HPsquareda day ago
I wonder how much of this is Omega-3 in the diet, or if there are processes that could deplete levels in the blood.
If I'm reading this right, if you can't get many fish sources in your diet, it's better to increase the quantity of non-DHA sources (certain seeds, oils and vegetables). But my understanding is non-DHA is not helpful so I may not be understanding correctly
Alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), the Omega-3 present in most plant sources, can get its chemical structure lenghtened to EPA and DHA in the organism. The problem appears to be, when people get older, the efficiency of this conversion takes a large hit.
Eat some berries and nuts
"Paleo" diet doesn't even include that much meat in it
So many hoops to jump through to understand what the hell you're talking about, just to land on what could charitably be called the dumbest thing I'll read today if I'm lucky.
So yes, you eventually evolved for this, but it wasn’t the dominant food source for a loooooong time.
During different points of time the ration was very different. From "mostly nuts" to "mostly fish".
I know it’s all vague delineation of where our species really started, and at which point you would no longer consider it the homo line, but for a significant part of history we were a small predator that would eat whatever was _easily_ available. Hunting animals is not easy and it’s a risky endeavour.
I’m not saying meat wasn’t part of our diet obviously, but it logically wouldn’t have been as dominant a part of our diet as it is today.
There are various bits of evidence for this, like the higher stomach acidity of humans, which resembles that of carrion eaters, like hyenas.
It is plausible that the ability to throw sticks and stones was used initially for scaring other predators and make them abandon their prey, and only later, after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, it became accurate enough to be usable for hunting living animals.
The ability to use stones to break the bones and eat the parts inaccessible for the carnivores who had killed the prey, i.e. marrow and brain, which are rich in hard to get nutrients, e.g. omega-3 fatty acids, is also presumed to have played an important role in the development of a bigger and bigger brain.
It is likely that the gangs of humans acted in a very similar way with the packs of hyenas, which acquire much of their food by scaring away from their prey the other predators, e.g. cheetahs, wild dogs, leopards and even lions. Moreover, similarly to humans, the most important ability of hyenas is not speed, but endurance when pursuing a possible prey that is tired or weakened, e.g. by wounds. While hyenas rely on their big teeth to chase the other predators, humans have relied on their ability to throw things at a distance, for the same purpose. While humans are quite bad at running, jumping, climbing or swimming, in comparison with most mammals, their throwing ability is unmatched by any other animal.
Diet is one of the very few places where your genetic ancestry actually matters – although your gut microbiome, which evolves faster (https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2014.00587), may not share quite the same ancestry as your human cell tissue.
Aside from lactose intolerance what else is different between humans?
Besides these cases, which are obvious due to immediate harm, and which are the reason for laws about food labeling that mentions lactose, gluten and various allergens, there is a lot of variability between humans in the efficiency of digesting various foods and in the capacity of absorption for various nutrients.
Some people are able to eat pretty much anything, while others are aware that they do not feel well after eating certain things, so they avoid them.
And if you look at our closest relatives chimpanzees, they also hunt without using tools. Humans and their ancestors probably ate whatever they had available, including meat.
Some may prefer to do it for personal pleasure, but also ease of life, or cost, which allows them to have time for things that they believe are also moral. Such as taking care of their children, working, and so on.
> Abstaining from killing animals is about the sober realization that we can have perfectly healthy and happy lives without killing animals,
But I have enough hobbies and I don't want to risk missing some things we don't yet know about. I just eat what I evolved to eat.
So do I: plants!
I maybe too much of a individualist, so I get a little triggered when I see claims from others about the moral justification of what I should eat, what job I should have, who I should vote for... When these things that I do are not hurting myself or other humans.
Now I'm sure you could take an example of each one of these and "butterfly affect" to some example of hurting another human, but I could do the exact same thing to any one of [your] lifestyle choices.
Maybe? But until we get to the point where this is universally true, or I forget how good a prime fillet tastes, I don't see a good reason to stop eating meat.
Plenty of things you consume create suffering, in plants, in animals, but also in humans. Therefore, why just focus on killing certain animals?
Other ways can also be more beneficial overall, such as favoring local farms which respect animals. Those exist, although their products are more expensive. In the alpine mountains where I grew up, cows and goats had undoubtedly a better life than most humans on earth.
You can also change the way to work and consume - all of this vegan ethic isn't very coherent if, as a manager, you pressure your subordinates to the maximum, and fire your coworker who you suspect that she just got pregnant.
No one is pushing for these changes you suggest and to take a stance suggests a social disorder or mental illness.
Edit: I think you mean Algae (which is EPA) Edit2: My mistake, I read Algal as ALA rather than Algae (algal)
The cultivated strains have been selected and/or genetically engineered to have enhanced production of certain long-chain omega-3 fatty acids.
The composition of an "algal" oil ("algal" is the adjective derived from "alga", "algae" is the plural of "alga") depends on the particular strain that the vendor has used in production.
The first cultivated strains produced only DHA, but in recent years most vendors use strains that allow them to sell oil that has a mixture 2:1 of DHA and EPA, with minor quantities of other long-chain omega-3 fatty acids.
For growing it would be difficult to obtain a good strain. The strains used by commercial producers were originally isolated from some mangrove forests or other such places on sea shores, but then they have passed through years of selection and/or gene manipulation. Even when a good strain would be available, a culture that is grown in less controlled conditions could be susceptible to being wiped out by a disease, I have no idea.
In any case, I think the difficulty is in the oil extraction, not in the culture. In industrial conditions the extraction could be made with supercritical carbon dioxide, for maximum cleanness of the extracted oil, but that would not be feasible at home. Using an organic solvent, like hexane, might be possible at home, but that would be dangerous and there is the risk of contamination of the edible oil with solvent residues.
Accurate chemical analysis of the oil would be needed, to determine the fatty acid profile and validate the extraction method.
But these results seem to say at higher concentrations ALA lowers risk of EOD. Which tends to refute the belief that only DHA/EPA lower chronic inflammation or that EOD is not just a story about inflammation.
The abstract only partitions the omega-3 acids in DHA and non-DHA.
While non-DHA includes ALA, without any concrete evidence that ALA has some direct role, it is more likely that the correlation seen with non-DHA refers not to ALA, but to the other long-chain omega-3 fatty acids besides DHA.
Humans can elongate ALA into useful long-chain acids, but the efficiency of this is typically lower in males than in females and lower in old people than in young people. Usually pregnant women have the best conversion efficiency.
Unless you monitor your blood composition, you cannot know if eating ALA (e.g. flax seeds or oil, or walnuts) can be sufficient for you. If you are an older male, it is very likely that eating ALA cannot be enough for avoiding deficiency.
Nevertheless, it remains at least 3 times more expensive than a fish oil, e.g. cod liver oil (I mean price per content of omega-3 fatty acids, not per volume; when not diluted to fool the customers, "algal" oil has a double concentration in comparison with fish oil, i.e. 5 mL of "algal" oil are equivalent with 10 mL of fish oil).
Taking daily a decent dose of "algal" oil can be more expensive than the daily protein intake required by a human, if that is taken from cheap sources (e.g. legumes and chicken meat). Allocating a major part of the budget for food to a supplement taken in minute quantities seems excessive.
I am not aware of any serious reason for the high cost of "algal" oil. A decade ago, it was much more expensive, e.g. 8 times or more in comparison with cod liver oil. Then the price has dropped to 3 times, and then it has diminished no more, remaining at 3 times for 5 years or more.
I believe that it should be possible to further reduce the cost of "algal" oil to make it an acceptable substitute for fish oil, but it seems that the producers are content with their niche market of rich vegans and they do not make any effort to reduce the cost in order to enlarge their market.
I have taken occasionally "algal" oil, to test it, but as long as it remains a luxury food I cannot use it to replace the cod liver oil that I am taking regularly, despite desiring to do so.
This is much better than nothing, but it is far from a daily intake comparable to that of the populations who live in places with access to cheap sea fish, where such fish are a significant fraction of their food (e.g. Japan).
If your target is to match the diet of such populations, that means e.g. 5 mL per day of non-diluted "algal" oil, i.e. a teaspoon of such oil (or 10 mL of fish oil), which contains around 2 grams of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids.
That would be much more expensive when using "algal" oil, at least judging after the prices seen e.g. on Amazon.
In order to not scare the customers, many sources of "algal" oil have a similar price with fish oil, but only because they contain much less omega-3 fatty acids per capsule. If you read the fine print, then you discover the true price ratio.
Thus the price of equivalent fish oil is about 25 cents, a ratio of more than 2.6.
If you add to your price sales tax and shipping, it is likely that you arrive to the 3 times higher price that I have mentioned.
Because in most days I eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients, which is significantly cheaper than industrially-produced food, I can eat very healthy and tasty food for about $5 per day (in Europe).
The food includes the equivalent in fish oil of 4 of your gummies, which might cost around $1.50 with taxes and shipping.
Paying 30% of the daily budget for food only for a supplement taken in a quantity negligible in comparison with the other food, does not seem right.
Gummy supplements are questionable, especially for supplements that can have strong flavors and odors by themselves.
If you’re taking algal based gummies and thinking they taste good, they likely either have very little omega-3 or the ingredients have been so heavily processed that I’d start questioning if the omega-3 survived the processing
A lot of the common wisdoms about fish oil and omega-3 were based on early studies that had some too good to be true results. As studies were scaled up to more participants and more rigorous methods many of the amazing early results gave way to less impressive or even null results.
I think it’s a good idea to get a mix of omega-3s in your diet, but given everything I’ve seen I don’t think it’s all that important to start micro optimizing everything with isolated supplements. Consume a mixed variety of sources and try to get some fish in there every once while.
The importance of DHA specifically in this study is a good example of how individual studies don’t tell the whole story. This could be a spurious result that is correlated with something else that leads to elevated DHA in the blood (diet choices). Supplementing isolated DHA could miss whatever the real factor was.
ALA is very weakly converted to the other fatty acids but it also has benefits in its own right. It's a pretty interest antioxidant being active in both fat and water
If I had afib I'd talk to a doctor about it before taking it and probably would stay well under 1G on any day I don't eat fish and skip it entirely on a day that I do.
Not a dr, not a health professional, not anyone you should listen to perhaps at all, but this is my understanding.
Doctors err on the side of "I read a note that said omega 3 = bad for afib" and stop thinking from that point onward.
The TL;DR (IIRC) is that we tend to only see this in trials where atrial fib is a tertiary endpoint so there’s not really compelling data to suggest AF is a risk.
But give it a listen and see what you think, it was a while ago I listened to it and I’m not qualified to give actual advice!
Do I need to eat fish twice a week? 5 times? Do I need to supplement because there is no way to eat enough fish?
Would love some practical guidance tacked on to this
- hemp hearts (complete protein, goes best with oatmeal for breakfast, on salads, or in soups for an extra bit of nutty / fatty flavor)
- pumpkin seeds (also good source of iron, iirc)
- algae-based supplement (currently taking an omega3 + vit D + vit K combo capsule from nordic naturals)
Cows eat grass for protein, we can't really skip the middle man and eat grass to get protein.
I don't know if it's true, but it wouldn't be unusual for there to be benefit from getting omega 3 from fish rather than algea because of something like this. AFAIK, we mostly only know about the benefits of eating fish.
The correlative effect is quite clear, i.e people who have high omega 3 levels (eat a lot of fish) have health benefits.
But in random controlled trials Omega 3 supplements have not had convincing effects.
It might be because the supplements aren't very good, or because there's actually something completely different going on, like fish displaces less healthy foods from the diet.
Some people aim for huge amounts of EPA/DHA but I don't think there's really much evidence that you need 3g/day or whatever the latest broscience is.
Mackerel is particularly high although it doesn't taste great to me compared to salmon, 100g of mackerel has ~4g of EPA/DHA so eating that a couple of times a week is probably more than enough.
Also there is some (although much less) in white fish, there can be significant amounts in shellfish, and tinned tuna has a surprisingly high amount. So all of that adds up if you eat those as well
Unless you’re also consuming all the oil from the can, prefer fish canned in water to canned in oil — because apparently the omega-3s can leach out into oil, but they’re not water-soluble.
Btw, trout is also up there (though not as high as salmon) and is a lovely mild-flavored fish.
It's not thaaat fishy, I didn't grow up eating it. After having it a few times it really grew on me.
Super cheap and an easy way to get it into my diet. I have 2-3 tins per week. I eat it for breakfast mashed on bread (our bread is like a hard cracker), sometimes with a bit of mustard, or butter spread first.
Maybe genetics, I'm guessing all my ancestors grew up eating dairy and some meat and not so much fish.
It used to be traditional in England to eat kippers for breakfast once a week but that's more or less gone extinct
So here we go again. First it was cholesterol, which was then rebutted, so people (myself included) started eating eggs every day. And now this. You can't win!
Eggs are believed to lead to adverse outcomes because of: 1. Their high cholesterol content. 2. Their SFA content.
I'm not sure what you mean by cholesterol being rebutted. The only thing like that I'm really aware of is the dietary guidelines de-prioritising dietary cholesterol, but that decision was made because when making DGs, people want to focus on the biggest levers we can pull. Dietary cholesterol _does_ have a negative impact on health, but it also has a threshold effect at around 400mg/d after which it has considerably less impact (unless you're part of the ~20% of the population who are "cholesterol hyper responders").
Because most people eating a SAD are already at that threshold, the decision was made to take dietary cholesterol off the headline recommendations, but if you read the details in the DGs and the meta-analyses that drive them, they still point to lowering dietary cholesterol as a smart health move.
I frequently see this change portrayed as "no longer recommending the lowering of dietary cholesterol" or "admitting they were wrong about dietary cholesterol", but that's not really what happened.
* 217,122 participants whose data was extracted from the UK biobank database
* Out of those 217,122, 325 got early onset dementia over an average of 8.3 years
* The vast percentage of data came from exactly one blood draw per person between 2006 and 2010 at the beginning of the biobank study
Omega-3 Blood | Hazard Risk | Rate of Incidence | Percent Incidence
Level Quintiles | | Over 8.3 Years | Over 8.3 Years
-------------------|------------------|--------------------|------------------
Q1 (Lowest 20%) | 1.0 | 193 in 100,000 | 0.193%
Q4 (High) | 0.62 | 120 in 100,000 | 0.120%
Q5 (Highest 20%) | 0.60 | 116 in 100,000 | 0.116%However, the estimates are still probably overestimated. Confounding, p-hacking, publication bias, all move us towards larger estimates.
Observational studies like these are useful for guiding future research, but, on their own, they're essentially useless for informing lifestyle changes.
Natto-serrazime is probably an excellent complement as it is on the other side and is a dissolver. (Noteworthy: Pterostilbene + Glucosamine similar to EPA reduces fibrosis)
The interesting connection is how this is needed when we are older, but not younger. When younger ERa activates more which does this all on its own. This is the connection to why 2/3 of alzheimer's are post-menopausal women and why HRT is important.
Edit: and to tie this to APOE as it is the gene most associated with Alzheimer's. e4/e4 requires more choline so someone with e4/e4 is more likely to be choline deficient. EPA/DHA usually attach to Phosphatidylcholine (PC) when in the blood/brain. PEMT is a gene controlled by ERa to make choline, but from the above less ERa activation and we make less PEMT so less choline and less PC. Choline is the precursor to Acetylcholine (primary neurotransmitter for memory and focus and essential for REM sleep). This is why Choline is known to help with Alzheimer's.
*edited: %-points instead of %
That 0.08% reduction would mean approximately 28,000 fewer EOD cases - not to be sniffed at!
What would it mean for salmon stocks and increased environmental damage?
To be clear my preference would be to source n3s from algal supplements and, once food safety testing for humans is complete, n3s from GM rapeseed.
In time I hope we end up with lab meat/plant-based meat alternatives that use these n3s so we can get the benefits of fish without the environmental and ethical concerns of getting n3s from fish.
And to be clear, many things that people worry about is less likely than that. Homicides (over an 8 year period about about 0.04 per 1000 people), terrorism (vanishingly small), and on and on.
None of this means that people should stock up on omega-3s, and as likely the study is actually finding a correlation with something else (e.g. wealthier people enjoy more fish rich diets and are less exposed to toxins, or something else), but halving something terrifying that isn't that uncommon is legitimately newsworthy.
EDIT: don't assume the causality
Besides there is so much noise here. You ate fish before going to the doctor to get your blood drawn in 2006
natural sources for omega FAs include hemp hearts and pumpkin seeds.
Unfortunately it tends to be more expensive. I have recs if you’re in the UK but not much use otherwise!
I consider myself vegan (although I guess I'm technically not then) but eat mussels, they contain almost everything missing in a vegan diet.
There's a bunch of less harmful stuff you can fill your diet with that just by virtue of displacing terrible things has positive effects.
TBH this sounds way to complicated. How could we survive? My guess is, all the studies are incomplete and flawed in some ways.
" Linseed oil, but not fish oil, leads to a desirable reduction in arachidonic acid (Omega-6) concentration."
There was a big push for this hypothesis in the 2010s, but on closer inspection the only research that seemed to support it was where the “low n3:n6 ratio” cohort were there by virtue of low n3, not high n6.
Where studies compare groups of people where ratios were manipulated but both were at adequate levels, I don’t believe we see any evidence of a deleterious effect.
insurance relies on what philosophers call a veil of ignorance. it only works if we're spreading stochastic risk things that might happen to anyone.
once data gives us perfect foresight into a 90% chance of a million-dollar claim, it’s no longer insurance; it’s just a pre-funded bill. at that point, the pool isn't spreading risk, it's just facilitating a direct wealth transfer. the 'good' risks realize they're just subsidizing a known event for others and they flee the pool, which is exactly how the market for things like LTC collapses.
we're basically at a crossroads where better data is actually making 'insurance' as a concept mathematically impossible for certain risks.
1) We should do whatever it takes to take care of each other no matter the cost, equality
2) The actual details on how to do that for every person in every dimension is not affordable, meaning decisions have to be made to violate rule #1
So now we are back to politics and deciding which ones are more fair than others.
So writing your sentence maybe true, but it's actually naive at the same time to think it can be done in every situation.
The question is, where do we fall on that gradient?
... which is not truly separate from the society in which you live.
If life sucks for your countrymen, then you (not! the royal-you, I mean you: bluGill) will inevitably be stuck dealing with the consequences.
Neighborhoods & communities atomize. Crime increases. Fascism creeps in. The list goes on.
Right?
Right?
Haha no you won't. You'll just raise premiums and nobody will know why.
if you want the purest Omega3 EPA without all the contaminants that are in OTC supplement nonsense (they are completely unregulated and untested by batch)
ask your doctor for a script of generic VASCEPA
CostPlusDrugs has the cheapest generic Vascepa that I've found
The dose is usually two pills a day but trust me on this, start with one for a long time, it takes your GI a long time to handle it without bathroom urgency
What I found from a quick search says the opposite:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7760937/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3534764/
> "An X-ray diffraction study found that EPA and DHA exert different effects on the lipid bilayer of cell membranes. EPA readily incorporates into the cell membrane core and stabilizes it, whereas DHA does not"
> "Why does this matter? Cell membranes are essential for cellular function: not only do they provide structural support for cells, but they also facilitate cell-to-cell communication and nutrient/toxin transport. Different effects of EPA and DHA on membrane stability likely elicit different effects in cell signaling. A second study revealed that in addition to stabilizing cell membranes, EPA is also protective against harmful reactive oxygen species and lipid peroxidation"
basically EPA modulates the immune system, DHA does not
For example, Scott Alexander wrote in 2014 on his blog Slate Star Codex about how Omega-3 lowers crime rates and Omega-6 increases crime rates. And he links to some cool RCTs where you can check the methodology yourself.
Eat your fish!
Which is not nothing but concluding anything about causality is a stretch.
Thing is, we actually have empirics on this, and in reality observational studies comparing intake to intake are concordant in over 90% of cases, so I think we actually have a very strong case for making causal inferences based on replicated epi findings: