And pregnant mothers can synthesize omega 3 fatty acids from

Behind Fish Oil Supplements

This is FRESH AIR. Cheap Moncler Jackets I’m Terry Gross. Today’s interview is about human health and the health of the oceans. My guest Paul Greenberg has written a new book whose focus is omega 3 dietary supplements, capsules containing the fatty acids derived from fish and other sea life. He examines the claims the omega 3 industry makes about the health benefits of these supplements and what the latest research has to say.

cheap moncler jackets sale He also writes about the effect these supplements are having on the populations of fish used to create them and how this is affecting the ecosystems of our oceans. Later, we’ll talk about Greenberg’s year long experiment eating fish at every meal to see if it would have a positive effect on moncler outlet store his health. One outcome of the diet it increased the level of mercury in his system not a result he was hoping for. One is for cardiovascular health, and the other is for brain health. And within those two mega categories are sort of sub things relating to joints, on one hand. Vision is a part of it because vision is sort of a subset of the brain. But I would say that if you really want to talk about omega 3 fatty acids, it’s good to talk about the heart and the brain. cheap moncler jackets sale

cheap moncler coats GROSS: So how does omega 3 function in the human body, and why do we think we need more? cheap moncler coats

cheap moncler GREENBERG: So in the heart, it seems to play a role in cheap moncler jackets inflammation. Inflammation is sort of one of these boogeyman words that has entered the discourse around public health in the last I would say five to 10 years. And inflammation is actually a really serious problem. It’s basically the body’s reaction to infection. And when things don’t subside after inflammation, you can have long cheap moncler sale lasting effects of one kind or another. So when we talk about cardiovascular health, generally speaking, people who are pro omega 3 tend to think that omega 3s reduce inflammation and thereby help our cardiovascular system be more resilient overall. cheap moncler

In the brain, omega 3s are actually a major part of the human brain. Somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the mass cheap moncler coats of the human brain is DHA omega 3 fatty acid. So it seems to be directly involved in cell signaling. It seems to monlcer down jackets imply that a healthy amount of omega 3 fatty acid in the brain causes our brains to work faster. That’s at least the theory anyway. It’s hard to prove once and for all that that is actually happening. But that is in fact what people seem to suggest in the scientific community.

GREENBERG: So omega 3 fatty acids are found in seafood. They’re also found in green leafy vegetables. There are different kinds of omega 3s. But basically what they are are fats. And omega 3s differ from other fats in that they are what are called polyunsaturated. I won’t go into the sort of details of how many carbon bonds they have and so forth, but what they are is moncler outlet sale they’re much more fluid than other forms of saturated fat, for example. And they seem to impart a certain kind of flexibility to our cell membranes.

moncler outlet And people who are really advocates of omega 3s, people that I sort of group together in the book as members of omega world people within omega world think that this flexibility, this fluidity within omega 3s somehow gets imparted to our cell membranes and makes us similarly flexible and fluid and prone to resolving things like inflammation. moncler outlet

GROSS: So what does the latest scientific research say about ingesting omega 3s through supplements?

moncler sale outlet GREENBERG: Lately not so many positive things. There have been these raft of studies that came out in the last, say, 10, 15 years really coming to fruition in the last five years that have shown really very limited effect, especially having to do with heart health, these large studies of studies that are also called meta analyses. For example, one was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association back I think in 2012. And they found pretty much no effect on moncler mens jackets cardiovascular health at all from omega 3 supplements. moncler sale outlet

cheap moncler outlet The other side, the brain side of omega 3s I think it’s still kind of we haven’t seen these big studies come out that say very clearly one way or the other, does taking a supplement help our brain? The fact that omega 3s are 5 to 10 percent by mass of the human brain does imply that, gosh, you know, if so much of our brain is this essential fat, will would more make our brains bigger and faster? And that’s the assumption, but it’s not necessarily being borne out by scientific research. cheap moncler outlet

moncler outlet sale GROSS: So how is the supplement industry responding to this research that you’ve been describing that says, you know, the omega 3 supplements might not be doing what we want them to do? moncler outlet sale

GREENBERG: Well, the supplement industry tends to respond with more and more studies. The problem that I found as a lay person going into this book was that there are so many omega 3 studies, almost 30,000 studies that have been done about omega 3s you know, this health factor omega 3s and that health factor. And generally, what the industry tends to do is that when a major study comes out and says omega 3s don’t work, they point to this raft of other studies that say that they do. And you can kind of get lost within these all these different studies.

moncler outlet uk But actually so my partner is a statistician. And she really helped me understand that there are studies and then there are studies. So most of the studies that the omega 3 industry falls back on are moncler sale outlet what are called association studies. And those are sort of like I mean, to use a very sort of crude example, association studies show that when there are chickens, there are eggs. They don’t show that necessarily chickens cause eggs. They just say that chickens and eggs tend to be around each other. moncler outlet uk

moncler jackets outlet So what those association studies tend to look at moncler sale is moncler outlet online if people are eating a lot of fish, if they tend to have, say, high omega 3 levels in their blood, they tend to have better cardiovascular health. But it doesn’t show necessarily that eating the omega 3 thing did actually improve your health. The issue becomes more complicated because people who are generally following an omega 3 lifestyle are generally kind of healthier overall. They tend to eat more vegetables. They tend to eat more fish. They tend to exercise. So it’s hard to say that this one single factor is causing all of these positive health things. moncler jackets outlet

cheap moncler jackets Now, the thing that scientists really use to prove effect is something called a randomized control trial where you actually have a group of people taking the medicine and a group of the people not taking the medicine. And they don’t know if they are taking the medicine, and the other people don’t know if they are taking the medicine. And then they look at health results over time to see if the people actually taking the medicine versus the people taking the placebo are showing improved health results. When they actually do the hard work of doing randomized control trials, up until now those randomized control trials haven’t been showing very strong effect of omega 3s, particularly when it concerns heart health. cheap moncler jackets

moncler outlet store GROSS: I think part of the reason why a lot of people take omega 3 supplements is that they know omega 3 is important to brain functioning. So like you said, why not have more? Can the human body make omega 3 by itself? moncler outlet store

GREENBERG: So, yes, it can. The human body can take what’s called alpha Linolenic acid, ALA, from which is a source of vegetable omega 3, will come to us from leafy greens, various vegetable sources. And we actually can take that and elongate that into EPA and DHA omega 3 fatty acids, which are in our heart and in our brain. So we can make it. But we only can do it at a very low conversion rate. So the supplement industry has sort of seized onto that little, you know, deficiency we have in elongating these fatty acid chains and saying, OK, well, the human body can’t quite do it, so we’re going to jump in and help the human body add more EPA and DHA to its system.

Interestingly, pregnant mothers actually are much more efficient at creating omega 3s. And the reason is because infants when they’re in the womb need to have DHA into their brain to build their brain. So actually, mother’s milk is quite high in omega 3 fatty acids. And pregnant mothers can synthesize omega 3 fatty acids from vegetable sources.

So it’s kind of unclear whether do we get that sort of initial load of omega 3s when we’re in vitro and then we put it all in our brain and that’s enough, or do we have to kind of keep eating it to keep building our brains over time? And to tell you the truth, I didn’t find an entirely satisfactory answer in all the research that I did. I think it’s open to question whether or not we have to do this.

moncler outlet jackets GROSS: So does the human body absorb omega 3s equally well through a supplement moncler outlet or through fish when the omega 3 is within the fish itself? moncler outlet jackets

moncler sale GREENBERG: My impression when talking to health professionals was that, generally speaking, it’s better to get omega 3s in food form, just like it’s better to get many different forms of nutrition in food rather than through a supplement. I think that the human body was did not evolve to take isolated amounts of certain chemicals or certain vitamins or nutrients. We evolved to eat whole food. And I truly believe that if you’re going to have omega 3s in your body. You should be having them through your food. What I think is interesting is that when you look at studies of indigenous people that live pretty far from the water, they look at health effects in people that don’t eat a lot of seafood but who generally live healthy lives that eat a fair amount of vegetables, cheap moncler outlet that are very physically active that you don’t see this market deficiency that the omega 3 industry warns us that we’re going to see. moncler sale

GROSS: Some of the eggs I buy have omega 3 in them. Is that because the eggs have been supplemented, or are there omega 3s naturally in eggs?

moncler jacket sale GREENBERG: So, interestingly, there’s a doctor in the book named Artemis Simopoulos. She noticed that in Greece, chickens were https://www.thebeastmark.com always browsing on wild field greens, purslane in particular. And so she smuggled a few of those eggs back to the United States. And then together with a guy named Norm Salem, they did a lipid analysis of the grass fed eggs with the corn fed eggs that are normally sold in American supermarkets. And they found that the omega 3 levels were much, much higher in the grass fed eggs. So I would say, you know, when you see pasture raised eggs, if the chickens involved are truly on pasture and truly eating grasses, they will have higher omega 3 levels. The other way around this, of course, is to supplement chicken feed with fishmeal and fish oil, which is done. It’s less and less now, but in the early days of sort of promoting omega 3s, quite often, chickens were fed fishmeal and fish oil to raise the level of omega 3s in their bodies, which would then get passed on to their cheap moncler eggs. moncler jacket sale

moncler outlet online GROSS: Well, let’s take a break here. And then we’ll talk some more. If you’re just joining us, my guest is Paul Greenberg. He’s a journalist who’s been focusing on issues related to fish for years now. And his new book is called “The Omega Principle: Seafood And The Quest For A Long Life And A Healthier Planet.” When we come back, we’ll talk about what the source is for over the counter omega supplements and what Greenberg says that’s doing to the oceans and the oceans’ ecosystems. So we’ll be right back. This is FRESH AIR moncler outlet online.