeah i mean i think what we hear so much about is inflammation chronic low-grade inflammation from our diet and our lifestyle and pollution in the air um all these things are are pushing this our bodies toward a kind of a chronic inflammatory state now i think the thing that we've seen with omega-3 is that how do they work people say and it's it's
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
It's kind of complicated to explain how they work. It's not like a drug that has just one target and bang, you can say this drug fixes that thing. Well, omega-3s are in every cell, every cell membrane. They do good things everywhere. And by about 15 different mechanisms, they do it. But the thing that really counts, it maybe largely comes down to anti-inflammatory.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
They put the brakes on, they soften the inflammatory response. And I think that plays out in many, plays out in dementia, plays out in cardiovascular disease, probably plays out in the way the, even the blood is a little bit thinner. when you take more omega-3. So you're less likely to clot in a bad place. That's also part of the good benefits.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
So inflammation is the one word I would use to describe all the benefits of omega-3. And we saw that in Framingham in our cohort that we looked at, we looked at 10 different blood markers of inflammation. And we correlated those blood markers with the omega-3 level. And for every one of them, higher omega-3, lower inflammatory marker.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
It's just been shown so many times, there's no question about it anymore.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, and because I'm trained in nutrition, in nutrition you learn that to be deficient, There's like being deficient in vitamin C. You have scurvy, okay? Your teeth fall out, all right? Really bad stuff happens. Vitamin D and rickets, your bones bend and break real easily. Well, deficiency in the omega-3 is not that stark. It's a long-term subtle thing.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
So I'd say insufficiency is maybe a little bit better term. But in the United States, if we ask how many people or what percent are what I would call suboptimal. And optimal, I will say, is an omega-3 index, which we'll talk about, of over 8%. We're talking about 90 to 95% of people.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Are not optimal. But to be not optimal is not necessarily to be deficient. It's to be suboptimal. You could be better. And you could be up in a zone that's protective. The average omega-3 level in America is roughly five and a half, maybe. If you throw it across, we're working on a project right now to kind of define the omega-3 index of every country in the world we can figure out.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And Canada, United States, we're sort of in that intermediate zone where you're not awful, you're not all vegans, but you're not optimal like the Japanese are, where they're on average, they're 9% or 10% omega-3 index, which is great.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
So the vast majority of people on Western diets, not just Americans, people who do not eat fish every day, like some cultures do, Japan, South Korea, they have really high omega-3 index because they eat fish a lot.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, I think it's both and. I think definitely the lack of fish in the diet. You know, historically, there were certainly people on the coasts were much more dependent upon the food that comes right out of the sea because we didn't have refrigeration. We couldn't transport things around the country. You had to eat what was there. And there was a lot of fish on the coast.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
So I suppose that omega-3 levels, we've been able to measure them 100, 200 years ago. coastal populations would have been higher, but not necessarily in South Dakota where I am. I don't really know that we ever were, certainly as a country, high in omega-3. People have tried to raise concerns that omega-6 fatty acid intake has come up over the time.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
I don't think that's been a reason why we have low omega-3. And we can talk about omega-6 later if you'd like to. But at this point, again, if you don't eat fish very regularly, you're not going to have a high omega-3 level. It just doesn't happen.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
That is definitely correct. I think if we look at the top three, nutrients that have scientific research papers published on them. You've got vitamin D, folic acid, and omega-3. And omega-3 has only been on the radar since the late 70s. And I'm talking about all the history of medical publications, okay, back into the 1800s.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, I think one of the first effects of omega-3 that was discovered, and we were part of the discovery of that in the late 1970s, early 80s, was that omega-3s are particularly effective in lowering one of the blood fats called blood triglycerides. So the other one is cholesterol. This is the blood. Omega-3s don't lower cholesterol significantly. Never really have.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
At least in the good, well-controlled studies, you don't see a lowering of cholesterol. But you will definitely see a lowering of triglycerides. And that's because the omega-3s will block the production of those molecules in the liver so they don't get sent out in the blood. So you reduce the levels. That's a good thing. Then the other things are LDL cholesterol.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
what some people call bad cholesterol. I hate to use that term because it's the bad particles. It's not bad cholesterol. Cholesterol is cholesterol. It's neutral. LDL particles, which carry a lot of cholesterol, are not affected by fish oils intake. HDL particles, the good particles, their levels can be raised a little bit by fish oil. So actually, lowering triglycerides helps raise the HDL.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
They're kind of on a seesaw in a way. So you'll definitely see an improvement in the lipid profile, but don't expect to see your cholesterol level go down if you start taking fish oil.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
It's complicated, yeah. I think there's metaphors, there's analogies for it. I think people have often used the fact that fish oil is an oil. Think about oil in your car. and having enough oil in the engine just to lubricate all the cylinders as they go up and down.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
If you're low on oil, you're gonna have a lot of friction and that's gonna create heat, that's gonna create, that's like inflammation. So I think that's one way of looking at it that if you're low on omega-3, you're essentially kind of low on oil and your cells are gonna, there's just gonna be friction, there's gonna be,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
inability to respond, like every cell has to respond to the outside environment. And it's a very finely tuned, finely designed system. And if the cell membrane, which is really
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
the most, almost one of the most important parts of the cell, the membrane, which decides what goes in, what goes out, that is very much dependent upon the fluidity of that membrane's important and the flexibility of that membrane. And if you have too little omega-3, the membrane just doesn't operate well. And so you get garbled communication between the outside and the inside.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And so things just don't go well.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Vitamin D has been known for many, many more years, as so has folic acid. Folic acid got a lot of interest, of course, when it was figured out that it related to birth defects. So any event, omega-3 has gotten a lot of attention and it's one of the top threes, but one of the top like five molecules in, you know, add aspirin, add prednisone, add other medicines and how much research they've had.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, and let me start with ALA, the plant omega-3, which you were very familiar with as a vegan, of course. That is a form of omega-3 fatty acids. It's kind of like a poor second cousin in a way. It is, strictly speaking, it has the right last name. Omega-3 is correct, but the first name is wrong. Alpha-linolenic, it's a precursor.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
a poor precursor to EPA and DHA, which can be made from it, but not very well at all, and you get very low levels. So to get EPA and DHA, which are the two that are in fish oils or in marine animals, they actually start in the oceans where they're made. To get those two, you really have to eat them preformed, meaning in seafoods.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
You mentioned a few of them, salmon, mackerel, herring, sardines, anchovies, albacore tuna is a good one as well. Those are all great sources of EPA and DHA. EPA and DHA have different roles in the body. They're different chemical structures, very similar, but slightly different.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And they are made in, each one of them is made into other molecules by different enzyme systems in the body that have anti-inflammatory or other beneficial effects. I always think, I never recommend that people just take EPA or just take DHA. because they come together naturally in fish, always together.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
They're in fish oils, always together, unless you process it strongly just to remove one or the other. And I don't see any point in that. I think the smartest thing to do is to get roughly 50, 50, 40, 60% EPA and DHA in the supplement. That's kind of the range that it's in fish. And so that's, I think the best way to go.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, that's a great question. So deer and buffalo and parrots and all kinds of other animals don't eat fish, right? How do they live? And it's a reasonable question. And why is omega-3 so important for humans and apparently not for horses, which are, you know, vegetarian, vegans? And Tell you the truth, I never thought about that. It's a great question.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And how you answer it, I think every animal is designed, you know, most all these animals we think about live in the natural environment in which they were designed to be. Humans are not. We can create our own food. We can transport our own food. Deer and, you know, ground squirrels don't do that.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
They're eating the natural environment they're designed and built in such a way that they have their cells work in given the food that they are set up to eat. But humans, we can avoid, we eat not just by necessity, we eat by taste, we eat by culture. And again, we can process foods in a way that no other animal can do.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And so that has all, I think, led to humans needing or being low in this particular kind of food. You think about back to cavemen and what did they used to eat? a mixture of plant and animal for sure. And they were probably eating fish. I mean, you've got to, if you're gonna have a civilization that grows up, you've got to be by water. You have to be by a river if you're not on the coast.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Even being on the coast is not very helpful because you can't drink seawater. You gotta be by fresh water. And there's always fish. Always fish in water. And so fish has been there ever since humans ever appeared on this planet. And they've been part of the diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Penicillin, it's one of the top five or 10 molecules that's been studied in the history of medicine.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And I think the fact that we've got so out of balance now is just a function largely of what food industry can do and produce for our taste. And whatever tastes good, we go for it. And if it's cheap, we go for it. Yeah. I know I'm dancing around your question because I don't want to dance around your answer.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Fish was a big part of our diet, right? And learning, you know, nobody else can handle it, can do fire. We can do fire. No other animal knows how to handle and use fire. And it's a huge deal. I mean, we would have no metallurgy, we would have no machinery if we couldn't figure out how to melt metals, smelt ores with fire.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Nevermind the cooking side of it too, which opened up, made some nutrients more accessible from foods that we would not otherwise derive the nutrients. Firemaker, it's a big deal.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, right. And the first question is, what kind of fish? Before we talk about, because there is a wide variety of omega-3 richness or lack of richness in fish. On the low end of omega-3 in fish, you've got things like tilapia and cod and perch and bass and a lot of lake fish. Shrimp. Almost nothing there. Lobster, almost nothing.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Because these are very, very low fat, protein rich types of animals, foods. And if there's very little fat, even if 50% of the fat is omega-3, which is not, if there's hardly any fat there, you don't really get much omega-3 when you eat a serving. So those kinds of fish don't count for what we think about telling people, we need oily fish.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And when we say oily, it's always kind of an odd expression, but people hopefully will realize fish that are like salmon, like sardines, like mackerel, herrings, you know, and anchovies. I don't know who anybody eats anchovies straight up, you know, other than maybe on a Caesar salad or on a pizza. But anyway, anchovies are very rich in omega-3. One of the good sources of fish oil is anchovy.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
So there are certain kinds of fish that are very good, some kind that are pointless, useless. And so when we talk about how much oily fish do you need to eat, we take salmon as the best example. You can get about a gram, gram and a half of omega-3, EPA, DHA from a standard size serving of salmon. So that's a lot. So if you did that every day,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
if you ate salmon every day, then you would not need to take any supplements.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Right, exactly, right. And not that they eat salmon every day, but they eat such a wide variety of different kinds of fish, including the... the rich oily fish, tunas, things like that. So one or two servings, one serving a day of those kinds of things, people usually recommend, like the American Harness Association, two oily fish servings a week. I don't think that's enough.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
that's better than most people can do or do do, but it's not enough, which is why I think we need supplements. We did a study, I think you may be referring to it, looking at the omega-3 index in like 3,000 people that sent in blood tests to our laboratory for analysis. And we asked them, do you take a fish oil supplement? Yes, no. How often do you eat oily fish as a main course?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
That's a fair statement. That's the reality, right? Fish is a great way to do it. You got to pick the right fish. You got to be consistent with it, but it's very doable. But most people will not be doing it. So they'll take supplements and dietary supplements, omega-3, EPA, DHA are definitely fine for increasing your blood levels and your tissue levels.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
So those are pretty rough questions. I mean, not very precise, but they're not bad. And we found that the only group of people that had a average omega-3 index at 8%, which we think our target, are people that reported three times a week eating oily fish and taking supplements. So that's a ballpark idea of what you got to do to achieve a optimal omega-3 index. It can be done all with supplements.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
It can be done all with fish. I like to see the mix myself, and that's what we observed.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Sure. The test that we developed about 20 years ago now, it's called the Omega-3 Index. It's a blood test. It reports the amount of EPA and DHA that are in the membranes of your red blood cells that circulate in your blood. Of course, about half of your blood is water, plasma, and about the other half is red blood cells. So it's very easy to get samples of red blood cells.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And the red cell is an example of kind of a surrogate for the other cells in your body that you can't get a sample of. So we like to measure red cell omega-3. We proposed back in 2004, and we still believe today, that an EPA DHA content of 8%, say 8% to 12% approximately. Very few people have anything higher. That range is the optimal range for the omega-3 index.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Most people are, like I said earlier, 95% of people are below that 8% in America. But we think it's an achievable target. It's a safe target. You can do it with supplements. You can do it with fish. So 8% is the target. The way we do the test, we analyze blood for some clinics, doctor's offices, and they send us blood tubes. And we isolate the red blood cells themselves and analyze them.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
But most of the time, we use the dried blood spot method. where we send a little kit to your home and you open it up and you've been through this. Clean your finger, poke your finger with a little lancet, get a drop of blood, put it on a card and put it in the mail and send it back to us and we send you a result.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And in that result, we'll tell you what your omega-3 index is on kind of, you know, a standard red, green, yellow scale everybody uses. And we'll give you some suggestions exactly.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
So if your omega-3 index is, say, at 5%, which is pretty typical, we have a calculator on our website that you can link to and put in your 5% index, and then it will tell you how much omega-3 EPA DHA you probably should try to eat additionally, how much you should increase if you want to get up to 8%.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And that's data we've got from other studies that we've reduced to an equation that says most people who are at 5% need about another 1,000 milligrams a day of EPA and DHA to get average 8%. That's a good place to start. So that's part of the report that you get back from OmegaQuant, our lab.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
There are other levels of testing that I think to me that's the most important test to get is the Omega-3 Index. That's the basic, that's the cheapest thing that we offer, which is around 50 bucks for that test. But you can, if you want, you can get more information, omega-3 and omega-6 ratios, EPA-AA ratios, trans-fat ratio. I think that's kind of important, too.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
The trans-fatty acids are the ones that we don't want to be eating, the ones in donuts and pastries. So we can measure that in your red cells and we report that. The third level of tests that we'll call our complete test, which gives you like around 24 different fatty acids, your blood levels and where they rank in relative to the general population where you are. So that's the complete test.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
But for my money, 80% of the bang comes from the omega-3 index. get that first, that's the most actionable one, I think of all of our tests.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Thank you. And you're right. I just have to echo what you said. And I love your little your dollars and pennies thing. I hadn't heard that before. That's good.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
It's so easy to get distracted by a million little supplements or I mean, if you look at the big things, exercise is a huge thing. Huge. Huge. And people won't do that. Why bother with all the other stuff if you won't even move? Just move. You know, I mean, that's half the battle. Eat less, move more. And that solves so many of our problems. And take more omega-3.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
I'm sitting down.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
That's great. That's great. And it's great advice. Good for you.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Keep it going.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, they do. If it's an algae-based EPA and DHA, again, I mentioned that omega-3s are born in the ocean, and they're born inside the bodies of these single-celled, what we'll call plankton. zooplankton, phytoplankton, just tiny, tiny little organisms that will take sunlight and sugar and make fatty acids, make omega-3s. And then they formed the basis of the food chain.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
So some companies years ago figured out which specific species of these little micro, we're not talking about seaweed here. This is, microalgae is not seaweed. Microalgae is something you don't eat, but they can be grown in a big vat. They can be fed sugar. They can then produce omega-3s, and then the company will harvest them and take the EPA and DHA out that they're making and put it in a pill.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And it's exactly the same stuff that's in a fish oil pill. So I don't have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is people taking alpha-linolenic acid from flaxseed oil or chia seed oil or things like that and thinking that they're getting the good omega-3s when they're not.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, right. And then to that point, I really want to recommend people test before they start supplementing because they're, I mean, it's not the end of the world. If you say, I know I'm going to be bad, I know I'm going to be awful, so I'm going to take some pills before I do my test. Fine, you know, but get some kind of baseline.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
It's good to know what the effect on your body is of the supplement you're taking.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, okay. So, right, to back up, that's a study we did as part of what's called the Framingham study. It's a big, very famous cohort that a lot of research has been done in. And we looked at the omega-3 levels in the blood of these people. And then we looked at how long they lived from the time we screened them.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Sure. First of all, there are several forms. I obviously walk into a drugstore, Walmart, Costco, whatever, and you're going to see lots of different types of omega-3. And it's very confusing to people. I think the most important thing is to look at the label and buy the product that's got, well, I would say the most EPA and DHA per capsule. Those are gonna be the most expensive.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
The ones that, I mean, one of the cheaper things like at Costco is something like 1200 milligrams, it says on the front, 1200 milligrams of fish oil, but it's only got 300 milligrams of EPA and DHA. So it's only 25% of that pill is omega-3. The other 75% is not omega-3. It's just other regular fats. That's a cheap product because you aren't getting much omega-3.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
It doesn't take much concentration to do that. I mean, it's not bad. It's better than nothing, obviously. But the ones I look for are the ones that are typically in a triglyceride form. as opposed to what's called an ethyl ester form. And ethyl ester is the form that most of the omega-3 drugs are in. And they do that just so they can concentrate the omega-3s in a pill.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
But you don't need to do it that way. I think the triglyceride form is the better form. Another good form is what we'll call krill oil, which is a phospholipid form, another natural lipid. And so that's a great source of omega-3 as well. But look for the amount you want to get. If you're going to aim for, say, 1,000 milligrams a day, find a pill that maybe gives you 500 milligram per capsule.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
So you could take two pills a day and you're going to get 1,000. If you're going to get something that's only got 300 milligrams, you're taking three to four pills a day. And the more pills you have to take, the less likely you are to take them. So those are some of the do's and don'ts. You don't need to refrigerate fish oil. You don't need to freeze it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Freezing it is not going to make a burp go away or prevent a fishy burp. Taking it with food helps reduce that. It's always good to take omega-3s with food. because you get all those digestive juices flowing from the food, then it helps with the absorption of the omega-3 fatty acids. So that's always a good idea. If you're taking an ethyl ester, you absolutely have to take it with food.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
The triglycerides or phospholipid is not so critical, but it's always a good idea. What other do's and don'ts? Don't chew them, okay? That's always a bad idea.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
I think they're about 65 years old when we screened them, when we measured their omega-3 levels. And then we followed them up for about 10 or 12 years. So between, say, 65 and 75. Some people died, some people didn't, right? Some people were smokers, some people weren't smokers.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Not as much. Not as much as what you're describing for olive oil. It's harder to do that with fish oils. And they're When people do surveys, they walk into a big superstore and buy 10 different bottles of fish oil. And then they go home and, well, they don't go home. They go to their lab and analyze it for omega-3 content. And they look at oxidation products, things like that, or mercury.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And by the way, you won't find mercury in any fish oil pill. Mercury, if it's there at all in the fish, and that's pretty rare actually, it's going to go away when they separate the oil from the water in the flesh. The oil doesn't have any mercury in it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Anyway, people will measure omega-3 content in different fish oil types, and then they'll write a paper on it and say, X percent of these met their label claim. Most of the time, they're pretty close to their label claim. They're not far off. There's always variability batch to batch. Rarely does anybody have any of the oxidation products, breakdown products.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
If they do find it, that's what makes news. But when they do the studies and everything looks great, then it never gets on the news, of course, because it's not news. It's what you'd expect. So I'm not worried. I don't go out of my way to get really, really high-end, really, really pure fish oils because those are so much more expensive.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Honestly, I don't see the point because you're getting something, even some of the stuff you can get at the big box stores. Again, I get the higher concentrated forms, not the low concentrations. Those products don't worry me. They provide the omega-3s in a safe and pretty well standardized form.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Sure. Great to be on your show. Thanks for the invitation. Yeah, that particular finding, we were part of a large collaboration of a bunch of what we call cohort studies. A cohort is just a group of people that gets recruited in a certain area, like in Boston or in London or whatever. And
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And we did all the statistics and found that the people who lived the longest were non-smokers and had the highest omega-3 levels, okay? And contra that, the people who died the soonest, most likely to die, were smokers and those with the lowest omega-3. And in the middle, I think is the area you're kind of talking about,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, exactly. I mean, you look at farm-raised salmon, for example. That 10, 15 years ago got a bad rap because it had high levels of PCBs in them, things like that. That's all been cleaned up. That was a wild extrapolation of the data anyway back then. But anyway, farm-fed salmon has got about as much omega-3 as wild-caught salmon. because that's how much they feed them.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And it's less than it used to be, to your point. They're starting to feed them other vegetable oils to supplement the calories, that fish oil. Fish oil is getting expensive because of podcasts like this. They can't feed it to the fish. They're finding new ways to make omega-3s for fish food. But, you know,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
If you're not going to eat salmon because you can't afford wild-caught coho, and so therefore you can eat a hamburger, you're not winning anything. Buy the cheaper type of salmon, or canned salmon is great. Albacore tuna is great. Those are really good sources of omega-3. Of course, sardines. Some people love them. I can't say I'm one of them.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
But yeah, I think you've got to be smart about it and don't let a little bit of a downside here stop you from doing the right thing. I mean, that really plays out, I think, and you haven't asked about pregnancy and omega-3 and mercury and all that. But
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
the FDA did a huge disservice to American women by telling them to not eat more than like 12 ounces of fish because they're worried about the mercury. And that has driven so many women, pregnant women away from eating any fish at all, which they, to their detriment, because the DHA is really important for baby's birth, baby's development. They're so afraid.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
of a whisper of mercury in a fish that they will avoid all the benefits just because they're afraid of that. I mean, we published a paper last year looking at the relationship between cognitive outcomes in babies and kids and fish intake. And regardless of the mercury in the fish, high or low, made no difference, the more fish you ate, the higher your IQ. in the kit.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
If you had high omega-3 and were a smoker, you had about the same risk of death as if you were a low omega-3 and non-smoker. It's kind of in the middle. So they were roughly equivalent in a way in terms of risk prediction. I've got to be careful with this.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And, you know, I'm a bit of a, I'm not standing on a soapbox, but because that I think was a real disservice to scare people away. It's kind of the same category you're talking about, scaring people away from something that's really good because of some tiny little risk, whether it's financial risk, your pocketbook, or here in this case, it's worried about mercury.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
So don't worry about the mercury, eat the fish, eat the oily fish. They're very, very low in mercury anyway. So wherever we work.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Because some people will take this and say, okay, all I got to do is eat more fish, take some fish oil pills, and then the smoking I'm doing right now is not going to bother me. I wouldn't go that far. But we all have some sense of how much smoking increases your risk for bad outcomes. And I just want to get people to realize that the omega-3 level is kind of in the same category.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Because of what the military feeds them. That's why. I mean, and just to back up... The two groups that have the lowest omega-3 levels in our experience, in our research, are vegans and US soldiers. Deployed in Iraq is when we did the study. But it was pitiful how low the omega-3 levels were in those soldiers. And you're right, they're not vegans. It's not because they're choosing that.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
It's just the military is not feeding them a healthy diet. And I know the military writ large knows about this, is concerned about this, and wants to do something about it. Exactly what they're going to do, I don't know. They have some kind of aversion to supplements in the military.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
So people are trying to come up with enriched foods that you can feed to people in the military that will give them omega-3. And those products are out there. But it's been a shame that people who ought to have the sharpest executive function, the best physical shape, the best resilience are not being fed optimally. And I'm sorry about that, but it's the way it was.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Hopefully it's not the way it still is.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Right. Right. And truck drivers and airplane pilots, you know, and people who, you know, you don't want to have sudden cardiac arrest if you're driving a truck or flying an airplane. Except you got another guy in the airplane. cover for you. In the truck, you don't. Anyway, that's just another little pet peeve of mine that these people that drive these rigs on these highways, pretty crappy hell.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, yeah. We typically say that if you're going to start to move your needle, and again, I say pick an example, omega-3 index of 5, and you want to go to 8, that takes about 1,000 milligrams a day. And it will take you about three to four months before you will actually hit a new steady state. It's going to be going up slowly, slowly, slowly as the red blood cells get incorporated with omega-3.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
It takes time. But then after around three or four months, you're going to be where you're going to be. And that's the time to retest, to see where you are at that point, to see how well you absorb whatever product you're using. Is it really working for you or not? Or do you need to take more or not? So really, we're not talking about years. We're not talking about days.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
We're talking about three or four months.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
It's on the other side, of course. Or I guess you'd say a low omega-3 is kind of like being a smoker in terms of your risk. But fair enough. That's a good way to explain it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, yeah. And again, I think... So many people miss the point. They see 1,000 milligrams on a label of a fish oil pill, not realizing that that's the fish oil, that's not the omega-3. Right. You need to look at the label, see how much omega-3 EPA, DHA you're getting, and then get 1,000 of that, which might take 3,000 milligrams of fish oil to get 1,000 milligrams of EPA, DHA, if it's-
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
a cheap product.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Well, yeah. First of all, just because you get up to 8% by taking 1,000 milligrams, it ain't going to stay there if you stop taking it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
that's number one number one yeah so you can't you're not you're not getting cured of low omega-3 by taking a bunch now and fixing your level everything's turning over all the time so you got to keep going with it whether you need to be at nine percent ten percent eleven percent twelve percent omega-3 index we don't really know um there is some partly because
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
There are so few populations or people around the world that have levels that high. We really can't study them. It's hard to, you know, you've got 20 people that have an omega-3 index of 16. What are you going to do with them? I mean, you can't do a big study on those folks.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
So, I mean, there's some evidence from Japan that even within the Japanese framework, having an omega-3 index of, say, 11%, 12%, is associated with a little bit lower risk of cardiovascular disease than having one at 7% or 8%. So I think there is some evidence that higher is better to a point, but I don't see any point going behind above 12%. Omega-3 index.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
So anywhere 8 to 12, I think would be great. Back to your point, let's just get up to 8 first. That would be great. If you can do that and maintain it, that's spectacular. If you want to be in the top 1%, then you can push it if you want to. But I'm not going to guarantee you're going to get any more additional benefit above the 8%.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, my omega-3 index, the last time I measured is around 10%, kind of in that zone. We use my blood here at the laboratory to, you know, we always run a high and a low control blood of omega-3. So mine is a high and I got to keep it high. It's for the business to keep going.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And I do about 1400 milligrams a day of EPA and DHA. Two pills, 700 milligrams each. I don't eat fish as often as I should. You know, I think everybody says that. I try to eat, you know, once or twice a week, I'll eat salmon. I wish I did more, but, you know, grandchildren, life, you know, gets in the way. So that's kind of what I do.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Well, we recommend that pregnant women look at their, we have at OmegaQuant, we have a test called the, it's a pregnancy test. It's DHA specific, not EPA and DHA, DHA specific, red cell DHA. And that level we target is 5%. Above 5% is good. And this is
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
It's probably even better above 5%, but we set this 5% target for pregnant women based on evidence that women above 5% don't have an increased risk for premature birth. So premature birth is kind of a big deal. Now it would be omega-3. Low omega-3 does predispose, below 5% predispose. I mean, it doesn't, it's no guarantee by any means, but they're higher risk for premature birth under that 5%.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
So that's pregnant women. Babies, children, not much experience there. People have not done many studies to where that would inform users of what is a healthy, what's the optimal level omega-3 index for a five-year-old. I don't know. 8% is not going to be bad. 6% is going to be great. I'd probably aim for something like 6% in a kid just to get started early in life. But I don't know.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
It was. I mean, when I first saw that graph come back from our biostatistics people and showed the lines, the death lines, so to speak, and showing that the omega-3s were basically canceling out the smoking in terms of effect on... I was amazed, too. But they said, trust us, so I trust them. But it's a pretty cool finding.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
I can't point to evidence for that. That's just a gut feeling. But I would not necessarily feel like you have to push an 8% target in a 5-year-old or even a 10-year-old. But if you get them used to either eating fish optimally or taking supplements, it's gonna be better for them in the long run. Almost all the research we do is adults. And so that's where we have our experience.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, that's a persistent goal of mine and a persistent frustration of mine. And I sense it in your voice as well. There... if you could just get the medical community, whatever that is, to see this data and realize, put two and two together and say, we really ought to be testing.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
That's why we formed Omega-Quant in the first place, was to have a test available for doctors to use, because there was nothing back then. Now there are some, big labs will offer Omega-3 tests, but part of the complexity of this is they aren't measuring red blood cell Omega-3, they're measuring, say, plasma. levels of omega-3, which is a different number and a different target value.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
And it gets confusing for doctors if there's two or three different ways of expressing the omega-3 status and they don't know which one is the right one. And they say, oh, just eat a healthy diet and take these pills and take these drugs, right? So it's been a challenge.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
I suspect that they will come when it eventually reaches the level of making it into the recommendations of particularly primary care doctors that they measure it. Vitamin D got in there. Vitamin D is measured commonly, and it's not because we're worried about rickets.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
It's because there was so much noise about it, and there was an easy test with one answer, not four different ways of expressing like vitamin D levels. With omega-3s, there are multiple ways of expressing it, and it's confusing. So that's a strike against us, I'm afraid. We like the red blood cell-based metric. We think it's the most stable, steady, long-term measure compared to plasma.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
But even if you go to some of your labs, like the big LabCorp, Quest, they will do omega-3 testing, but it'll be in a plasma and you get a different number. But that's better than nothing. And it's a step in the right direction. But I am frustrated that we can't get a uniform endorsement for omega-3 testing in the medical community.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
You're kind. I appreciate it. And thanks for this chat. It's been a lot of fun.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, she's a PhD in nutrition like I am. And she's very involved with the kind of early life, pregnancy, early development stuff. So yeah, it's been a lot of fun having her on board. Stay in touch with omegaquant.com or I've started a research organization called the Fatty Acid Research Institute. Pretty clever name. Fari, F-A-R-I. People can find stuff about me there too.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
I'm bad at the standard social media stuff. I just, I don't know, just haven't gotten into it. Posting every other day is something I'm doing. But anyway, those two websites, Bill at OmegaQuant is my email. People want to contact me. That's fine. Happy to respond to questions. Do it all the time. So anyway, that's kind of how you contact me.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Thank you, Drew. Enjoyed it a lot. Best of luck.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
The investigators will draw blood samples at the beginning of the study and then they just keep in touch with these people over the years to see how they do, the diseases they develop. Then we look backwards and we look at omega-3 levels in the blood from when they started the study and see what diseases happened, who died, who didn't die, things like that.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
the paper you're talking about, we looked at omega-3 levels in something like 150,000 people, 18 different cohorts, and we put it all together and we looked at the people at the highest omega-3 levels, the highest 20% versus the lowest 20%, and those that had the highest 20% were like 10 to 15% less likely to die during that period of time that we followed them up.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, it's a great story. And I assume if you were a typical vegan, you were below our like 4% in that red zone. And that's not a good place to be. What do we know about omega-3 and depression and anxiety? And this is, yeah, there's been quite a bit of research in the area. And it's mixed.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Mind-Blowing Science of Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Heart Health, Brain Health and Longevity (Rebroadcast)
Part of the blessing, the mixed blessing of having so many studies done on omega-3 is that some of them turn out like you think they are. Some of them don't really find a relationship or an effect. Hardly ever is there a... bad outcome, so to speak. So it's either positive or neutral.