An Omega-3 that’s poison for cancer tumors | Hacker News Reader

An Omega-3 that’s poison for cancer tumors

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255 pointselorant83 comments

For those who want to take DHA/EPA supplements, but don't want to contribute to the destruction of fisheries (both oil fish and krill), look for vegan supplements. They're more expensive, but the price is coming down as volume grows.

Vegan omega-3 supplements are made from algae, which are the original source of the oils for all fish as well.

Also less mercury contamination.

Which ones are those? I know people are taking flaxseed and rapeseed oil but that's mostly ALA which is hardly converted to DHA by the body.

There are various unicellular organisms that are cultivated either for EPA extraction or for DHA extraction.

Usually EPA and DHA coming from 2 different cultures are mixed into a commercial "algae oil", together with some vegetable oil.

Most of those unicellular organisms are not algae, but there is no better name that could be understood by the general public.

For example, EPA is extracted from thraustochytrids, which are non-photosynthetic unicellular distant relatives of the brown algae.

The only problem with the "algae" oil is that for now it is very expensive. In Europe it is 8 times more expensive than fish oil. While I eat mostly vegan food, I make a couple of exceptions and one of them is fish oil. I have tried algae oil. It was good, but I could not afford to pay for an adequate daily dose of it.

I do not know how much of this premium price is due to the cultivation costs and how much is due to vegans accepting to pay more for a vegan solution.

Do you think this is a normal price for them (and also actually real, good quality oil):

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07BRY1FRZ

I also saw normal fish oil in similar price range but that could just be Amazon inflating prices?

I pay for cod liver oil a price that divided by the content of omega-3 acids results in about EUR 0.10 per gram.

At your link, the price is GBP 17 per 24 g DHA, which results in about EUR 0.82 per gram of omega-3.

I have paid about the same price, i.e. 8 times higher than fish oil, for a similar algae oil.

So the price seems right. However the product from your link has a problem, it contains only DHA.

There are 2 omega-3 acids that are required by the human body, DHA and EPA. Fish oil contains both and also vitamin D.

The cultivated algae produce either DHA or EPA, not both. Some vendors mix oils from 2 algae cultures, to sell supplements with both DHA and EPA.

Others sell DHA and EPA separately, like in your link.

If you choose this DHA supplement, you must also search an EPA supplement, to take them both.

Otherwise you must search a supplement with both DHA and EPA. The prices are about the same so it is just a matter of convenience to choose separate or combined supplements.

Unfortunately, I have not seen any algae oil at a significantly different price, so the only cheaper solution is fish oil, at an 8-times lower price.

>which is hardly converted to DHA by the body

Hardly or just in small quantities?

With flaxseed oil, you could just consume more of it in order to offset the low ALA/DHA conversion rate. Or is there a downside to the idea?

The downside is that you do not know how much you should eat, because the conversion efficiency varies from human to human and it also diminishes with increasing age.

Eating too much ALA, with the hope that this will be enough to ensure the DHA & EPA that you need, even in the worst case, can be harmful.

Nevertheless, this is a problem mostly for those who eat little or no animal foods. Otherwise you might get enough DHA and EPA from the normal food. Actually the best source of omega-3 acids are the animal brains, which are very tasty when well cooked.

However, since the Mad Cow disease, the popularity of eating brains has strongly declined, even among non-vegans.

> Nevertheless, this is a problem mostly for those who eat little or no animal foods.

That is why I'm curious. I've been living nearly-vegan for 15 years now and I've been "supplementing" with flaxseed oil for a few years now as well (still can't get used to the taste).

Google for Opti3 vegan capsules from a company called Vegetology. They have the highest DHA/price ratio I know.

On their website they have a 3-for-2 deal that is indeed the least expensive vegan DHA/EPA supplement I've seen so far. Thanks for the recommendation.

The cheapest I've found so far are Walmart's Spring Valley Omega-3, 1000 mg, 180 count for $15.48.

I've heard some people (Rhonda Patrick from the top of my mind) say that the omega 3 coming from vegan sources (nuts, seeds, algae...) would not be as efficient as their non-vegan counterpart even if they are already converted to epa/dha. I haven't been able to find any conclusive research on this though. Anyone one with some expertise is the field caring to clarify?

I am not sure what you mean by organic and non-organic.

The chemical synthesis of the omega-3 acids is too expensive, so all commercial products claiming to contain omega-3 acids contain such acids that have been extracted from living beings. Therefore all commercial omega-3 acids are organic.

Because the omega-3 acids are expensive, they frequently are sold diluted in some other kind of oil.

The oil used for dilution should be some good quality vegetable oil. Unfortunately there are cases when some junk oil is used for dilution, possibly including various garbage, e.g. colorants or flavors.

Therefore, when choosing an omega-3 supplement, it is good to check the list of ingredients to see whether the good omega-oil is not mixed with a bunch of undesirable, possibly non-organic, substances.

The main component, i.e. the omega-3 acids, can be found in one of 3 sources:

1. A few vegetable sources with short-chain omega-3 acids, e.g. walnut cores, flax seed or hemp seed

2. Fish oil, e.g. cod liver oil or salmon oil

3. "Algae" omega-3 oil

The first group of omega-3 sources does no harm and people who eat enough animal food might not need anything else.

On the other hand, people who eat little or no animal food must eat some omega-3 supplements belonging either to the second or to the third group.

There is no efficiency difference between fish oil and "algae" oil. The only difference is that the "algae" oil is more expensive, but it is available for those who do not want fish oil.

Like I have said, it is imperious to check the composition of any supplement, to see which is the real content in EPA and DHA and whether they are not mixed with some junk.

Many omega-3 supplements appear to be cheaper, but they are diluted and their real cost per EPA+DHA may be higher than of other non-diluted supplements.

Fish oil may also contain heavy metals due to accumulation of those through food chain. Some companies claim to filter those, but with algae there is no such risk at all.

The risk is much lower for "algae" but as long as you do not know how exactly the vendor cultivates the "algae", the risk is not zero.

These "algae" are cultivated in sea water. They might use synthetic sea water, but they might just take water from the sea, which contains mercury.

Some "algae" concentrate the mercury from sea water, others do not.

The only completely risk-free supplement would be if you could afford a chemical analysis for it.

As long as you do not analyze it and you do not inspect the production facilities, there is a non-zero risk of toxic substances included in your food.

Governments can enforce food standards with product testing.

That is what we all hope, whenever we buy any kind of food, regardless if it is fish or algae.

But of course it is good to also verify whatever you can, because food standards may be too lax or not enforced well enough.

So I agree with the other poster that mentioned the risk of mercury content for fish products, which however exists for all marine products, including algae products, even if it is lower than for small fish and even lower than for large fish.

Nevertheless, I hope that any fish product or algae product that is sold would be sampled and analyzed from time to time to verify that it does not contain harmful substances.

Even if the algae comes from sea water containing mercury the resulting oil should have a lower concentration of mercury than similar fish oil would have. Heavy metals accumulate up the food chain as larger predators eat smaller ones. Algae is about as low on the food chain as you can get for sealife that humans consume.

If by "organic" and "non-organic", you have meant omega-3 acids included in meat or animal organs versus omega-3 in oil extracts, then the answer is that there is no difference.

During digestion, the fatty acids are separated from the food and they are absorbed as such by your intestine.

So unlike for some vitamins or minerals, which might behave differently in the form included in dietary supplements versus the form included in natural food, for fatty acids there are no such concerns.

The only thing is that many omega-3 supplements are sold as ingestible capsules, for the benefit of those who do not like to eat oil.

In my opinion eating capsules is a bad choice. I believe that it is better to buy bottled oil containing omega-3 acids. Both fish oil, e.g. cod liver oil, and "algae" oil are available in bottles.

Then you can mix a little omega-3 oil with olive oil or another kind of oil that you use at cooking (by mixing it to the food after cooking and cooling, otherwise the omega-3 oil would be degraded by heating).

If you do like this, then really there exists no difference between the omega-3 from a supplement and the omega-3 from meat, because they would be digested and absorbed in identical environments.

Otherwise, when the oil is released from capsules, the local concentration might be too high overloading the absorption system in the intestine, so some of the oil could be wasted compared to the case when the oil is mixed with other food.

I realized what I wrote and edited before you could finish your reply. Indeed, they're all organic, I meant to say the difference between vegan and non-vegan. Either way, wasn't aware about the junk oil they sometimes use. Interesting. The supplement I'm currently using (Minami veganDHA) only contains only DHA which you said isn't enough and would need to be suplemented with EPA. The world of supplements is so complicated with a lot of FUD out there. For some reason it's difficult for me to find an authority on supplements that gives a nuanced and explanatory view on things and isn't just pushing affiliate links. So, thanks for the insightful response, super helpful!

"imperious": arrogant, domineering

Did you mean "important"?

(My aim is to be helpful given the many non-native English speakers on HN.)

I think OP meant: imperative

Yes, indeed, you are right.

However, I have encountered a lot of uses of "imperious" instead of "imperative", coming from native speakers, which is why I happened to make this choice of words, which is not the right one.

I've used both fish oil supplements and algae based supplements. The latter left a very unpleasant fishy (well, algaeal, I guess) taste in my mouth every time I burped, even when taking them with food. The fish oil supplements (paradoxically) did not have that effect.

As an Icelander raised on Lýsi (cod liver oil) I remember fishy burps all day long as a kid. I still take Lýsi every day but the burps are gone, it's probably a couple of decades now since they perfected purification of the oil to make it mostly taste/smell free. My kids still get lýsi every day to no complaints (and it's a part of the daily routine in Icelandic kindergartens).

Yes, I have also started recently to eat daily some cod liver oil and I have been surprised that it has only a very faint and pleasant fishy flavor.

The fish oil that was available when I was a child had a much stronger and less pleasant smell.

When is the best time to give the code liver oil to a kid?

(Or maybe it does not matter) but I read multiple suggestions: in the morning after breakfast or at least 1-2 hours _before_ a meal or at least 1-2 hours _after_ a meal.

Can you please share when do you give this? ( I am assuming that you have a better tradition/understanding of this)

Don't they have fish farms specifically for this purpose?

Second that. My favourite are Opti3 from Vegetology (not affiliated, just a happyn long time customer).

>The poison acts on tumor cells via a phenomenon called ferroptosis, a type of cell death linked to the peroxidation of certain fatty acids. The greater the amount of unsaturated fatty acids in the cell, the greater the risk of their oxidation. Normally, in the acidic compartment within tumors, cells store these fatty acids in lipid droplets, a kind of bundle in which fatty acids are protected from oxidation. But in the presence of a large amount of DHA, the tumor cell is overwhelmed and cannot store the DHA, which oxidizes and leads to cell death. By using a lipid metabolism inhibitor that prevents the formation of lipid droplets, researchers were able to observe that this phenomenon is further amplified, which confirms the identified mechanism and opens the door to combined treatment possibilities.

Neat.

Lipid metabolism inhibition to overload tumour cells w/ DHA which oxizides'em till cell death.

Artemisinin being peroxide also acts through ferroptosis. Would be interesting to see it in that combo.

this is all above me and i'm not following it exactly.

it was my understanding the polyunsaturated fats (3s and 6s alike) were both prone to oxidation far more so than saturated or monosaturated fats and it was this reason alone why there's correlation between high PUFA consumption and prostate cancer

It was also my understanding, that this phenomenon is why astaxanthin an antioxidant found in certain algae and things that feed off that algae, such as krill, salmon, and to a small degree - shrimp, crab, and lobster, and noted for being more powerful than the antioxidants found in blueberries, green tea, and even CoQ10, as well as never flipping to a pro-oxidant, the way say.. VitC, E or reservatol can, is extremely useful when consuming Omega3s. Supposedly astaxanthin protects against the oxidation of PUFAs.

So if preventing the oxidation of PUFA's is seen as vital to getting their benefits while avoiding the problems of oxidation - how is it, again, that oxidation of Omega3s is a good thing?

Is this one of the cases where it's oxidation can result in both tumor cell death in one area but create it in another? Or am i misreading?

The polyunsaturated fatty acids are much more prone to spontaneous oxidation by the air.

In your body the oxidation reactions are not spontaneous, they are catalyzed by enzymes.

All the cells have large quantities of enzymes used for the oxidation of the mono-unsaturated fatty acids and of the saturated fatty acids, which are stored together in the fat used as an energy reserve.

So MUFA and saturated fatty acids are either oxidized rapidly when you do physical work or they are stored in reserve fat when in excess.

The poly-unsaturated fatty acids are not used as an energy reserve, they are used mainly for building various kind of cellular membranes.

Most cells do not need to transform PUFA and they do not contain enzymes for this. Excess PUFA are processed mainly in the liver, where they are transformed through a chain of reactions to fatty acids that can be oxidized through the normal path.

When there is a deficit of PUFA, but there are precursors with a shorter chain, e.g. ALA for DHA & EPA, the liver will perform elongation reactions, to increase the quantities of PUFA, instead of preparing them for oxidation.

However all these reactions with PUFA, either for synthesis or for degradation, are rate-limited by modest quantities of the necessary enzymes, so either too small or too large quantities of PUFA can exceed the processing capability needed to adjust the PUFA concentration in the body.

For those who want to dive deeper, the NIH has a great fact sheet:

https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Omega3FattyAcids-HealthPro...

Crazy correlation (n of one etc.) but I find I’m worse at Chess if I take fish oil (it’s a good one from Nordic Naturals). I’m not sure for me it’s a good idea.

N of 1 is still worthy of discussion if the data is reliable. Have you considered trying to get someone to perform a double blind placebo controlled test on you?

Food intolerances can cause brain fog. Various reasons.

I have an autoimmune disorder and most food outside AIP diet cause mental sluggishness for me.

Basically I eat bread and my immune system decides it’s a virus and decides my organs must die.

So yea, If something bothers you, listen to your body, even if it’s being stupid.

Also not sure if correlation or causation but i have anxiety when taking fish oil. Usually i'm pretty chill but with fish oil i suddenly have problems even ordering a coffee.

Does this lend credence to the rumored idea that putting the body into ketosis (or perhaps ketoacidosis) could actually have tumor fighting effects?

There is some evidence that a ketogenic diet might be of benefit to cancer patients:

> In KDs, the 4:1 ratio of high fat to low carbohydrates mimics the metabolic effects of starvation (Figure 2). These diets slow cancer by inhibiting insulin/IGF and downstream intracellular signaling pathways, such as phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K)/protein kinase B (Akt)/mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR). Ketogenic diets also amplify adenosine monophosphate—activated protein kinase (AMPK), which inhibits aerobic glycolysis and suppresses tumor proliferation, invasion, and migration. Mouse models of metastatic cancer show that exogenous ketones themselves have direct cytotoxic effects on tumor viability.5 β-hydroxybutyrate can modify chromatin by binding to and thereby inhibiting histone deacetylase, ultimately repressing transcription and curbing cancer cell proliferation (Figure 1).

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6375425/

This same article also mentions that a ketogenic diet can promote weight gain in cancer patients, which is a concern because frequently such patients lose weight as a result of both their disease and the treatment for it.

Although not a scientific paper, there is some suggestion in [1] that both fasting and keto can have benefits in terms of making chemotherapy both more tolerable and effective. The suggestion here is that driving down insulin and blood sugar may be the mechanism, which seems naively to mean it effectively "starves out" the cancer. Note however that both keto and fasting act on the insulin/IGF, AMPK and mTOR pathways, so there is a moderately large web of cellular/biological interactions to untangle here.

As a side note, the insulin/IGF, AMPK, and mTOR pathways are frequently implicated in animal studies of general longevity as well. We don't know the extent to which this stuff transfers over to humans, but, if you're a mouse, we can extend your life dramatically by playing around with these metabolic pathways.

---

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6375425/

[1]: https://www.curetoday.com/view/early-evidence-shows-fasting-...

I think potentially so. There was a podcast episode with Tim Ferris or/and Kevin Rose once (maybe this one? [1]) where they talked about research from/with Valter Longo on this (and it’s likely in his book too). Also in Michael Mosley’s book “Fast 800” he talks about how once you’ve fasted for 12 hours your body triggers the “metabolic switch” and autophagy happens where your body starts dissolving/eating(?) unhealthy cells which are then later regenerated!

[1] https://podcast.kevinrose.com/guests/dr-valter-longo/

The 12 hours is a guess. IPeter Attia has talked about this. We just don’t know when autophagy kicks in in humans as we have no direct measurements or bio markers to measure yet.

I forget how they measure it in animals but I believe it results in animals no longer being among the living.

This second episode with Dom D'Agostino discusses potential cancer treatments with the ketogenic diet:

https://tim.blog/2018/06/05/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts...

It makes intuitive sense that people who are overweight / too well-feed get more cancers than people who are subsistence farmers and don't get quite enough to eat. The evidence is the rate of cancers between countries.

I would examine if keto / severe calorie restriction kills more precancerous and cancerous cells through stress.

It's probably best to start calorie restriction before acquiring cancer to keep the population of precancerous down.

That's hardly evidence. You have to control for all the other things that differ between developed and undeveloped countries. Since this is difficult you could at the very least find 1000 farmers in an undeveloped country and feed them 100g of fat a day I'm addition to what they eat, then monitor their health for a few decades. Then we'd know better

Don't you simply have more cells that can turn into cancer when you're fat? More tickets for the cancer lottery?

As you usually loose weight on keto, maybe that explains the protective effect?

Not exactly. Fat cells primarily increase in volume in response to lipogenesis.

One of the primary hypotheses behind chemotherapy is to halt all cell division to let stress kill off more cancerous cells than healthy ones. The idea being that cancerous cells are more fragile than healthy ones, even though they proliferate faster and don't execute programmed cell death themselves as readily.

No. The mechanism described absolutely not.

The paper starts with the fact that tumor acidosis promotes disease progression through a stimulation of fatty acid metabolism in cancer cells.

Instead of blocking fatty acids, they test a hypothesis that excess uptake of specific fatty acid could have antitumor effects.

In Mongolia especially in rural area local people eat only meat/fat from horses, sheep and camels and drink heavy fermented horse milk. They do not eat any fruits or vegetables (it is hard to grow those in a semi-desert). They also avoid fish even when it is plenty in nearby rivers or lakes.

Mongolia is on top of the charts regarding death from liver and other cancers and from heart decease. So I very much doubt that keto-diet has a protection against cancer.

On the other hand the life expectancy both absolute and conditional at a particular age of Mongolians either matches or within 2-3 years of that of Indians who eat mostly vegetarian diet. So if Mongolian have high prevalence of cancers, then they must have less prevalences of other deceases. So if keto diet has any protection, then it is against those other deceases, but not for cancer and heart ones.

This has me concerned that DHA could actually be harmful for non-cancerous cells as well while doing a water diet or a ketogenic diet.

The lipid metabolism inhibitor was used to enhance the already present DHA toxicity mechanism for the cancerous cells, and the toxicity was provoked by the fact that metastasing cancerous cells place themselves in ketosis (=acidosis).

This is what Ray Peat has been saying for years. He researches nutrition with a specific angle - does something inhibit metabolism or does it accelerate? His thesis is that nutrition should be optimized to make metabolism go as efficient as possible. I'm not sure how valid his ideas are, but it is definitely worth checking out. Whenever you see people warn about seed oils and PUFAs, they are usually basing their views on his research.

It is very likely that all kinds of poly-unsaturated fatty acids, both the omega-3 and the omega-6, are harmful in too large quantities.

Before being degraded easily like MUFA or saturated fatty acids, the PUFA must pass through various transformation reactions that can be performed by our body mainly in the liver and only with a limited rate.

When the quantity of PUFA exceeds that which is needed for the maintenance of various cellular membranes by more than can be degraded in a given time, they accumulate and can be harmful.

The problem, like for any other kind of food, is that it is extremely difficult to determine experimentally which are the minimum dose per day and the maximum dose per day outside which an omega-3 acid or any other substance becomes harmful instead of useful.

The main difficulty is that those limits are not absolute, but they depend on the quantities of other substances eaten at the same time and on the kinds of activities that are performed.

So it is not surprising that the results of various studies are contradictory.

For omega-3, most studies that I have seen showed improvements up to 2-3 grams per day and no harmful effects that could appear in a short time up to a dose 2 or 3 times larger than that.

While there is no doubt that you need both some EPA and some DHA, there is no certainty about which would be the right quantity of each per day.

For example some studies have shown that for the brain and against some inflammatory conditions it is better to eat more DHA than EPA, other studies have shown that for the heart it is better to eat more EPA than DHA.

It is impossible to know how much the results of such studies are influenced by whatever else the study subjects have eaten at the same time.

Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the inferior limit and the superior limit for omega-3 consumption are very close. Therefore eating a few grams per day should be safe.

I assume that for killing a tumor much higher doses are needed.

Back in the day, like ten years ago or so it was very trendy for health gurus to promote high doses of fish oil supplementation (minimum 3g daily of combined EPA+DHA, ideally way more). You can still find posts from angry users in forums complaining about loss of libido, hypothyroidism and erectile dysfunction.

I would stay away from it, but it might be worth it for vegetarians, pregnant and lactating women. Or if you eat the average (crap) western diet.

I remember this trend. Some of my bodybuilder friends would be taking shots of olive oil and fish oil in the morning and night.

Nobody ever stops to check if this Standard diet is making the tumors grow faster... instead they go like: mh if they get more of this (omega 3 = mostly animal fats) it grows slower. In nature mice would eat many different things, grain as well as insects... afaik Mouse Standard diet is high carb

They found "an n-3 long-chain PUFA-rich diet significantly delayed mouse tumor growth when compared with a monounsaturated FA-rich diet." So the difference was feeding one set polyunsaturated fatty acids and the other set monounsaturated fatty acids.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15504...

Could you elaborate? What is the takeaway for humans here? To eat ONLY pufa when you have a tumor?

The takeaway for humans here is that there seems to be an effect in mice so perhaps someone should fund a study with human subjects to check whether this effect also exists in humans.

Thank you for remembering that "cancer cured in mice!!!" is a headline about once per week.

Is this limited to fish oil or can flax oil (Omega 3) and hemp oil (Omega 3, 6, and 9) be a substitute as well?

Hemp oil doesn't contain EPA or DHA, but is does have 20% ALA. ALA converts into EPA and DHA in your liver, but in rather limited quantites (less than 15%). It'd be a poor choice for triggering this effect.

http://www.hempoil.ca/efa-faq/

https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Omega3FattyAcids-HealthPro...

Thanks for the links. EPA and DHA being the key components, the following is often missed when discussing omega-3 fats. So fish fed on vegetable based feed don’t get the EPA and DHA.

“DHA and EPA are present in fish, fish oils, and krill oils, but they are originally synthesized by microalgae, not by the fish. When fish consume phytoplankton that consumed microalgae, they accumulate the omega-3s in their tissues [3].“

Earlier, most fish from cultures contained negligible DHA and EPA, because they were not fed with their natural food.

Now, there are fish farms that have cultures of algae that produce DHA and EPA, then they feed crustaceans or rotifers with the algae. The crustaceans or rotifers are added to the fish food, so in such farms the fish contain omega-3, like those grown in natural conditions.

This is not done necessarily to improve the nutritional value of the fish, but to ensure that they reproduce for the next farming cycle, because fish deficient in omega-3 acids may fail to reproduce.

Flaxseed is superior. Drinking 20g of it will make even abysmal conversion rates sufficient.

Problem with flaxseed is it is the richest dietary source of lignans, a type of phytoestrogen. A phytoestrogen is a plant nutrient that is somewhat similar to the female hormone estrogen. Due to this similarity, lignans may have estrogenic and/or anti-estrogenic effects in the body.

Yet beer still has magnitudes more given the consumed quantities.

That's why I don't drink beer either.

Yeah, but you eat female mammals regularly which are filled with real animal estrogen.

Fish get their DHA from algae[0], so algae oil can substitute.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5387034/ (ctrl-f "Long-chain PUFAs")

If you are interested in adding Omega-3 to your stack, make sure it is molecularly distilled fish oil. Otherwise there is the risk of excess lead and mercury.

You can also eat fish that are low on the food chain like sardines.

Fish don't synthesize Omega PUFAs, they eat algae (which unfortunately and inopportunely stains teeth)

From "Warning: Combination of Omega-3s in Popular Supplements May Blunt Heart Benefits" https://scitechdaily.com/warning-combination-of-omega-3s-in-... :

> Now, new research from the Intermountain Healthcare Heart Institute in Salt Lake City finds that higher EPA blood levels alone lowered the risk of major cardiac events and death in patients, while DHA blunted the cardiovascular benefits of EPA. Higher DHA levels at any level of EPA, worsened health outcomes.

> Results of the Intermountain study, which examined nearly 1,000 patients over a 10-year-period,

> “Based on these and other findings, we can still tell our patients to eat Omega-3 rich foods, but we should not be recommending them in pill form as supplements or even as combined (EPA + DHA) prescription products,” he said. “Our data adds further strength to the findings of the recent REDUCE-IT (2018) study that EPA-only prescription products reduce heart disease events.”

Now they're sayin'; so I go look for an EPA-only supplement, and TIL about re-esterified triglyceride and it says it's molecularly distilled anchovies in blister packages. Which early land mammals probably ate, so.

I found this comment too late... Already ordered a "kids" supplement that has a 2:1 ratio of DHA:EPA.

I do not think that you should be much concerned about this, because other studies show that more DHA than EPA is preferable when using other criteria.

So the conclusion is that nobody knows for sure if you should eat more DHA than EPA, to have a better brain, or less DHA than EPA, to have a better heart.

What is certain is that you need some minimum quantity of both DHA and EPA.

Especially for children, who do not have yet to worry about cardio-vascular problems, a supplement with more DHA than EPA seems actually a good choice.

> molecularly distilled fish oil

Where is a good place to buy these? I’ve been hesitant to buy vitamins/over the counter online. Do grocers carry molecularly distilled fish oil?

I buy Trader Joes Omega 3's, those are molecularly distilled. They also are 1200 mg per softgel, most others I've seen in stores are only 1000.

Because everyone in the world who distills things just distills them (and might feel fancy and say what kind of still they use), but fish oil purveyors molecularly distill the oil. At least it’s fish oil and not snake oil.

Look for independent lab reports, not the magic words “molecularly distilled.”

(P.S. mercury is quite volatile. Methylmercury appears to have a boiling point below that of water. I know nothing about distilling fish oil, but I would expect that mercury and it’s compounds could end up in the distillate if done carelessly and that the oils would oxidize or otherwise degrade. So they must either use a molecular still, whatever that is, or perhaps it’s done in an inert atmosphere or under vacuum.)

Yeah, molecular distillation is a type of vacuum distillation pretty ubiquitously used in distilling extracts from oils because minimizes decomposition due to heat. I looked it up.

So, for example, you shouldn't eat algae Omega-3 because it hasn't been processed by a fish first? Aren't the fish why you end up with lead and mercury contamination?

Really interesting findings. There seems to be a lot of good health benefits from omega 3 and fish oil in general[1]. There is currently an interesting study underway in Norway with 70.000 participants to see if fish oil has an effect on covid-19[2], English translation is towards the bottom of the page. The study is partially funded by a producer of the fish oil, but the study is interesting to me nonetheless.

1: https://examine.com/supplements/fish-oil/ 2: https://oslo-universitetssykehus.no/om-oss/nyheter/kan-tran-...

… in mice

Go vegan!!!!!!

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