Category: omega-3

Omega-3 Facts of the Day

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1. In the 1960s, Greenland Eskimos ate a diet very high in omega-3s.

2. In the 1960s, Greenland Eskimos had very low rates of psoriasis. The Danish rate of psoriasis was 20 times the Eskimo rate.

3. High omega-3 intake reduces inflammatory intercellular signals.

4. Psoriasis is beginning to be considered an autoimmune disease.

It’s not the same type of fact but on the SLD forums spacehoppa reported her rheumatoid arthritis was in remission, apparently from omega-3s, for the first time in the 18 years since it was diagnosed. Her balance was also better.

Science in Action: Omega-3 (methodological improvements)

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I realized (in both senses) several ways to improve my omega-3 self-experimentation:

1. Simpler treatment. I had been drinking both walnut oil and flaxseed oil. For the sake of simplicity, I stopped the walnut oil. I continued to drink 2 tablespoons/day of flaxseed oil. I will vary the amount of flaxseed oil.

2. More controlled measurement. Instead of balancing on any part of my right foot, I started balancing on only the balls of my right foot.

3. More measurement. I measure my balance once/day. During that one session I had been measuring my balance 20 times (measuring how long I could stand on a platform before falling off — 20 durations). The first 5 durations were warm-up, leaving 15 durations that counted. I increased the total number of trials to 30. It was still easy; the whole thing takes about 10 minutes.

4. A new measure. Anything that affects balance is likely to affect other mental abilities, I believe. To test this belief, I will start measuring my brain in a new way: a pencil-and-paper version of Saul Sternberg’s memory-scanning task. It will take about 5 minutes.

I started #1-3 about a week ago and will start #4 today.

An Unexpected Benefit of Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A few days ago I ate a handful of peanuts. Uh-oh, I thought, will this make my brain work worse? Peanuts are high in omega-6. As regular readers of this blog know, when I increased my omega-3 intake several months ago, my balance got better. More recently, when I replaced high omega-3/low omega-6 oils with a low omega-3/high omega-6 oil, my balance got worse; when I returned to the high omega-3/low omega-6 oils, my balance went back up. (Details here.)

To measure the effect of different fats on my brain I have been measuring my balance every morning. The morning after I ate the peanuts, my balance score was within normal limits. Meaning my brain was working no worse than usual. This was reassuring — an unexpected benefit of self-experimentation.

In ten years, will there will be websites that people regularly visit to take a few mental tests? The tests would be a quick and easy measure of brain function. The sites would remember all your scores and would graphically compare your current score with your previous scores. One more way to procrastinate — but it would be good procrastination.

Science in Action: Omega-3 (discussion of balance results)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

My recent omega-3 results encourage more self-experimentation to see if they can be repeated and extended. I’d be very surprised if they turn out to be due to expectations (”placebo effect”). First, the effect of going from high omega-3 to low omega-3 was different than what I expected. I did not expect the one-day lag. Second, the improvement from low omega-3 to high omega-3 repeated results that surprised me. When several months ago I increased my intake of omega-3 I was surprised to notice the next day it was easier to put on my shoes standing up.

My general plan is to find what omega-3 intake produces the best balance and then compare many other fat intakes to that. If omega-3 really improves my balance, I would like to know:

1. What is the effect of omega-6 fats? Do they reduce the effect of omega-3, as often claimed?

2. What is the relative potency of different forms of omega-3? Fish oil omega-3 is supposedly more potent than flaxseed oil omega-3 but I worry about degradation during the trip from fish to store shelf.

3. Does omega-9 have any effect?

4. What other mental functions are affected?

Science in Action: Omega-3 (materials)

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Self-experimentation is for everyone just as blogging is for everyone. You don’t need fancy equipment to be an interesting blogger and you don’t need fancy equipment to do interesting self-experimentation — at least I think my recent omega-3 results are interesting. Here are the easy-to-find materials I used:

1. To measure my balance, I used a bamboo cutting board ($15), a 0.5-inch pipe plug ($1), a booklet with about 20 pages (free), and a stopwatch ($10). Here they are:
Balance-measurement equipment

This shows the size of the pipe plug:

The pipe plug up close

I put the booklet on the floor and put the pipe plug in a cut-out hole in its center. The hole goes about halfway into the booklet (e.g., 10 pages out of 20).

Assembly of the balance-measurement equipment: Step 1

Then I balance the cutting board on top of the pipe plug:

Assembly of the balance-measurement equipment: Step 2

I stand on my right foot on the cutting board; the measure is how long I can balance on it before my left foot touches the floor.

2. To vary the amount of omega-3 in my brain, I used these oils:

The oils I used

Walnut oil and flaxseed oil are high in omega-3 fats; sesame oil is low.

If you are interested in doing similar experiments, feel free to contact me.

Science in Action: Omega-3 (background)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

The omega-3 story began with the circulatory system. In the 1960s, two Danish scientists wondered why Eskimos rarely die of heart disease. Could the answer explain the sharp decrease in heart disease mortality in Norway during World War II? In spite of this promising beginning, the heart and mortality benefits are still not clear. A 2006 meta-analysis of heart disease studies concluded that “omega 3 fats do not have a clear effect on total mortality, combined cardiovascular events, or cancer.”

You can find lots of recommendations to consume omega-3 fats in various forms — fish, supplement, and so on. On the other side, Marion Nestle, the author of What To Eat, seems to believe the advantages claimed for omega-3 are “ hype.” Most researchers are less certain. From a recent New York Times article about Martek, a company that makes an omega-3 food supplement:

“A lot of the claims made for DHA [a form of omega-3] are in the realm of hypotheses,” said David Schardt, senior nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy organization based in Washington. “They are certainly worth pursuing, but there’s not yet enough proof to warrant telling people to go out of their way to take DHA.”

The exceptions, Mr. Schardt said, are people with a history of heart disease and premature infants, who need an extra boost of DHA for proper brain and eye development to compensate for their early exit from the womb.

Martek’s scientists, when pressed, generally agreed with Mr. Schardt. The data showing any health benefits of DHA beyond those related to the heart or premature infants, while encouraging, is not quite conclusive, they say.

The typical experimental study of omega-3 takes two groups of people with a pre-existing problem, gives one group omega-3 and the other group a placebo, and measures outcomes several months later. A 2005 study in Pediatrics, for example, compared two groups of children (n = about 60/group) with Developmental Coordination Disorder. Most of them had ADHD. One group was given an omega-3 supplement; the other group was given a placebo. The children were tested before treatment and after three months of treatment. (The reading, spelling, and behavior scores of children in the supplement group improved more than the scores of children in the placebo group.) Studies like this are hard.

In summary, there is considerable uncertainty about the effects of omega-3; and the methods used to reduce that uncertainty are slow and difficult. This is why self-experimentation might help.

My recent data. The Queen of Fats (2006) by Susan Allport, a science writer, is an excellent introduction to the subject.

Science in Action: Omega-3 (balance results)

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Because many SLD dieters reported better sleep, I wondered if omega-3 improved sleep. I increased my omega-3 intake by switching from olive oil, which has little omega-3, to walnut oil and flaxseed oil, which have much more — especially flaxseed oil. The amount of oil stayed roughly the same. The night after the change, my sleep got better. To my surprise, so did my balance. The next morning, I found I could more easily put on my shoes while standing up. I had been putting on my shoes standing up for 2-3 years and it had never been this easy. (I put on my shoes standing up because I thought it might improve my balance.)

I devised a simple measure of balancing ability. I stood on one foot on a platform balanced on a small metal cylinder (a pipe plug). (I will post pictures.) The parts were easy to find. I tried cylinders of different sizes until the balancing was neither too easy nor too hard. The measure was how long I could stand on one foot on the platform, which measured with a stopwatch. I made these measurements in blocks of 20 (the first 5 were warmup, leaving 15).

My early attempts had two problems: (1) The dose was too low. I had been taking the flaxseed oil as capsules (10 1000-mg capsules/day). I started taking 1 T/day in liquid form (much faster). Then I increased the amount of flaxseed oil/day from 1 T to 2 T. My sleep improved: I woke up more rested. Because the sleep effect was now perfectly clear, I thought measuring the effect on my balance would be a good idea. (2) Practice effects were too large. How well I could balance depended on how often I measured my balance. To avoid practice effects, I measured my balance no more than once/day.

I did a baseline period of several days; then I replaced the walnut oil and flaxseed oil with the same volume of sesame oil, which is low in omega-3. I continued this period until the effects seemed beyond doubt. Then I did another baseline period with the original amounts of walnut and flaxseed oil.
Effect of Type of Fat on My Balance
Here are the balance results. Each point is a geometric mean over 15 trials. The bars are standard errors. After one day, my balance got worse with sesame oil. When I returned to the high-omega-3 oils, my balance returned to its baseline level. To measure the clarity of the effect, I compared the 17 baseline days with the last 4 sesame-oil days. This gave t (19) = 4.1. A very clear effect.

I made this graph in a cafe. The person sitting next to me asked what I was working on. I showed her the graph. I explained that I measured my balance as a way of measuring how well my brain was working. The results suggested that the type of fat in my diet affected how well my brain worked. She said the results were very interesting because most people will have diets closer to sesame oil than walnut oil and flaxseed oil. Many people will be interested in these results, she said. I hope so, I said.

I will post later on the background of these results, the questions they raise, and procedural details. If you can’t wait, read the posts in the omega-3 category. If you are interested in doing a similar experiment, please let me know.

Yet More about Omega-3

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Perhaps inspired by USA Today, the New York Times discusses DHA, an omega-3 fat sold as a food additive. “Magical or overrated?” is the question posed by the headline. According to Marion Nestle, overrated:

“My experience in nutrition is that single nutrients rarely produce miracles,” said Marion Nestle, a professor in the department of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University and the author of “What to Eat,” published last year. “But it’s also been my experience that companies will put anything in their food if they think the extra marketing hype will help them sell more of it.”

Single nutrients rarely produce miracles? There is a long history in nutrition of just that: The story of the discovery of vitamins. One single-nutrient miracle after another. Given that history, the claims for omega-3 are plausible. If Nestle has an alternative explanation for the many results that point to the benefits of omega-3, that would be interesting to hear. It wasn’t provided in the article. “Companies will put anything in their food if they think the extra marketing hype will help them sell more of it”? Well, B vitamin supplementation of flour has cut the rate of neural tube birth defects roughly in half, a huge benefit, a huge amount of averted misery. Given that success, it is reasonable to think that other supplementation might also be helpful — to everyone. I discuss derogatory treatment of food companies (”will put anything in their food if . . . hype will help them sell more of it”) in the last chapter of The Shangri-La Diet. Curiously enough, Jane Jacobs once said, you can only change something if you love it.

I have done more self-experimentation about omega-3s and will describe the results in a week or two. Previous posts about omega-3 here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here

Someone Has Been Reading This Blog

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According to this USA Today article, “omega-3 is in”. That is, in many new food products to be introduced in 2007, such as a new orange juice. Omega-3, says the article, is “the hot ingredient” and “the miracle food.” The article delicately calls omega-3 a “fatty acid” rather than a fat. My many posts about omega-3 include this and this. More to come.

Is Drinking Olive Oil Healthy?

Seth Roberts46 Comments

In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs wrote about an isolated North Carolina hamlet that her aunt visited in 1923:

One of my aunt’s tasks there was to see to construction of a church. . . One of the farmers donated, as a site, a beautiful knoll beside the river and my aunt suggested the building be made of fine large stones which were already quarried, as it were, needing little dressing, there for the taking in the creek and river beds. No, said the community elders, it was a pretty idea but not possible. . . . Entire walls and buildings of stone would not be safe.

These people came of a parent culture that had not only reared stone parish churches from time immemorial, but great cathedrals.

Likewise, nutritional wisdom is forgotten. Drinking olive oil now seems absurd to some people. But it was practiced in at least one place in the not-so-distant past:

In a mountain village in Crete, [Ancel] Keys saw old farmers working in the field who drank only a glass of olive oil for breakfast; he later verified that one of them was 106 years old.

From Todd Tucker, The Great Starvation Experiment, p. 204. There is a whole organization (Oldways) devoted to preserving ancient foodways and using them for nutritional guidance. The best practitioner of this approach has been Dr. Weston Price, a dentist, whose work is nicely summarized here. Dr. Price traveled the world looking for economically-primitive societies (“native peoples”) with ancient eating habits and excellent health. Their diets, especially the common elements, would suggest what a healthy diet must have.

Two of Dr. Price’s conclusions are relevant to the Shangri-La Diet:

1. “All native peoples studied made great efforts to obtain seafood.” This supports my comments about the importance of omega-3 fats, found much more in seafood than in other foods.

2. “The last major feature of native diets that Price found was that they were rich in fat, especially animal fat.” The animal fat in native diets would be high in omega-3 because the animals were eating grasses and other plants, not corn.

When I wrote my long paper on self-experimentation I divided it into two parts: one titled “Stone-Age Life Suits Us” (the common thread of the five examples), the other about weight control (the research behind SLD). The two parts struck me as quite different. Drinking sugar water to lose weight was definitely not a return to a Stone-Age lifestyle. But the big improvements in SLD since I wrote that paper — from sugar water to ELOO, and from ELOO to oils high in omega-3 — brought SLD much closer to the Stone-Age-Life-Suits-Us theme, I now see.