Comment by adrian_b
5 months ago
The range of 1 to 2 g daily of DHA+EPA has been suggested based on the daily consumption of 2 g or more that is typical for populations like the Japanese, who include a great proportion of marine food in their diet and who appear to derive health benefits from this.
I agree that for now there is no better evidence about which is the optimal daily intake.
Quantities about 10 times less than this might be sufficient to avoid any obvious signs of nutritional deficiency, but are unlikely to be optimal.
The capacity of converting ALA from vegetable oil into DHA and EPA may vary a lot between humans and it is typically lower in males than in females and also lower in older people than in young people.
The less risky choice is to ensure that you eat enough DHA+EPA. Perhaps one does not need 1 to 2 g of DHA+EPA daily, but eating it is unlikely to be harmful, while not eating it carries definite risks.
If you lean at all toward evolutionary biology, You tend to pay attention to the idea that earlier man had a diet which had a much higher ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6.
I would add that vegetable oils probably are not the ideal solution just beyond the idea that you need to extend the carbon chain up to something that can be used for your body in some type of pharmacological type role. The modern western diet has a ratio of somewhere around 15 to 20 to one in terms of Omega 6 to Omega 3. Virtually every vegetable oil will continue to drive that ratio toward a imbalance toward Omega 6.
It is true that early man specifically during the Ice Age, had a much higher omega-3 diet. But many of you are not genetically ice age people. I know I am because of my haplotype, which is K1.
Most European Caucasians would probably do better on a high omega-3 short chain poly unsaturated fatty acid diet. Like the omega-3’s from flaxseed. The change from gather cultures to farming culture changed the way we processed polyunsaturated fatty acids.
Flax was included in the first set of domesticated plants, together with the cereals barley, emmer wheat and einkorn wheat, and together with a few legumes, including lentils and peas.
This set of domesticated plants does not appear random, because any more restricted set would have made impossible the substitution of the animal food used previously with plant seeds.
The seeds of cereals and of legumes together could provide an acceptable protein source, while the flax seeds could add the alpha-linolenic acid, which can be transformed by humans, with modest efficiency, into the needed DHA and EPA.
We know that the first generations of people who had become dependent of agriculture had serious health problems in comparison with their ancestors, which have become less severe after many generations, presumably after they have learned to better balance their diet and when those who have survived might have been better adapted to eating such food.
Nevertheless, regardless where you are located you do not know the properties of your genes, unless you do some very expensive study, by using various diets and monitoring how they influence the content in your blood of various substances, e.g. of DHA and EPA when eating various sources of omega-3 fatty acids, of vegetable or of animal origin.
In the absence of such a study, the safer hypothesis is that you belong to the people who are not efficient at the elongation of ALA into DHA and EPA, so it is safer to eat food with enough DHA and EPA, instead of eating food with ALA, like flax seeds or oil, and hoping that you belong to the people for whom this is good enough.
This is similar for a few other conditionally-essential nutrients, which can be produced by humans, but in most cases only in too small quantities compared to necessities, so it is safer to ensure that they are present in food, e.g. vitamin K2, choline, taurine, creatine.
There’s a study that 3g is needed to move triglycerides and HDL in a good direction. I did that under a doctor’s direction and it worked as intended. Didn’t do anything for my cholesterol otherwise which is one of the confounders in some of the studies. Sometimes people get better LDL, sometimes not. vLDL improved markedly but maybe I was just taking better care of my diet between tests.
I don’t mind taking them so I kept the Omega 3s and started taking others for my LDL issues.
I take fish oil and eat seafood for this exact reason. I probably get 4 to 5 g of omega-3 a day at least. And that really moved all my lipids in a positive direction.
Without hijacking the thread, may I ask what you took for better LDL? Always interested in heart health! Thanks!
Diet and exercise is the first thing. In my specific case saturated fats and sugars increase my LDL. I take fiber pills (pulls out cholesterol containing compounds used in digestion), “Red Yeast Rice” which is the yeast that makes statins - I’m taking it as a low dose statin -, Bergamot extract which interferes with cholesterol production, and Plant Sterols which block dietary cholesterol absorption.
Six months will show if it’s working. If not I’ll go on a full dose of a statin.
This is a great reminder, thanks.
Omega use and consumption in general can be one thing, and in many cases need higher consumption or timing, relative to the health condition or goal you need to support.