Posted by brandonb 6 hours ago
* 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%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.
*edited: %-points instead of %
EDIT: don't assume the causality
That 0.08% reduction would mean approximately 28,000 fewer EOD cases - not to be sniffed at!
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.
However, the estimates are still probably overestimated. Confounding, p-hacking, publication bias, all move us towards larger estimates.
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.
Right?
Right?
Haha no you won't. You'll just raise premiums and nobody will know why.
Which is not nothing but concluding anything about causality is a stretch.
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
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.
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
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.
> 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!
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.
No one is pushing for these changes you suggest and to take a stance suggests a social disorder or mental illness.
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.
Eat some berries and nuts
"Paleo" diet doesn't even include that much meat in it
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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!
- 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.