The Missing Fat You Need to Survive and Thrive

Hey everyone, welcome to my weekly house call. Your chance to ask me your questions and this week's question is Dr. Hyman. I've been hearing so much contradictory information about omega-3 fats. Some studies show they help everything and some studies show that fish oil supplements don't seem to do anything. What's the real story on omega-3 fats? Well, here's the deal. I said it over and over, but it's worth repeating. Food is information, not just calories. Food influences the function of our genes, our hormones, our immune system, even our gut flora. In fact, every function of your body is controlled by food. It's the biggest determinant of your biology. Now, nowhere is this more true than with omega-3 fatty acids. The omega-3 fatty acids from wild fish and certain nuts and seeds, like flax seeds, have critical roles on our cognitive development, on learning, on visual development, immune and inflammatory function, pregnancy outcomes, brain health, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, cancer, mental illness, and lots more. And it does so because it affects every cell of our body. The omega-3 fats form the cell membranes that cover our 100 trillion cells and they regulate hormones, and they regulate inflammation throughout your whole system. Now, at a recent nutrition conference, I heard this doctor from the NIH, Joseph Hibbeln. He's the scientist in the Section of Nutritional Neurosciences at the NIH. And he presented some data that was startling about the effect of fish oil or omega-3 fats on our mental health. He told us that the flood of soybean oil and seed oils, which contain high amounts of linoleic acid, floods our bodies and it promotes inflammation and disease. Now this fat forms arachidonic acid in our cells and in our culture it comes from soybean oil. 80% of the fats consumed in the US are arachidonic acid containing 20% are in the form of EPA, although I think that's a lot less than that reality. A lot of people have no omega-3 fats. In Japan, 80% of the fats are EPA, which is omega-3 or fish oil, and only 20% are from linoleic acid or soybean oil. And these are seed and soy oils, and this changes our whole tissue composition in dramatic ways and it damages our health. In fact, there's been a thousand-fold increase in the consumption of soybean oil over the last century. In fact, 10 to 20% of all our calories that are consumed in America are from soybean oil, and therefore about 5% to 10% of the calories are from linoleic acid instead of the omega-3s, which we should be eating. Now, it's interesting to me that four or five million years of human evolution occurred in a seafood-rich nutritional environment in which seafood was the main source of fat. There were no seed oils, which we now use to cook french fries and donuts and packaged foods, and we have to ask ourselves what happens when our nutritional environment radically changes. This level of soybean and refined oils in our diet is unsafe. Recent research has found that homicide mortality in the United Kingdom increased dramatically with the increase in the consumption of linoleic acid from soybean oil. The same thing happened in the United States, as well as Australia, the UK, Canada, Argentina, and all over. Conversely, the homicide mortality rates, meaning people who go out and kill people, are inversely related to seafood consumption. Meaning if you eat fish, you're less likely to kill somebody. That's amazing. The more seafood people eat in a society, the less homicide they have. Even more dramatic was a study that was presented in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2002, looking at the reduction in felony level violent offenses among prisoners given omega-3 fat supplementation. Now, a placebo-controlled trial, they gave one group the recommended daily amount of vitamins and minerals and omega-3 fats, and the other group, they just had their regular prison diet and lifestyle. By just providing vitamins and fish oil supplements, there was a 37% reduction in the prisoners committing felony-related violent crime in prison. That's amazing. It's also been shown that fish consumption is universally related to depression and that a one-year study of EPA, which is an omega-3 fat, was helpful in treating treatment-resistant depression, meaning when everything else doesn't work, fish oil works. It's also helpful in treating postpartum depression. The DHA content from fish oils also is a critical part of mother's milk and helps neurologic development in the fetus. I think it increases higher IQs. In fact, seven points higher IQs if you get fish oil. That's why they put now DHA in all the formula. The DHA content of mother's milk is also correlated with a lower risk of postpartum depression. This means that women who had higher levels of omega-3 fats in their tissues had lower rates of postpartum depression. It's also true that little kids who have dyslexia, dyspraxia, which is difficulty writing, learning problems, attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, they're mostly omega-3 deficient. See, dopamine activity, which is critical for brain function in these children, is improved with essential fatty acid consumption. And guess what else improves dopamine? Adderall or Ritalin, right? The stimulants are given these kids, but what about fish oil? There have been controlled studies showing that by giving fish oil, There's been improvement in reading and spelling and treatment groups, improvements in conduct in school, because the nervous system is very dependent on these fats to function, so these kids behave better. So you can see from this data that omega-3 fats are critical for controlling every cell function of our body, including our mood, our mental functioning, as well as our metabolism. So there you have it. Omega-3 fats can help you be happier, smarter, better focused, and less mean and thinner. I want to hear from you. How has using omega-3 fats helped you? Comment below or on my Facebook page and if you like this video be sure to share it with your friends and family on Facebook and Twitter and submit your questions to DrHyman.com and maybe next week I'll make a house call to you.