This YouTube interview (Jeffrey Bland, PhD with Mark Hyman) defines metabolic health and discusses its prevalence, causes, and consequences. Key claim: only 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy; poor metabolic health is linked to high blood sugar, cholesterol, blood pressure, visceral fat, inflammation, and diseases like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. The speakers highlight omega-3 fatty acids (EPA, DHA, DPA), pro-resolving mediators, and a specific high-purity fish oil (sourced from Dutch Harbor/Alaska, flash-frozen) as interventions to protect against metabolic dysfunction.
Questions this video answers
12%.
Having high blood sugar, high cholesterol, or high blood pressure.
Dutch Harbor, Alaska; Bering Sea; Gulf of Alaska.
Processed within ~20 minutes of being live and flash frozen at -10 degrees (reported as "minus 10 degrees").
Chapters
So we've had a lot of questions asked about metabolic health. What is metabolic health and where does it come from and what can you do about it? And I am happy to be speaking to one of the world's experts in metabolic health.
I don't know about that.
No, I do know about that. So you've written many books, you've studied tens of thousands of patients, and you are an expert. So tell us, what is metabolic health?
Well, you know, here's the bad news, Jeff. Only 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy, which means 88% or not. And what does that mean? Well, poor metabolic health in that context is defined as having high blood sugar, high cholesterol, or high blood pressure. All these three things are indirect measurements of your overall poor health. It's primarily driven by our poor diet. And it drives the accumulation of belly fat or visceral fat that is not just there holding up your pants. As my colleague and friend Sid Baker said, it's active, it's dynamic. It's producing all kinds of molecules that are good or bad, depending on what you're eating. So if you have visceral fat that comes from eating all the starch and sugar and processed food in your diet, you're generating many inflammatory chemicals, many hormones that cause your appetite to go up and your metabolism to slow down. And it creates this whole cascade of problems that we're seeing and, and the end result as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, these are all metabolic diseases and signs of poor metabolic health.
So let me give one example of which there are many of things that are limited in the standard American diet, the sand diet, which can be put back in to some extent with the appropriate formulation. So that's omega 3 fatty acids. And there are many different forms of omega 3 fatty acids. We're pleased individual health omega 3s that we have both the EPA, DHA, DPA plus, we have vitamin A, vitamin D, and we also have these pro resolving mediators, all of which are part of the protection against metabolic dysfunction.
That's right. So, Jeff, you just hit a mouthful there, but basically there's a lot of compounds in there. The fish oil that's in regular fish oil is there, but this is a special kind of fish oil because it contains compounds that are often lost in the processing of regular fish oil called pro resolving mediators. And what they do is they resolve inflammation, inflammation in the body. It's your body's own break on the immune system. And they are needed because we are living in an inflammatory world and culture and so that's what's so beautiful about this. Not just an average fish oil, it's like a pretty unique product.
Yeah. These fish from which this oil is derived were caught on hook and line. They're from 20 minutes of being a live fish, they're processed and they ultimately then end up flash frozen at minus 10 degrees. And this process never uses chemicals or anything in heat to eventually produce what we consider probably the purest Dutch Harbor, Alaska, Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska fish oil.
I mean, this is the one I use because it just gets you all the benefits of regular fish oil, but also gets you these extra benefits. And what's amazing about it, it doesn't taste bad and smell bad. I don't know how you did it, Jeff, but it tastes and smells pretty good.
Well, let me tell you, this was for me a revelation. So we built this pharmaceutical grape plant in Dutch harbor to produce this oil. And we were waiting on bated breath for the first oil to start coming out the spigot to see what it would be like. Because we, you know, had all this stuff we constructed to do this. And one of my colleagues said we had to get cocktail glasses so we can drink this oil when it comes out in the appropriate, you know, receptacle. I thought, well, that's a little, I don't know.
And so we're all standing there, a little shot glass.
We're standing there with our cocktail glasses and here comes the first oil out and it is colorless, it's odorless. And then we taste it and there no fishing taste. And now I recognize that the color and the order and the taste are byproducts of the damage to the oil that occurs through putrefaction and oxidation and things. So a real clean fish oil doesn't have those adverse.
