How Omega-3s May Slow Biological Aging (New Evidence)

And what it was found is that people with a higher omega-3 intake slowed their age acceleration. So, you know, you're accelerating, your aging is happening at a certain rate. If you're smoking, it's happening at an accelerated rate. If you're taking omega-3, it's slowing that rate of acceleration. But what was really fascinating is that there was synergy. So, when you looked at omega-3 plus vitamin D, it slowed epigenetic aging even further than just omega-3 alone. it slowed it by about 3.3 months. When you looked at all three combined, resistance training, omega-3, and vitamin D, it slowed it by about 3.8 months. So really, it was like these lif these healthy lifestyle factors converging with omega-3 being the thing that's really moving the lever. So excited to be here, Expo West. I had no idea how big of an event this was until I was driving here in traffic and I thought everyone was walking to Disneyland and I'm like, this is this is not the Disneyland crew. Um, so as Harmony mentioned, I am a huge advocate of omega-3. I mean, this started from gosh, when I was a graduate student, I started, you know, supplementing with omega-3 back in 2007. Um, just reading the scientific literature and realizing how important it was. And then when I went on to do my posttock with Dr. Bruce Ames, the late Dr. Bruce Ames um in in he's a UC Berkeley professor but I was at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute and I was researching omega-3 in his lab as well. So it's it's been not only a passion of mine at the personal level but also something that I research and I continue to research as an associate scientist at the Omega-3 fatty acid institute that was founded by Dr. Bill Harris. So today I'm going to be talking about how we can all optimize our longevity with the power of omega-3 delay of age related disease and through the delay of the molecular events that lead to age related disease. And we're talking about cardiovascular disease being a big one, cancer, Alzheimer's disease. These diseases that not only shorten our life expectancy but also decrease the quality of our life, right? We don't want to live the rest of our life with Alzheimer's disease. You know, the last 10 years with Alzheimer's disease or with cancer. This is a standard disclaimer here. I am a scientific researcher and so what I'm presenting here today is not medical advice. It doesn't represent any omega-3 supplement company's views. It is my views. These are my slides. This is what I present when I go around and do presentations. So, just keep that in mind as forformational purposes only. It's not meant to be prescri prescriptive. Okay. So, just to give you an overview of what we're going to talk about today. First, we're going to talk about the role of omega-3 and cardiovascular health. We're going to talk about cardiovascular events. We're going to talk about all cause mortality. Um, and then we're going to talk about some of the mechanisms like inflammation and changing what's called selfu cell fluidity, and we'll talk about what that means. We're going to talk about how omega-3 slows the aging process. It slows biological aging. We're going to talk about how it synergizes with other micronutrients and lifestyle factors like vitamin D and exercise. We're going to talk about the role of omega-3 in delaying age related neurodeenerative disease like Alzheimer's disease. We're going to talk about how it plays a role in preventing brain atrophy as we age and also improving cognitive function. And then we're going to get into the muscle and talk about disuse atrophy when we're not using our muscles and how omega-3 plays a very unique role in helping prevent some of that disuse atrophy and why that's so relevant. And then we're going to talk about the gut. We're going to we're going to finish on the gut, which is actually a major source of inflammation. And so we're going to talk about a unique way that omega-3 is actually playing a role in inhibiting leaky gut. So, I want to just get started with the first slide here, which really highlights the prevalence of omega-3 insufficiency and deficiency. People are not getting omega-3 fatty acids from their foods. So, about 90% of the US population does not eat enough seafood and about 80% globally of the population not getting enough omega-3 from their diet. Which leads me to this really important study that was published out of Harvard several ye several years ago that identified low omega-3 intake as one of the top six preventable causes of death. So there are three types of omega-3 fatty acids. There's alphal leninoleic acid ALA that is found in plant foods like walnuts like flax seeds, chia seeds. And then there's the marine type of omega-3 fatty acids iicosa pentaeninoic acid EPA and docahexaoyic acid DHA. And those are found primarily in seafood. And so what this Harvard study identified was that people weren't eating enough of the EPA and DHA from seafood. And why is that important? What am I what do I mean by top six preventable causes of death? Well, what these researchers did was they looked at all the different things that people have control of in their life and diseases that increase early mortality. And top six of those were things like smoking. So, if you avoided smoking, you would, you know, live longer. If you didn't, you would shorten your life expectancy. Hypertension, type two diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and not getting enough omega-3 from your diet. Right? Nobody is thinking about that. Everyone's thinking about all these other disease. they're not thinking about what they're not getting from their food. It was actually found that 84,000 deaths a year were attributed to people not getting enough omega-3 and by people I mean in the United States were not getting enough omega-3 from their diet. And um compare this to people eating trans fats. So trans fats, everyone knows it's terrible for cardiovascular health. Um it leads to cardiovascular disease and that was attributed to 82,000 deaths per year. And when anyone walks into a grocery store, you know, you can pull into any aisle and pick up, you know, food and it'll say zero trans fat, zero trans fat. It's marketed everywhere. Everyone's thinking about not consuming trans fat because it leads to early mortality. But nobody's walking into a grocery store and thinking, am I getting enough omega-3? Am I getting my fatty salmon? Am I am I getting enough seafood? Nobody's thinking about that. But they should be. It's very important for our health. So, let's talk about, you know, how we can measure omega-3 and how we know it's important for health. Well, there's large large studies that have been done, longitudinal studies, Framingham cohort being being a big one, where lots of different blood biomarkers have been measured in individuals, including the omega-3 index. So, the omega-3 index is a marker of your omega-3 fatty acid levels in in blood cells. So, it's a long-term marker because your red blood cells take about 120 days to turn over. So, it's nice to have more of a long-term marker of omega-3 versus just looking at omega-3 and plasma phospholipids, which to some degree could be reflective more of what your, you know, recent diet was versus more of your long-term omega-3 status. So, Dr. Bill Harris um and his and his colleague Clemens Van Shaki had identified this omega-3 index back in I think it was like 2002 2004 something like that and so um when they when they measured you know thousands of people's omega-3 index what they found was that those people with a high omega-3 index that's indicated as 8% or more so 8% of the fatty acids in the cell in the red blood cell membranes were composed of these omega-3 fatty acids s um they had a 90% lower risk of sudden cardiac death compared to people with a low omega-3 index being 4% or below. 90% lower risk of sudden cardiac death. That means, you know, if someone had a heart attack and they had a high omega-3 index, they were 90% less likely to die from that heart attack than someone who had a heart attack that had a low omega-3 index. That's a big difference. And if you think about heart attacks, I mean, every 30 seconds, somebody in the United States is having a heart attack. So this is a this is a really important finding, but it's not only important for reducing the risk of sudden cardiac death, it's also been linked to our life expectancy. So yet again, looking at the omega-3 index in people um I think this was maybe the Framingham, yeah, this is the Framingham cohort. Again, this is a very large population of people where a variety of different biomarkers have been measured. Those individuals with a high omega-3 index of 8% or higher had a 5year increased life expectancy compared to people with a low omega-3 index of 4% or lower. I mean, 5 years is a big difference in life expectancy. And really, all we're talking about here is the difference between having a high omega-3 index and a low omega-3 index. If you think about other countries that actually do eat a lot of seafood, like Japan for example, in Japan, their average omega-3 index is 10%. So they're in that high omega-3 index range. In the United States, our omega-3 index on average is about 5%. So we're pretty close to that 4% which is the low range. And if you look at the difference in life expectancy between people that are in the United States versus people that live in Japan, it's about 5year difference. So people in Japan have a 5-year increased life expectancy compared to people in the United States from that same Framingham cohort. And this is the data that I find so compelling. Um and I really you may have heard me speak about this before and I really like to talk about it and I like people to see the graph because visually it's it's just so clear. So what Bill and his colleagues did was they took this Framingham cohort and they took the people with the high omega-3 and the low omega-3 index and they said, "Okay, I want to look at these individuals and I want to specifically look at smokers versus non-smokers with a high and low omega-3." Because we know that smoking, one of the worst things you can do for your cardiovascular health is smoke cigarettes. A lot of people associate cancer, lung cancer with smoking when in fact, you know, lung cancer increases in a sort of dose dependent manner. The more cigarettes that you smoke, you know, the higher the risk of lung cancer and that sort of compounds over time. When it comes to cardiovascular disease risk, that's an exponential increase. Like you, it doesn't take much. And that is because, you know, the damage that the tobacco smoke is doing to the endothelial cells and the inflammation that's being generated really really bad for cardiovascular health. Um, and so if you look at individuals that have the highest life expectancy, that would be in green, they were non-smokers with a high omega-3 index. They live the longest. Big surprise. People that live the shortest life expectancy is what you would expect. Smokers with a low omega-3 index. That's red. So, they're dying sooner. But what's so fascinating is that when you take the smokers that actually have a high omega-3 index, they have the exact same life expectancy as the non-smokers with a low omega-3 index. And really, you can look at this data and go, "Wow, I don't smoke, but it's like I smoke." You know, low omega-3 is like smoking when it comes to at least our overall life expectancy. Um, of course, all the smokers when I present this data think, "Oh, yes, I got to take omega-3." Of course, that's the wrong way to look at it, right? Because you want to be that green curve. You want to be the non-smoker with a high omega-3 index. But it really just highlights, you know, we know, and we're going to talk a lot about this today, that omega-3 fatty acids play a very, very important role in cardiovascular health. And that is why one, I think they're really similar, not getting enough of that in your diet is very similar to consuming trans fats. We're always worried about the things that we're, you know, the toxins that we're getting when also we should be worrying about what we're not getting because what we're not getting, our body needs certain nutrients to function normally and optimally. And what we're not getting is also like a toxin. We're we we are we're smoking when we're not getting enough omega-3. So let's talk about cardiovascular health and the gold standard for cardiovascular health which would be randomized placeboc control trials of which there have been quite a few omega-3 fatty acid trials that have looked at cardiovascular health. So the first one is that I think has probably one of the most robust effects is the reduce it trial. This was about a five-year randomized controlled trial where individuals were separated. These are individuals with high risk for cardiovascular disease. Many of them are already on some kind of firstline standard of care treatment like statins for example and others and they were given either four grams of vipa this is a pharmaceutical grade prescription form of purified EPA or they were given a placebo control for five years and after the five years a variety of different outcomes were looked at right and what was found was that the people that were given this vipa this high dose EPA and it was four grams. They actually had about a 25% lower um risk of all sorts of cardiovascular events, death, eskeemic events. So, we're talking a pretty big effect here on lowering the risk of heart attacks and strokes and eskeemic, you know, es schemic events. The next trial that had positive results was the vital study. And the vital study was a really big trial and it's still ongoing and people are still harvesting data from this trial. Um, and it there's a lot of components to the trial, but I'm going to talk about the omega-3 component where individuals were given a very low dose of omega-3 fatty acids. Actually, they were given LVA. This is another prescription form of omega-3. In this trial, they were only given 840 milligrams of Levvesa, which is a combination of both EPA and DHA, or they were given a placebo control. And this was also a 5-year trial. After the five years, some of the secondary outcomes that were looked at were actually improved with respect to cardiovascular health. So individuals that were given the the prescription in Luvvesa had a 28% lower heart attack risk and they had a 17% lower coronary artery disease risk compared to those given a placebo and that was at a pretty low dose. I mean we're talking less than a gram a day. So pretty compelling data. There's also the strength trial. Um this was four grams of EPA and DHA. This was Epanova. Um, Epanova was and is omega-3 fatty acids in free fatty acid form. So, usually these fatty acids are asterified. Both of these that I'm talking about here, prescription form, vipa and lubevesa are in a ethylster form, which is not quite as bioavailable as being in a triglyceride form, which is what you find naturally if you're getting omega-3 from fish. Um, and so free fatty acids are actually very harsh on the gut. I remember this is something that I was looking at when I was a posttock in uh Bruce Aim's lab and my colleague at the time Mark Shagnaga was doing some of these experiments. He's a gut health expert and he was basically um looking at you know free fatty acids and free fatty acids can actually be very hard on the gut almost like a detergent. So um I'm not sure that Epino has gone anywhere since then but it's it's kind of um researchers are looking into the the impacts of actually taking free fatty acid form of omega-3 maybe being a little bit hard on the gut. So that trial was actually ended early because it wasn't really showing any positive results. But the take-home here is that the the reduce it trial and the vital study really gold standard showing, you know, compared to placebo that if you take omega-3 fatty acids, even at a lower dose, it is reducing the cardiovascular events that occur with age. And there's many reasons why omega- omega-3 fatty acids are beneficial for cardiovascular health. At the top of the list would be inflammation. So, you know, inflammation is a driver of heart disease. It's a driver of atheroscerosis. And omega-3 fatty acids are in my view the most potent naturally occurring dietary compound that has anti-inflammatory effects and it has it through a variety of ways. So both EPA and DHA, they get metabolized and their metabolites help resolve inflammation. So if we're looking at EPA, they make resolins, the E the E series of resol resolins. DHA makes the D series, but it also makes the protectins and the neuroprotectins. And these molecules, they're not blunt force stopping inflammation. Like you need inflammation, right? We there's a reason why our immune system is active. You want it to be active, but you want it to shut off when it's supposed to shut off. And that's what these omega-3s are really doing. They're keeping inflammation in check. The other way that omega-3 fatty acids are cardioprotective have to do with the cells and the fluidity of them. And I I told you we'd talk about this. So both DHA and EPA get incorporated into our cell membranes. They're a very important part of our cell membranes. These are lipid billayers that surround our cell and they really change the way our cells are, you know, moving. So what they do is they make them more flexible instead of really stiff. So trans fats make cell membranes really stiff and omega-3 fatty acids are the exact opposite. And it's very important like if you're talking about the endothelial cells that are lining your vascular system, your arteries, if you're talking about the cells that are surrounding your mitoardium, your paricardium, you know, you know, surrounding your heart, those you want all those cells to be flexible and not stiff. And in fact, the stiffening of our heart with age has to do with that paricardium and myocardium stiffness. And so omega-3 fatty acids are really doing the opposite of what the stiffening is. It's making them more fluid. And that's another mechanism by which omega-3 fatty acids are very protective for the heart. So cardoprotective. Okay, I want to shift gears and talk about some data that I'm super excited about. This data has been emerging now for I don't know the past eight or nine years. And by emerging, what I mean is we've had continual studies coming out where it's just one after the other validating confirming what has been shown, which is that omega-3 fatty acids slow biological aging. And what I mean about that is, you know, we all all of us sitting in this room, we're born, we have our birthday, we have our age, right? So I'm 47 and a half. And you know, that's my chronological age. That doesn't necessarily mean that if you look at the age of the cells in my organs, in my blood, in my liver, that they're going to look 47 years old. Depending on a variety of both genetic, but also lifestyle factors. Importantly, you know, your your cells in your body can actually be either, you know, much younger or much older than your chronological age. And it really depends on how you're living your life. And so biological age, typically, we measure this through epigenetic aging. And these epigenetic aging clocks were developed by Dr. Steve Horvath when he was at UCLA. And there's a a variety of different clocks that are used. There's the DNA grimage, the DNA pheno age. Um, and those are two of the major ones. And then there's some other ones as well. So, we're going to talk a little bit about these epigenetic clocks. And what these are are essentially just looking at DNA methylation patterns. And these methylation patterns are exactly that. They're a pattern that change with age. And the changing of these patterns really seems to pre be a precursor to the phenotype of aging into the outcomes of aging. Right? to the phenotype being frail, you know, having diseases, then the outcomes, dying from heart, cardiovascular disease, dying from cancer, right? So, so the the epigenetic aging clocks are very sensitive to the molecular events that are causing aging. And that's why we can measure these clocks and make an estimation about what our biological age is. So, one of the first studies here, this was in 2019, showed that omega-3 does slow biological aging. was this was a prospective study looking at people that um basically reported their omega-3 intake and the DNA grimage clock was used in this this um study and the DNA grimage clock is a very very accurate clock um that can predict when someone is going to die. It predicts like your your time to death basically. And what it was found is that people with a higher omega-3 intake slowed their age acceleration. So, you know, you're accelerating, your aging is happening at a certain rate. If you're smoking, it's happening at an accelerated rate. If you're taking omega-3, it's slowing that rate of acceleration. So, it's slowing age acceleration. Another study that actually published pretty recently in 2024. This study also looked at omega-3 intake, both, you know, dietary, supplemental intake, and found that omega-3 did slow biological aging, and it really mattered. The dose really mattered, and this was based on gender. So, for women, it took about at least one gram of omega-3 to start to slow biological aging in women, whereas for men, it actually happened at a lower dose. It happened at around 461 milligrams a day. So, um, it seems like men men must probably must have more inflammation going on because they were they were really they seem to to be able to have an effect even at a lower dose. Um, but this is really interesting because you see like once you hit that one gram mark, that dotted line, this is this is, you know, age acceleration. You see that it slows, right? You're slowing your age acceleration after that one gram mark for for women and then a little bit sooner than that for men. Yeah. Another study showing that. But even more what I'm even more excited about is the randomized control trial because that really is, you know, it's it's it gets rid of the confounding factors because at the end of the day, a correlation study is is just that you're correlating things and you try to, you know, take in take into account all the potential other confounding factors. But when you have a randomized control trial, then you can really definitively say this is actually slowing aging. And so what this trial did was it this was in in Switzerland and um these people were very healthy to start. So I'll say this aging epigenetic aging wasn't found to be slowed by vitamin D alone which other studies starting with vitamin D deficient populations have found that vitamin D does supplementation does slow it. In this study they only took 2,000 IUs a day. If you're deficient it takes about 4,000 IUs a day to bring you up to a sufficient status. So in this study they didn't didn't see any effect on sewing of biological aging in you know the vitamin D group exercise alone. So this exercise was resistance training. It was 30 minutes of resistance training three days a week. Keep in mind that 90% of the participants in Switzerland at the at the start of this study were already physically active which is outrageous. So these are clearly physically active people. These are healthy adults. Okay? You would never find that in the United States, but they were already physically active. So there was really wasn't much, you know, slowing of epigenetic aging after they're already being physically active, adding, you know, the resistance training on top of that. But adding the omega-3 alone did slow epigenetic aging in this population. So this was the only thing that really had a profound effect. But what was really fascinating is that there was synergy. So when you looked at omega-3 plus vitamin D, it slowed epigenetic aging even further than just omega-3 alone. It slowed it by about 3.3 months. When you looked at all three combined, resistance training, omega-3, and vitamin D, it slowed it by about 3.8 months. So really, it was like these lifesy lifestyle factors converging with omega-3 being the thing that's really moving the lever. And you might look at me and go, well Rhonda, I mean 3.8 months, what does that mean? like that doesn't matter. I'm not talking about extending your life expectancy by 3.8 months. I'm talking about slowing aging. So, we're talking about a cumulative effect, right? This is going to keep compounding year after year. And what I love about this study is they looked at that. So, so the 3.8 months um of epigenetic aging slowing that was the combined omega-3 vitamin D and strength training that also reduced prefrailty by 40%. So even though it was only about a four-month slowing of epigenetic aging, it reduced frailty by 40%. And it reduced invasive cancer by 61%. Wow. Exactly. I mean, this is this is pretty exceptional. The omega-3 alone without any other, you know, vitamin D or resistance training reduced infections by 13%. And it decreased falls by 13%. So what the point I want to make here is that I know Steve Horvath who developed these epigenetic aging clocks you know over a decade ago. He's a friend of mine. I talked to him the other day about this. I was so excited about this data. Um you know he he says that these these epigenetic agent clocks are very sensitive to inflammation. In fact it's one of the things that really accelerates the aging process inflammation. And we know that omega-3 is as I mentioned it has very powerful anti-inflammatory effects. I talked about resolving inflammation. EPA also can sort of directly affect inflammation through the lucatryins and the prostaglandins. It can reduce a little bit of of those as well. So the the fact that omega-3 is really having a profound effect on biological aging in my mind is very important. We know we have the omega-3 index data and we know the outcomes are also affected. we know cardiovascular death, you know, is lower. We know that you're increasing life expectancy. And here we have, you know, in real time, it's actually slowing the aging process. So, um, this trial, by the way, was a two-year trial. So, I think that it's really important to keep in mind that you can have an outsiz effect by something as little as in this study, you know, taking, let's see, what was the dose? Um, in this study, the dose was it was one gram. It was one gram, as little as one gram a day had an effect on slowing aging. I mean, that's pretty profound. And so, as I mentioned, these epigenetic clocks are very sensitive to aging. Sorry, to inflammation. And inflammation is at the core of aging. I mean, this is known. It is really, really one of the I would say molecular processes that is driving all these hallmarks of aging. It is driving, you know, damage to your DNA that leads to cancer. It's driving damage to proteins that's leading to them aggregating and not being degraded. And you're getting these aggregates in your brain leading to Alzheimer's disease and in your cardiovascular system leading to cardiovascular disease, atheroscerosis. You know, it is fundamentally driving cancer. I mean, inflammation is at the heart of cancer. It's really at the core of every age related disease. And we now know it's literally just accelerating the way our DNA is changing with time, right? This is the epigenetic clock data. It's really just at the at the fundamental level changing our DNA and accelerating that. And so, you know, I remember there was a study that was published, you know, about 10 years ago. This was out of Japan. And in Japan, they have a high percentage of the centinarians, people that live to be 100. And the semi super centinarians, this is people live to be 105. And also the cent the super centinarians that would be 110. And this Japanese studies looked at you know all these biomarkers to see you know if I look at older adults if I look at the centinarians and the semi and the super centinarians like what what sort of patterns arise what can I what can I tell from these biomarkers that's going to predict whether or not they're going to live to be you know the next stage. And the only thing that was able to predict whether or not someone was going to go from being an older adult to someone that lives to be 100 and someone that lives to be 100 to 105 and so on was suppressing inflammation. Nothing else predicted it. Not low blood glucose, not lipids, not kidney function, liver function. Nothing else predicted it except for the ability to suppress inflammation. And not only did that predict the ability to live to the next, you know, 105 or 110 being really old, but it also predicted cognitive function. So people were more cognitively aware and they didn't have neurogenerative disease as well if they were able to have low inflammation. And again, you know, omega-3 fatty acids are doing just that. They are suppressing inflammation. They're resolving inflammation. They are doing it through a variety of mechanisms. They have these specialized pro-resolving mediators that are really keeping the immune response in check. And that is important because our our immune system is going to be activated every day. We're being exposed to all kinds of things in addition to pathogens when you want it to be activated. I mean, just air pollution that we're breathing in constantly. Right now, you know, just normal, you know, diet, you know, try you try to eat as healthy as you can. Inflammation's being generated in the gut is constantly being generated. And so, you really want to have something that keeps that in check. Um, it also plays a role in increasing the cellular cleanup inside of ourselves, autophagy, and that is also very important for aging as well as helping reprogram cells. But we're not going to get into all that today. Okay, I want to shift gears and talk about another really important area with omega-3 fatty acids and how it basically affects our brain aging, cognition, and the way our brain is aging. Omega-3 plays a very important role in the brain throughout the lifespan from we're talking in uterero development when you're inside of your your mom's belly and and your you're developing from that point even preconception I mean it's it's it plays an important role at every life stage right now we're going to talk about more of the end type we're going to talk about neurodeenerative disease but I just want you to keep in mind that it's every stage is very important for brain health so Bill and his colleagues have also published some studies is looking at the Framingham cohort looking at omega-3 index and Alzheimer's disease. And so again, what Bill found is that individuals that had a high omega-3 index had about a 50% reduced risk of Alzheimer's disease compared to people with a low omega-3 index. So again, this is correlative data. We're going to talk about strengthening that with um some some intervention and randomized control trials as well. But I mean 50% reduction is really really a big deal when it comes to Alzheimer's disease. Well, other studies have actually looked at um omega-3 fatty acid levels and reducing Alzheimer's disease risk and found a dose dependent decrease. And this always strengthens data when you can find something that is dose dependent. So for every increase in so 100 millgram per day increase in omega-3 fatty acids that was associated with lowering the risk of Alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline by 10%. So as you kept going up 100 milligrams more you had a 10% lower risk of Alzheimer's disease and you went up 10% 100 milligrams more of omega-3 fatty acid again an additional 10% decrease in Alzheimer's disease risk again. And so that's probably why when you get up to that high omega-3 index, which we'll talk about, it takes about two grams a day to get to that high omega-3 index. If you have a low omega-3 index, you could see where that 50% reduction comes into play because you keep going up in a dose dependent manner. And this is an analysis of multiple different studies here showing that omega-3 reduces Alzheimer's disease risk in a dose dependent manner. We also know that higher omega-3 index is associated with a larger hippocample brain volume. So as we reach older adulthood and I mean the age of about 65 we start to lose 1 to 2% of our hippocampus per year. So our brain our hippocampus our brain is atrophying and specifically our hippocampus is atrophing and our hippocampus is very important for a lot of different brain functions. learning and memory being two of the most important. And so you don't want to lose 1 to 2% of your your hippocample brain mass per year because that's going to affect your memory. It's going to affect your cognition, your your executive function. It's going to affect everything, right? So there are studies that have found that a higher omega-3 index is associated with larger hypocample brain volume. And um and that was also something that was found to be dose dose dependent as well. And so it was delaying it's it's basically staving off that losing of the hippocample volume. So you're basically you're going against what happens naturally with age because inflammation plays a role in hippocample atrophy. And so if you can if you can negate some of that inflammation, you're going to keep some of your brain mass. And of course that's probably partly why you see a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease as well. And there's also been some studies looking at omega-3 fatty acid supplementation in individuals with mild cognitive decline and how that can help improve cognition um after taking omega-3 fatty acids versus placebo. So there have been a few studies. This is this is a metaanalysis of multiple studies as well. Um sorry though this is this is one study that did it was a two-year trial. These patients had uh mild cognitive impairment and they took two grams a day of omega-3 for two years and after the two years they had improvements in cognitive function, executive function um and importantly they actually had lower plasma biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease. So they had lower amaloid beta in their in in their plasma but they also had increased markers of neuronal autophagy. So what that means so neurons are they're not constantly make you're not constantly making new neurons. They're called post postmotic. So basically what you have is you know pretty much what what you're going to get. And so our our our brain has ways to to get rid of you know bad stuff that is accumulated in them and that is through a process called autophagy. Um and so autophagy is very active in the brain because it's very important to to keep our neurons healthy. And so there's biomarkers in the blood that are showing that that's going up in people that supplemented with omega-3 compared to the placebo. So I think that um this is alo also just strengthening the whole picture here that I'm that I'm trying to present to you, which is that omega-3 fatty acids are very important for brain health. They're very important for preventing inflammation in the brain, which does lead to brain atrophy and also lead to neurogenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease, you know, dementia. And so, um, it's it's something to keep in mind. As I mentioned, 90% of the US population does not get enough omega-3 from their diet. So, there's a variety of reasons why omega-3 is improving brain health, inflammation being at the core, we talked about that. Um, but also the the cell membranes. It's it's in our in our neurons, the cell membranes are very important. And the fluidity, much like in our cardiovascular system, the fluidity is extremely important because all of our transporters and receptors for neurotransmitters, they're all in that cell membrane. It's very important for the structure and function of our receptors and transporters. And so, it's globally affecting neurotransmission. When you have a cell membrane that's not getting omega-3 and uh in the in the brain, what happens is and there's studies that have shown if for example you take animals like mice and you make them omega-3 deficient, their glucose transporters aren't functioning right because they're structurally like the membranes too stiff and so the transporter is not right and so glucose can't get into the brain. And so this over time, yeah, it's going to affect your cognition in the short term. You're going to feel brain foggy. It's not going to you're not going to feel sharp. But over time, what's going to happen is low glucose in the brain affects a lot of different processes, right? Neurotransmission. It also leads to the accumulation of tow tangles. This is a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease as well. And so you really it's really essential for their cell membranes as well um as boosting neurotransmission. So there have been studies also showing that EPA and DHA are important for dopamine, serotonin. you know, when you have high inflammation, it stops the release of serotonin. You're not able to release serotonin from the from the preynapse. And so, um, it's really just globally affecting neurotransmission, neuroplasticity. It's affecting the transporters, and it's affecting inflammation. So, there's a lot of ways that omega-3 is really behind the scenes improving the way your brain is aging. And when you don't have omega-3 there, you know, not only is it not countering the inflammation, but it's affecting just global nutrient transport into your brain and global neurotransmission. Okay, we're going to shift gears now again and talk about omega-3 um briefly in the muscle. And this is something that not a lot of people are aware of and I think it's an important topic. So um that you know some of these studies that we're going to talk about come from Stu Phillip and Chris Mclo when he was a postoc in Stu Phillips's lab at McMaster University. Chris Mclo now has gone on he has his own lab and he's continuing to research this topic but let's take a a step back for a moment and just talk about muscle mass and you know during the aging process because it's important to understand this to understand how omega-3 is impacting it. So muscle mass is very important for how we're aging. Obviously frailty, you know, if you have a fall, I mean the more muscle mass you have, the less likely you are going to fall. And if you do fall, you're going to you're going to bounce back quicker, right? So as you know, throughout our life, you know, we reach our peak muscle mass at around the age 20 to 30, then we start to lose on average about 8% per decade after that. Now, this is when I say on average, I mean the average person that's probably not really physically active. If you add in resistance training to that mix, you're probably not losing 8% per decade. The average person then when they hit the age of 70 starts to lose 15% per decade. And as people get older, they become less physically active. Right? As someone reaches the age of 70 to 80 years old, they have about 60 to 80% of the muscle mass they had when they were 30. I mean, it's really, really a profound decrease. And so you really want to try to increase your muscle mass as much as you can, you know, before you get to that point. And it's important to realize that as we age, so what's important for increasing muscle mass? Amino acids and resistance training, right? The training is the phys the mechanical force helps you increase muscle mass. So um those are the two most important signals for increasing muscle mass. Um as we age, we become less responsive to amino acids. So, it doesn't have the same anabolic effect that it does when you're younger. Amino acids are much more anabolic in a 30-year-old than they are in a 70-year-old, unless they're training. Physical activity and particularly resistance training reensitizes the muscles to amino acids so that it's almost like you're younger again. And that's really, really important. Um, because most people are not training. And so, this is this is called anabolic resistance. You're basically when you get older and you're not physically active, your body is not responding to amino acids. Your muscle is not responding to amino acids the same. And so you're not building muscle the same way you did when you were 30, for example. Why is this important? This is important because disuse atrophy events happen. They happen because they're planned. So surgeries, when you undergoing any kind kind of surgery, you're going to have a period of time when you are not mobile. You are not using your muscles. And when you're not using your muscles, you lose them. You lose them. They atrophy. Um, this could happen because you fell, you had a fall. Uh, so you're not going to be mobile for a period of time while you're recovering. This could happen because you have the flu or some other respiratory disease, and you're not moving around, right? So, there's a lot of reasons why particularly older adults have disuse atrophy events, planned or not planned. And when they lose that muscle, it is catastrophic because they can never gain it back like they had before they lost it. And um it's very very hard for them. And anyone here that has grandparents, parents that are aging that have had these disuse events, you'll see they start to compound. They have one and then another and the next thing you know they're they can barely walk to their car. I mean, they just they're they lose it quickly. It's a very accelerated downhill trajectory. So disuse atrophy is a problem and anything that you can do to slow disuse atrophy is hugely important. Hugely important and this is where Chris and Stu Phillips came in. So they were looking at omega-3 fatty acids and their effect on disuse atrophy. And you can't do this experiment in older adults. It would be unethical because they do lose a lot of muscle mass and it's really hard to gain it back. So they did this study in younger women and um they gave these women for four weeks ahead of time. They gave them five grams of omega-3. It's a high dose of omega-3. Remember prescription forms of omega-3 are about four grams a day. So they were going above that but they were doing it for a month. And the reason they did the high dose is because as in any experiment whether we're talking about creatine or omega-3 there's a loading phase where there where um in this case both both the researchers Stu and U Chris Mclo were trying to get omega-3 fatty acids to accumulate in the cell membranes in the muscle because it takes about one month for that to happen. So take so that's why they preloaded them for one month with with five grams of omega-3 and then they immobilized their leg. So you put like a cast, you know, around the leg so that they're basically not using one leg. And you're looking at muscle mass loss over that period of time. And what was found was that the the women that were given this omega-3 fatty acid supplement, it cut their disuse atrophied in half. So they lost only they lost, you know, only 50% of what they would have lost if they didn't have the omega-3. I mean, it's a huge effect. And um I think this is really really important because again, you know, if you can do if you can give older adults an omega-3 supplement and make it where they cut their disuse atrophy in half is going to have a profound effect on these events because that really does eventually affect their trajectory and into into their mortality risk. Right. So, um, some follow-up studies by by Chris Mcluri have found that actually it doesn't really even seem to be the inflammation that's playing a role in this disuse atrophy. It's the accumulation of the omega-3 in the muscle cell membranes. And we've been talking about transporters, right? Well, amino acids are transportered through a transporter. And what it seems to be going on is that these the omega-3 in the cell membrane is sensitizing the amino acids in the muscle tissue like they were young, like what exercise does, right? So, um, very interesting new data coming out of Chris Mcllor's lab. I would say then, you know, in the in the case of someone who's supplementing with omega-3, then maybe you would imagine that they would have more muscle mass, like an older adult, and that's exactly what's been shown. So there's metaanalyses of studies that have found that if you supple if older adults supplement with two grams of omega-3 per day, they actually have higher muscle mass. They have improved walking speed. And um I think this is very important because you know and it's not even necessarily in the context of exercising. they they they just have increased muscle mass likely because all their sedentarism, the disuse events, they're not losing as much muscle mass from them because they have that omega-3. So, pretty powerful data. Um, and then we're going to move on to the last part of the talk here. I've got six minutes left. That's perfect. We're going to talk about the role omega-3 plays in what is kind of known as leaky gut or what I like to call gut permeability. And um this is also very interesting data because we've been talking a lot about the role of omega-3 and inflammation. Um it seems as though there's multiple layers to this. So our gut is the home of like trillions of bacteria, right? We've got like trillions of bacteria in our gut. Many of many of them at the distal end of our gut in the colon. Some of these bacteria are good, the probiotic kind, and some are bad pathogenic kind. But regardless, bacteria in our gut, particularly the na the gram negative bacteria, have a component to their outer membrane. And the bacteria have a component called lipopolysaccharide. It's also referred to endotoxin. They're kind of the same thing, lipopolyaccharide. We have about a gram of this lipopolyaccharide in our guts at any given moment. It's a lot of it just sitting around. And you know, that's because bacteria are often dying in our gut, right? And so when they die, you still have those those dead cells there. And when we eat a meal, even if it's a healthy meal, we have a transient opening of the epithelial, you know, cells and the and and the junctions that are that are connecting our epithelial cells lining our gut. There's a transient opening of it and then closes. Um, but when you have that opening, guess what comes out? LPS. LPS comes out. And this is kind of part of what's called the postprandial inflammatory response. You may have heard of the postprandial gl glycemic response, right? Or glucose response where you're, you know, your blood glucose levels go up after a meal because you're eating carbohydrates. Well, guess what else goes up? Inflammation goes up after a meal because LPS is being released into your bloodstream after a meal. Now, the the degree of how much LPS is released depends on the meal that you're eating. It also depends on whether or not you have celiac, for example. CE people with celiac, you know, if they have any exposure to any sort of gluten, those those junctions are open and the floodgates are out and inflammation LPS is going into their bloodstream. If you eat a high high fat, high refined sugar, you know, ultrarocessed foods, the the the standard here, um that's really going to cause a lot of leaky gut. It's going to make your your intestines are going to become permeable and LPS gets released into the the bloodstream. I'm going somewhere with this. So the LPS, this is, you know, in your body. It gets it's in your circulation now where all your immune cells are. Okay? And it sees LPS and it thinks this is bacteria because it's part of a me bacterial cell membrane. So it's ready. It's primed to fire away to fight fight the invader, right? It's not really an invader. It's just something that was released because, you know, we ate a meal. Um part of the adaptive response here is that we start to increase our lipoprotein production. we make more VLDLDL and LDL and that binds to LPS and sequesters it and prevents it from, you know, actually causing a lot of harm. So, um, that's one of the reasons why you never want to go get your LDL measured right after you've been sick or if you've had some kind of really stressful event because inflammation, stress causes inflammation and inflammation will make your LDL number go up. Just FYI, always do an N of two. Um, but that's a that's a little side note here. So the the binding of LPS to these LDL particles, what's happening now is um it's binding to a certain region. It's binding to the region called APOB. And the apo part of the LDL particle is very important because that is the part of the LDL particle that gets recycled back to the liver so that your LDL levels aren't staying around forever in your bloodstream. But LPS is obscuring that apo and so it does not get recycled and so it stays around in circulation longer. And what happens is as it stays around it's delivering triglycerides. What lipoproteins are doing is they're delivering triglycerides and cholesterol mostly triglycerides fatty acids to your other cells and for repair. You need them for repair and things. But um now this LDL particle can't go back to the liver. It's got to stick around longer. It's it's smaller in size. is it becomes what's called a small dense LDL particle and what happens is that small antel LDL particle lodges itself in your arterial wall and because the LPS is a signal for the immune system hey bacterial invader here the first line of defense is macrofasages it's a type of immune cell that come and engulf bacteria they eat bacteria up so that it doesn't kill you well they come thinking it's bacteria but really it's a small dense LDL particle lodged in your artery you got this macroof phase it tries to eat it only it can't because it's stuck to an LDL particle and so now you have the beginnings of what's called a foam cell it's like a macrofase there and it's you know making cytoines and stuff and now bringing more and so you have the the start of atheroscerosis all coming from gut permeability all coming from LPS leaking out into circulation why am I getting to this point um well the other thing is also that this LP LPS is affecting the brain and you know so I'm talking about cardiovascular health I'm talking about now that the LPS is increasing you know inflammation and that inflammation is affecting the brain and I will just say this that there have been studies that have injected LPS at a normal level that you would find being released in the circulation after a meal into after a bad meal we'll say um they've injected it into healthy patients either LPS or a saline control and injecting the LPS into those individuals increases their inflammatory biomarkers, but it also increases depressive symptoms. It it increases um you know social withdrawal as well. Within that same study, if individuals were given an omega-3 supplement before they were injected with LPS, their inflammatory markers weren't going up as much and they weren't getting the depressive symptoms. But that's a whole other story. um in terms of like studies have shown that actually inflammation is a major part of depression and omega-3 particularly EPA seems to be very powerful at reducing depressive symptoms in people with major depressive disorders. Um I'm unfortunately not going to get into that today. It was kind of a side note here because it's all back to the LPS, right? LPS is affecting cardiovascular health. LPS being generated from the gut is affecting your brain. This is why you hear a lot of people talking about gut health. Gut health is at the core of our health in general. And it really is true. Why am I telling you this? Because omega-3 actually in um decreases LPS release after a meal. So in this study here, there is a low fat and a highfat meal. Typically higher fat fat meals do increase more LPS because fat can kind of lice this the gut cells and be an irritant on the gut. But omega-3 in the green at at every point um at the baseline it seems as though the omega-3 group actually had a higher LPS. But after the meal, you can see it's it's suppressing the release of LPS and endotoxin into your bloodstream. And um which is kind of why I like to spread my omega-3 intake out throughout the day. It's very powerful um and important here because now we're talking about not only is omega-3 fatty acids reducing inflammation at the level we already discussed with these specialized pro-resolving mediators and the protectins and the resolins. But even at the level of the gut, and we know this, we know that from animal studies looking at mechanism that omega-3 fatty acids in the gut, when you take the omega-3 fatty acids, they're working on site. They're working at the first, you know, organ that sees it, which is your gut. And it's increasing the level of a protein called IAP that degrades LPS in the gut. It degrades LPS in the gut. It also kills the bacteria that are producing LPS. And so what what I'm getting at here is there's so much to omega-3 when it comes to inflammation. We're just scratching the surface and of understanding how it is so powerful at reducing inflammation. Everything from cardiovascular health to inflammation in the brain to muscle to the gut, the originator of a lot of inflammation in our body. And I and I so I'm going to end with that because I think it's very important. Um and in conclusion, what can you do? What what are the takehomes here? In my opinion, one, everyone needs to measure their omega-3 fatty acid levels. You don't know what you you don't measure. And so, you want to you want to get this omega-3 index test, which I heard may be in a little baggie floating around um today, which is kind of cool. Um the omega-3 index test, you want to be at that 8% range. How do you get to that 8% range? Well, a lot of people can try to consume, you know, fatty fish that are high in omega-3 fatty acids, low in contaminants, um, like mercury, salmon, wild Alaskan salmon is my favorite. Not everyone likes to eat salmon and certainly doesn't want to eat three to four, I don't know how many servings a week it will take. You have to measure your omega-3 index to see um, not everyone likes to to eat that fish because one, unfortunately, our fish are contaminated with microplastics and they're contaminated with mercury and PCBs and all kinds of environmental toxins. Um, and some people just don't like the taste. So, so Bill Harris has done some studies also looking at what it takes to get someone from a low omega-3 index of 4% to a high omega-3 index. If they supplement, it seems as though if they're taking a triglyceride form, a little bit, maybe 1.5 to two grams a day. Um, I like to say two grams a day is really to be safe, but um, two grams a day of omega-3 fatty acids seem to get people from a low to a high omega-3, you know, index level. And that's really where you want to be. And that's where you want to be for the brain benefits. That's where you want to be for the cardiovascular benefits, for the reducing, you know, aging. It seems like it's a a pretty good sweet spot and that's what I take. Um, so with that said, thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned something today and I think I have some time for questions. Thank you so much, Dr. Rhonda Patrick. We're going to do Q&A. We do have the room until 12:15, so we do have a little time here. If you do need to leave and you're hopping over to another session, make sure to get your gift bag in the back with your complimentary omega-3 index test kit. Since I'm right here, I'm going to go with you first. >> Thank you so much. Great talk. I see that you recommended two grams a day. What is the ratio that you generally recommend of the DHA and EPA? >> Yeah, that's a great question. What is the ratio of EPA to DHA? And I think that really depends on what outcomes that you're looking for. I think that, you know, if you're looking the the data really shows for cardiovascular health, EPA is very important. DHA is as well. It's very it's an important it's it's it's the cell membrane component. D mostly DHA is getting into cell membranes. EPA too, but to a to a lesser extent. Um, if you're if you're looking for a lot of the brain benefits, Alzheimer's disease, DHA really shines there again, probably because that cell membrane component. Same with the the muscular effects. So, uh, personally, you know, I like to go for closer to a 2 to1 ratio. I actually like DHA. I like a little bit higher DHA for me. >> For me, yeah. But, you know, other people might want to go the opposite direction, >> right? Yeah. Perfect. I'm going to continue in this row and I'm going to hop over here. >> We know there's been great studies on the efficacy of supplements. Have you seen any or done any work on consuming through whole fish consumption verse supplementation? What are your thoughts on that in terms of efficacy and and effectiveness? >> Yeah, I mean, so several of the studies that I presented, even some of the initial omega-3 slowing biological aging, um the omega-3 index, you know, studies looking at 90% reduced, you know, sudden cardiac death. Those were really omega-3 intake and it was it was people that were eating fish andor supplementing. So, it's really kind of a com combination. Um, and so there's definitely like if if you can get your omega-3 index up to that level from from diet, it seems to be protective as well. >> Perfect. >> Is that your question? >> Yes. >> So, >> comparing one or the other, not directly. >> Good. Okay. Perfect. I'm going to hop over to you. >> So, how many gel capsules would that be for two grams? >> It depends. It depends on how concentrated the supplement you're taking is. For me, it's four, but um you know, you know, I like to find a more concent. It's hard to get like one gram of omega-3 into just one capsule. So, generally, I would say two grams on, you know, in general would probably be be about four capsules. >> Um my name is Ati Hakeim. I'm a family medicine physician. It's the first time I've attended this conferences. That was outstanding you guys. That was absolutely outstanding. And cardiovascular disease is our number one killer for every single person in this room. Please listen to everything she said. That was absolutely outstanding. So my question is, we are working in a sick care system in our country. We wait for people to get sick. We work backwards. That's not my goal. So how soon can I start doing this for my people? Cuz I have kiddos, right, that already have hypertension, diabetes. Yeah, we live in a sick care model and I'd rather practice health care. How soon can I start doing it? Can I start reversing things for people that already have it? I I personally think that omega-3s are important starting, like I said, from you know, you're in the womb in uterero developing. I give my son um my son is 8 years old and right now he's getting about a gram of omega-3 a day. Um, so you know, I I I do recommend that, you know, kids who some kids like to eat fish, mine doesn't. So, omega-3 supplementation is only real omega-3 fatty acid source. But I think it's important starting as soon as you can. And the data really supports it. Also, data supports it for cognitive health in in children as well. And there are studies showing that a gram a day is safe in children and it lowers ADHD. It improves cognition. I mean, there's all sorts of in addition to cardiovascular benefits, just brain benefits for children. Autoimmune. I mean, yeah. I mean, we could have talked for hours about every possible disease. It's pretty ubiquitous. >> Uh, I'm I'm a biochemist myself, but um, is there like an upper tolerable limit? Are there people getting too much? Because I know um DHA has a bunch of double bonds and it's eas easily oxidized, prone to lipid proxidation and if you have too much in your membrane, it can be deletarious. Did they do any studies showing like, oh, this person's has way too much omega-3, he's probably going to get sick or anything like that? Um there's been studies like like Bill did studies gosh back in a long time ago maybe the 1980s um giving people 30 grams of omega-3 a day and there was no negative effects and I don't remember how long I'm not saying that that that there aren't I'm just saying that he had for the short amount of time that he did it there was not I think that you know we know that prescription forms are four grams a day um and this is this is vipa and lvesa so you know yeah I I think it all depends on the person and there's there's always an upper limit and so it's better to kind of stay within that safer range and talk about that with your physician. But oxidation um your your cell membranes only take up so much like if you're if you if you're overflooding the system with DHA, you start to metabolize it like through fatty acid oxidation. So that's that's what happens. >> One more over here and then I'm going to jump to that side. Um, first off, I think uh I don't work for uh Nordic Naturals, but they do have a 2X that gives you one gram in a a soft gel. >> Oh, nice. And one capsule. >> Yeah. And all liquids uh give you more than that in the liquid. Yep. So, um >> but would you speak to the difference between athaler and triglyceride? I know I I listen I've listened about 20 times to your conversation with Dr. Harris >> from 22. So, found my fitness for people who want the long form. >> She does a great talk with Dr. Harris. But, um, >> thank you. >> And all kinds of citations which you can read. >> Um, but if you would speak because on the his Omegaquant website, he has a calculation how much triglyceride you'd have to take to get to that 2.2 grams and how much uh how much ethylster you would take. >> Yeah. So, the difference between and I'm going to just give a very general overview here. Um, you know, the ethylester versus triglyceride. So, when omega-3 fatty acids are isolated from fish and they're purified, um they're oftent times run on a column to purify away things like PCBs and mercury. And so, um the the triglyceride backbone is removed and they're basically run through this alcohol column. And so, it has a you know, basically an an ethylster backbone to run it through the column to purify. And I think a lot of you know supplement companies will leave it in that purified form ethylester form that's not a naturally occurring form. So when we metabolize when we're taking an ethylester form um it it's very different in terms of like the enzymes that are cleaving things and how much we absorb. So we absorb far less of omega-3 in ethylsterform than if someone were that were to then take that omega-3 that's been purified and then resterify it on a triglyceride backbone which is the I would say more of the gold standard in my in my opinion because you actually you get you're you're absorbing so much more of that omega-3 from the triglyceride form. So Dr. Dr. Harris on his site does have a calculation that's done and I think that the calculation shows that if you're taking triglyceride form you may not need you may not need five sorry two grams you may need like 1.7 or something like that grams versus the two if you're taking ethylester form at the end of the day I don't think you should just go off the calculation you should take the omega-3 index test you know before and maybe like you know a few months after you're supplementing right so 120 days at least wait before you take the test again. Um, I would wait a little bit longer and and see if that dose is right for you because I've I've seen people that have taken um two three grams of ethylstroform and still not raise their omega-3 index. So, really testing is important part of this equation here. >> Amazing. You had a question here, right? Perfect. And then I'm seeing we're back. >> Uh, Dr. Patrick, thank you. Excellent, excellent presentation. What do you make of the recent three recent FARE papers that all showed better avoided risk from things like um early onset dementia, uh anxiety, depression, lifetime history with the nondha component and the uh the the other omega-3 in plasma? >> You're talking about EPA? Well, the the the studies found um that the sum of ALA, EPA, and DPA had better avoided risk for those um for those eventualities than the DHA component, which ties most heavily to the omega-3 index. >> Um I haven't seen that study, but I mean I've I've seen a lot of other studies showing that DHA and EPA are very very important. I mean, in terms of their metabolites as well. So, I'll have to look that study up. I had a couple questions up here. Yes, you've been waiting. Thank you. >> Thank you so much. I have a question. I really love eating seafood, but considering all the impurities in the seafood these days, like the microplastics, heavy metals, antibiotics, do you think it's still worth eating seafood for omega-3s or should we just take the supplements? And are those supplements tested for heavy metals and microplastics? And question number two, would you have time to come on my podcast in Australia to talk about this more in detail? It's online. Um, so the question is like, do do I think it's safe to eat seafood? I eat salmon like two or three times a week. Very small 4 ounce piece wild Alaskan salmon. Um, I, you know, it it does have the the lowest amount of of mercury contamination, but you know, the microplastics are a concern. I will say this about microplastics, they do accumulate in the intestines. And so eating like shellfish or fish that have the full intact or like a sardine, like the full sardine, that's the worst thing you can do because if if you're eating the intact digestive tract, that's where all the microplasters are accumulating. So, but there's still probably some in the muscle flesh of the of the salmon. I still think it's healthy. There's so many studies out there showing that salmon is correlated, you know, eating salmon is correlated with so many health benefits. So, at the end of the day, even with the contaminants, in fact, there was a study, you remember that, you know, that you're probably too young, but like for a long time, um, OBGYNS were recommending pregnant women to not eat fish because of the contaminants and the mercury and how it was going to have a negative effect on, you know, brain development in in in udo. And so all these women stopped eating fish and it was really terrible because that was like their only source of omega-3. And it turns out that um newer studies have come out since then that show that even women eating a lot of fish in fact um the omega-3 fatty acids were protecting against the mercury toxicity. And there was even one study that was published a few years ago that showed higher levels of mercury which was indicative of higher omega-3 intake because people that were taking in fish had higher mercury actually was a biioarker for intelligence and they and the children had higher um intelligence quotient scores. So IQ scores if they had higher mercury not because mercury is improving brain function but because they were getting omega-3 fatty acids. So in other words, obviously, and this is kind of why I want people to think about food in a way. I want them to think about food not so much about what you have to avoid, but what you need. And you need omega-3s, and they are so powerful. So, I do a combination of both because I still am not able to get my omega-3 index up to where it needs to be with just eating salmon. Just a quick follow on because she asked my qu half of my question. Uh between farmraised and wild caught besides the detriments of uh contamination. Is that from a strictly omega-3 perspective? Is there one that's preferred or like get it in however you can? >> Yeah. Um, it's it's an interesting question because, you know, it depends on like some of the farm-raised sa salmon, they're not eating the right foods that normal salmon are eating in the wild. So, a big a big part of that would be like the little um the little tiny fish that have aanthin in it. Aanthin is a carotenoid that gives salmon its pink color and it's also very beneficial as well. So in in the farmraised salmon, they're feeding them other I hate to say maybe even corn um stuff like it's not really great. Uh and so they have to inject the salmon with actual an asisanthin and they do that like farmra salmon or they're basically albino. So, you know, there's a little bit of like, well, there might be a higher omega6 ratio in those types of salmon, but the omega-3, as long as there's enough omega-3 there, it's probably fine. And I used to I've changed my mind somewhat on this. I used to kind of been like, oh, only wild, like don't don't do the farm. And then some newer studies have come out showing that farm salmon raise like raises omega-3 fatty acid levels like just as good in some cases. So, um, don't sweat it too much. >> Yeah, I I definitely eat it when I'm out. I know at the restaurants it's probably farmed, right? So, I eat wild at home. When I'm out at a restaurant, I'll do the farmed and I'm not like dying over it, you know? >> Yeah. >> This is my 13th expo, and I have to tell you, this is my favorite talk I've ever done. So, thank you. >> That's amazing. >> Um, can you speak to the omega-3 content of canned fish? >> Sure. Um, it depends on the kind of fish. I would say that there are sardines that are very high in omega-3. In fact, I mean, I can't there was I used to eat sardines that had like 500 milligrams of DHA in them, which is pretty high. The only um I think now is the microplastics. They have to be like the sliced sardines. I don't want to eat the whole digestive tract. And then there's the canned aspect. I think tin cans don't they're not lined with plastic so there shouldn't be as many plastics leeching into them but I do think they're again a good source and I'm not as concerned about their mercury because if if if a developing fetus which is very very sensitive to mercury way more sensitive than we are as adults if they're okay and protected by the omega-3 fatty acids I feel a lot better about eating some some sardines and getting some mercury in Hey, uh, right here. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for Found My Fitness, your recipes, all the tools that you have on your websites and everything. Um, I'm actually a fish farmer, uh, an aquaponic farmer, so raising fish to produce plants. Um, um, so yeah, in an environment that's recirculating with no heavy metals, no microplastics, things like that, and where we can actually tailor the diets, add supplements to the diets, things like that. I was curious if but you kind of answered it if you have an opinion on that but um on from that do you see market shifts or uh potential products coming from microbial sources whether it's um you know bacteras being able to generate these things or if you have >> yeah I'm excited about all that research that you know we can I some people are really scared of genetic engineering I'm not one of those people I mean it depends on the context right but when it comes to you know generating omega-3 in a more sustainable way I'm very excited about that possibility. I think we will eventually head there actually quite soon. >> Yeah. >> But I have a question for you. >> Sure. >> Um, have you seen any studies that have compared microplastic levels in farmed raised fish versus wild fish? Has that been done yet? >> Studies? Not necessarily. I'm part of the aquaponics association. We're a multinational aquaponics focused association. Um, I've got colleagues at universities and small farms, large farms. It's something that we talk about, but the way that we design our systems is with generally PVC pipes and then um >> I'm trying to remember the acronym for the the plastics used for the tanks, but it's all food safe plastics. Um so generally we like to think that our microplastics are a lot lower. >> The only inputs are filtered water, the feed, and the supplements, calcium carbonates, and things like that. So >> I'm going to look that up when I'm done. Yeah. Thank you so much. All right, we actually have to slowly well quickly actually leave this room. We have one one last one I'll ask on your behalf. When's the best time to take your omega-3 supplements as our grand finale? >> I think the best time to take them is when you're going to consistently form a habit to take them. And don't worry about like I Yeah, it it really is the day because like there's studies showing that if you take an omega-3 fatty acid, these SPM molecules, they're resolving inflammation stay in your stay in circulation for 24 hours. So, you're good. You're covered today. So much Dr. Rhonda Patrick.