HS 236 - Get Your Dietary Dose of Omega-3 with Stuart Tomc

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It's my pleasure to welcome Stuart Tomk to the show. He is a certified natural health professional and a leading authority on dietary supplements. Former consultant to the World Health Organization and integrative physicians worldwide. Stuart, welcome. How are you?

You know, I'm very. I'm well today. Thank you for having me. A tough subject to discuss today, but I think we have to do it.

Yeah, we definitely. And you're coming to us from the Chicago area, is that correct?

That's correct. Right here in Chicago. And the corporate offices for the company I represent is out in sunny California.

And that is Nordic Naturals, right?

That's correct.

Fantastic. Well, good. Well, tell us what is the latest and greatest in the world of health and supplementation?

Well, I think one of the areas that I am most curious about is this discovery of what we call the endocannabinoid signaling system, which is a relatively new recovery. We have these receptor sites in our brain and in our periphery, and they're very instrumental in regulating satiety, food seeking behavior, some of the reward mechanisms that are triggered by behavior in general. And it appears as if the fat you eat on a regular basis may have a role in some people in increasing this activity of food seeking behavior through marijuana like receptors. So this interesting interface of how too many of the wrong kind of fats in relationship to other fats may be increasing. Hyperactive endocannabinoid tone making you have the munchies and not be able to stop eating what you're eating. That's an area of great interest.

So you're saying that contributes to the.

Obesity problem then, and metabolic derangement and syndrome X? I mean, just try to imagine this. We had a balance in our tissues of the most important of the essential fatty acids up until about the 1950s. Then we told everyone to ban, discontinue the saturated fats, right? They were demonized, polyunsaturate, everything. But we made no distinction between Omega 3 and Omega 6, then told people no fat, fat free cookies, fat free muffins, fat free everything. We gained a lot of weight. Now we've been demonizing the trans fatty acids now yet once again. But too many seed oils in our diet drive food seeking behavior. This is a new and exciting discovery.

So what is in our diet exactly that is causing us to eat more?

Okay, so if you have higher levels of arachidonic acid, which is the long chain Omega 6 that is in every one of our trillions of cell membranes, this arachidonic acid is converted into another compound called anatomide, which is made on demand. And there are some others like that that then fits into a receptor site that triggers the munchies. What we've seen over the last five or six years, and then top researchers at National Institutes of Health have been exploring this. As we have eaten more and more and more seed oils and have more and more omega 6 in our diet, we have more omega 6 in our tissues. That initiates more and more food seeking behavior, and we have a reduced satiety.

Okay, right. But where Are we getting.

This from? I mean, what is the external source that is creating this whole chain of events?

You're talking about corn oil in particular. Ah yes, king corn soybean oil, which makes up about 20% of our daily energy intake. Now the fact that with animal nutrition we've completely changed the diet of what our ancestors ate, of what our grandparents ate, because we've changed the food that we feed them. So we've imbalanced the fats in the animals themselves, further imbalancing ourselves. Then we eat more vegetable and seed oils and less fish and fewer green leafy vegetables and we're radically out of balance.

Right, right. Okay. So what do we have to do to bring ourselves back into balance? I mean, you're saying that the meat supply is so corrupted. Yeah, I mean, you know that. Can we even do anything about that? I mean you can eat free range and grass fed and you know, but I sort of wonder how legit all of that is. You know, it seems like everything's corrupted nowadays.

Well, I, you know, I to the U.S. department of Agriculture's database to really get the fatty acid analysis that's in food. I mean, that way I take what is more subjective out of the equation because this is a challenging and charged topic as you know. So I look at the data of what's actually in the food. Now the U.S. department of Agriculture's database doesn't distinguish between grass fed cattle and grain fed cattle. However, from other sources of information, it's true. Grass fed cattle, wild caught fish, animals that eat more of their natural fare have higher levels of omega 3 and lower levels of omega 6. I've seen data on farm raised salmon versus wild salmon and until the last two years when they radically tried to get the feed back to being more balanced, you could get three times as much Omega 3 in a wild caught salmon than you would in a farm raised salmon. So yes, with diet we can do something, but it's not easy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right, well what can we do in the diet though? I mean, it's not easy, but you know, is it supplementation, will that correct the problem? Because you know, some of it we can't fix at the root.

Probably that's correct. I mean, I was just talking to a physician the other day. We know that Omega 3s, whether they're from food or supplements, are converted into the anti inflammatory hormone compounds that help put out the fire and rebuild. But we don't always know what's causing the insult. It's multi, multifactorial the biggest thing I encourage people to do in all of my lectures is you're going to get the greatest initial benefit, I believe, by dramatically reducing the Omega 6 intake. Because what we want to do is we want to reduce the burden of the body needing supplementation. It should be a supplement. And if we can get people to really study which oils are the highest in Omega 6, not use those, eat more green leafy vegetables, more flax meal, and then eat supplements if you're not getting enough cold water, oily fish in the diet, to me, that's a much better overview of how we can correct the imbalance. Because what we've been doing, Jason, by telling everyone to take two capsules of fish oil a day, not keeping the background diet into consideration, a lot of people just miss the benefit boat with Omega 3.

So what, what happens? The two capsules won't solve the problem.

Because of what? Because that. I mean, you know, we're talking about how it's hard to fix the diet, right? I mean, it's really hard given a corrupted food supply, given, you know, all of the corn syrup everywhere.

You know, what do we do?

Well, the issue is this, because both of these fats, and thank you for structuring this in a way that we can really step through this one piece at a time. I appreciate that. Because everyone needs to understand that both of these fats are essential. We don't make them. But balance is critical. They both compete. Every bit of omega 6 you eat, every bit of omega 3 you eat is fighting for attention and placement inside of every one of your cell membranes. Then when the immune system is triggered, which is every day, all day long, in a myriad of different ways. If you have more Omega 6 in your tissues, you create the compounds that prolong inflammation, constrict your airways, constrict blood vessels, increase blood clotting, increase pain sensitivity. It's a natural thing. You want to have that. However, if the standard American diet is 80% omega 6 and only 20% omega 3, because we don't eat fish every day, we don't eat tons of dark green leafy vegetables, we don't eat enough seaweed, every time your immune system is challenged, you have an explosive hyperbolic reaction that isn't necessary. So the competition is between. Every bite of food you eat that doesn't get turned into energy becomes you. The fats in that food set the stage for how you're going to respond to inflammatory insults. That's a key part of aging successfully, is knowing how to respond efficiently to the Myriad of insults out there.

Okay, all right, good, good. So. So what else can we do? You know, I mean, this problem is so multifaceted that it's, you know, everyone is out there marketing a different solution, a different supplement. The magic pill.

How do we sort the wheat from the chaff?

Well, I mean, that's so hard now with so much gimmicky over simplification and.

Massively and incredibly good marketing at the same time.

I mean, it would make anybody suspect. I mean, the people that I look to as the forerunners in this whole conversation with are people like Bruce Lipton. I don't know if you're familiar with Dr. Lipton, but he's one of the forerunners in this area of epigenetics and what is above the genes. And for years he's been lecturing, he's written three amazing books. One called the Biology of Belief. And the reason I pick Omega 3s as my main area to focus is because the cell membrane, according to Lipton, is a liquid crystal semiconductor with gates and channels. So if the environment dictates gene transcription and that cell membrane is the interface, I think it's the first thing, the simplest thing, the fastest thing we can do to get results. I mean, Dr. Lipton said to me, he's like, hey, Stuart, you're doing important work. However, caveat. If you can get people to wake up on how fear and unresolved emotions and hatred and resentment can drive so much stress response in the body that you're in constant fight or FL flight, the immune system is depressed because you're in constant running mode. I mean, that's really a hard place for a lot of people to begin this journey.

Oh, sure. I mean, you know, in psychosomatic medicine ever since. Norman Cousins was probably the pioneer of it, I assume, but, you know, with his great book Anatomy of an Illness. But, you know, I mean, it has been proven over and over to be a legitimate science.

Oh, and I think that that's where this is going to end. I just came back from Australia and they have very strict laws there about supplements. I was one of the keynote speakers. Bruce Lipton gave the opening address and it was very, very interesting because they're so restrictive with what you can and cannot sell with supplements in Australia that the emphasis on mind, body, meditation, heart rate variability. They did a demonstration. They got a guy on stage, measured the heart rate variability. 300 of us all sending our love towards him. We completely relaxed. This guy got his sine wave going for his heart rate to be far more Metered and appropriate and helped reduce his overload of stress. Now the trick is to get a lot of people from allopathic evidence based medicine to buy into that. Well, that's a hard stretch. It is no matter. Even Cleveland Clinic, all these places that are looking at the role of meditation with reducing stress and helping with inflammatory cytokines. New study that just came out. Huge reduction in C reactive protein among people that meditate and people that pray and people that have that mind body connection. But that's so hard to get people to start there. I like to find the simple small victories that we can get somebody to motivate them to look at their emotional health.

Yeah, yeah. Very, very good. I definitely agree on the mind body part. But tell us about what else we can do.

In terms of supplementation. In terms of men choices.

What else can we do there?

Well, even before I answer that, and I will answer it directly, I promise, I'm just such a big believer in sleep. I can't tell you after 25 years of working in the dietary supplement industry how many health gurus and health experts I've known personally and I've seen that might know everything to do and don't sleep or don't forgive or they're angry.

How much sleep is the right amount though?

I mean, I think it's sort of like the newest theory around carbohydrate metabolic burning that we're going to have to find out for ourselves individually what that is. Because I was at a conference recently and a gentleman from D.C. who's high up in health, I probably shouldn't mention his name, looked at me and said, hey, you know what, Stuart? We're about to find out that resveratrol is really good for some people. And once we understand those allelic differences and that interface with the nutrigenic nutrigenomic activity, we're going to go into an era of personalized medicine that's going to make this look like gross oversimplification. In the meantime, eat when you're hungry and sleep when you're tired. And I believe that if we can get more sleep, it's so restorative that I will choose at this point sleep over exercise, which I think is equally as important.

Okay, so sleep more, exercise less. Just kidding. Not necessarily. But I will say something about exercise. As much as I love to do it, and especially yoga, I'm a big fan of yoga. I hurt my shoulder recently and I couldn't do it. And I tell you, resting is also important. You know, taking a Break from exercise I think is very beneficial. You know, I was like doing it too much. I think you got to give the body time to recover.

Well, you know, there's. I just came back from bodybuilding.com, their big operation, and I gave a bunch of lectures out there to their group. And these are fitness, I mean, real enthusiasts. Down the hallway are pictures of everyone that works there before and after, like with a newspaper. And now they're just ripped. They're all just like supermodel looking ripped. I've studied that as well, and I've talked to a lot of different experts that study this. You can, you can reach that tipping point where a certain amount of the stress and the hormetic challenge is good and it upregulates a lot of the body's antioxidant signaling system. But evidence that shows when you go over that bell curve and you're just slamming yourself way, way, way too much that you can actually speed up the aging process. We actually see a lot of people that look older that are physically very fit. I remember the man, Gerald Reeven, who coined the term Syndrome X. I saw his last lecture in Holland in Maastricht, and the title of the talk was why a Cluster Is a Cluster. How about this for going out on top? He said, we probably made some mistakes. This is what he said. I'm paraphrasing. We have some fit fat people out there and some skinny time bombs that are about to have a stroke or a heart attack. So again, that's one of the other paradoxes that I'm interested in. That just getting everybody to 2%, 5% body fat or whatever, that's not a solution for successful aging or for optimal health either.

Very, very good point, Very good point. Okay, so what else?

Well, I think that the area where I believe it can all come together is that whole idea of being attentive to the decisions that we make. And so as we go into this holiday season and people have a tendency to maybe indulge, maybe more than they normally do, that if you tell yourself I really shouldn't eat this and then you go ahead and eat it, that might be one of the most foolhardy things that we do. Because if I'm going to eat a brownie that my grandmother makes with her grandmother's recipe, and I've recently gone through some fitness craze, or I'm on this gluten free thing, or I'm doing more of the paleo diet or whatever, and I refuse the generosity of my grandmother's Brownie with her love. I'm missing out on something that can be supremely healing and connecting. And that's something that I think that we've missed in our obsession to find these perfect philosophies or diets.

Very good point. Very good point. Well, what do you think about the. I want to ask you about your thoughts on the fda. You were making some interesting comments about Australia and how they have very strict laws when it comes to supplements. And, you know, I would say that we do too. You know, the fact that you look at the herbal world, for example, how, you know, no claims can be made, you know, if you, if you make a claim on a bottle of prune juice, yet everybody knows what prune juice does. Okay. You know, you're going to jail. I mean, what do you think about that and what's the right answer? I mean, you're in this business, so it affects you.

It does. And I see it from all sides. The one part of me that is very appreciative that we test these theories is so that we can remove some of the oversimplification that may because we have such a growing audience of the people that listen to shows like yours and want someone like me on the air all the time. Since that audience is growing. My concern is when we say everything within the four walls of this health food store and all of these great herbs and supplements and these tools that we have, everything in here is fundamentally safe and effective and good. And everything over here in the pharmacy, everything that we get at the hospital, all this stuff is all bad. See, I think that huge division of where we're unwilling to see the benefit in, for example, the FDA asking for more research. I used to work for a spice oil company you might have heard of oil of oregano. Have you ever used it?

No.

Okay. It's nature's most effective germ killer that I ever found. And I worked at that company for 10 years. So we did all this research in laboratory studies, petri dishes, and in animal studies of how this stuff kills, like every single virile and germ. So the owner of the company got emboldened because the evidence was looking great. So he's coming out saying, hey, I think I found the cure to the coronavirus. I found the cure to this. The cure to this. The cure to this. The cure to this. None of that stuff was extensively studied for long term safety in humans compared to antibiotics or antivirals. And research tested and proven effective. So he made these outrageous claims that exceeded what the law said he's allowed to make and he ended up getting in trouble. So, I mean, there's part of me that thinks it's a great thing to rein in all the bad actors in this industry and then the people that have legitimate science like omega 3, like vitamin D, There are some areas where there's such strong science that over time they will prove themselves to be important tools in the tool chest. Does that answer the question?

Yeah. Yeah. So you're conflicted about it. And, you know, I am too.

I think we all are hugely conflicted about it. Because when I went to a place like Australia, which I love, and I've been to New Zealand now, and I've seen even Health Canada is firmer than we are. And when they limit these things, that a competent, educated person who I think should always be talking to a naturopath or a medical doctor that has advanced training in nutritional medicine, that a lot of these tools like you may need megadose omega 3 if you're concussed. I have a colleague who just retired from the Pentagon. I mean, he ran the primary care flight unit, the medical unit at the Pentagon. He's telling you to take a dose of omega 3 of 9 grams a day if you get concussed.

Yeah. Now, let me ask you about this. Let's talk about that for just a moment. Wasn't there some contrary news about Omega 3 and fish oil maybe about two months ago? I want to say, saying that it was bad for you. I don't know what. Of course, there's so much controversy about this stuff, we all know that. But there was a new study out, like maybe it was relating to heart disease. I'm not sure. I just remember hearing it and I thought, oh, gosh, now what do we have to do? Take all this stuff we thought about omega 3 and fish oil was so good for us, and now they're saying it's bad. Who do you believe? How do you do this?

Well, there were actually two major fronts. One was on top of standard of care, which we need to make that point, and I'll describe that in a second. And then the other one was an association, an observation between omega 3 levels in the tissue 10 years after somebody started a study, and their coincidence of developing prostate cancer. We've got two areas. Let's address the first one. Pharmacology has gotten so sophisticated that you can get a cardiac care patient or someone that's had a heart attack. So stabilized with drugs, thin their blood, keep their atherogenic cholesterol a little Bit lower, because that's what we're seeing with some of these statins. It's not just that they lower cholesterol, they're also anti inflammatory for oxidized cholesterol, which can be dangerous. And you get people on all these drugs and then you give them 1,000 milligrams of Omega 3, EPA and DHA, and then you're supposed to see is there a statistically significant reduction in death with middle age obese smokers that are already on six to nine different drugs? I'm not surprised in the least, Jason, that there isn't a huge added reduction in death on top of every drug that's known that standard of care. I don't know why anybody's surprised by that. We've got to put that in context because the best fish oil research goes back to the big Italian study before statin drugs were so widely prescribed. The other would be the prostate issue. I mean, I am very leery of ever saying that something is inappropriate science because that's easy to say. I'm going to quote the lead author of the prostate study. He says it's important to note, however, that these results, his observation that Omega 3 was connected to prostate cancer, he says, do not address the question of whether Omega 3s play a detrimental role in prostate cancer. All he saw was 10 years after they were first tested that there was a very small difference in the omega 3 in the men. And then 10 years later men developed prostate cancer. I mean, it's a correlation, it's an association, it's not causation. And it's very misleading to people that need help.

Very interesting. Well, the debate rages on, my friend.

It's just hard. Maybe as a final thing, can you address that? How does the consumer know what to believe anymore? Can you give any more advice on that?

Well, I am a data junkie. I try to be really excited about the information, but I really want to place my trust in the evidence. And then understanding the mechanism of action, those are the two things where there's freedom. Because if you understand the mechanism of action when I tell you that our running theory is that people that eat more seeds and seed oils and less omega 3s anywhere you live in the world will die differently. They will have more thrombotic events. There are a few unified theories in nutrition other than quit smoking, which you can challenge with the Japanese paradox where they smoked a ton, drank so much green tea, had so much iodine, and had some of the lowest levels of lung cancer. But then they also had high levels of esophageal cancer. So there are always these paradoxes everywhere. One thing that I'm so interested in is giving people the sources for the data. So here's what I'm going to recommend. Readpubmed.gov I'm sure you do. Jason, talking to you, everyone. You hear something new in some infomercial, you read it in an editorial. I don't care if your doctor tells you, go to pubmed.gov, type in the search engine, read the research around whatever you're being told and then explore what is the mechanism of action when people learn that aspirin blocks omega 6, that rimonabant, the FDA approved obesity drugs.

So you would say you believe in the aspirin theory then the aspirin therapy concept. Right.

I've gotten some questionable mail from some people that have been quite upset with me for saying it. I believe as a risk, reward, benefit, when you look at the totality of benefit versus the risk and the cost, because that's something that our audience has a hard time doing, that the return on investment is extraordinary. What I'm saying is if aspirin blocks cox, which converts arachidonic acid into pro inflammatory hormone like compounds, what if we ate less Omega 6, had less of it in the tissues and had more Omega 3, how would we respond to immune inflammatory insults? Would we need aspirin every day? Or like the Inuit that had the thinnest blood and the lowest risk of heart problems, that ate far more omega 3 than omega 6? I guess I say it like this. Aspirin was the wonder drug of the 20th century. Some believe the appropriate balance of omega 3 in the tissue may be the ideal recipe for the 21st century.

Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, that may well be correct. Stuart, give out your website and any other resources you want people to have.

Thank you for that opportunity. One I'm going to give you. I love my mentor, Bill Lands. L A N D S Dr. Lands wrote what I believe is the seminal book on this subject called fish omega 3 and human health. Fish omega 3 and human health. He put together a food calculator. Jason, you can go to a website and look up every Omega 3, 6 balance in every food we eat for free by going to fastlearner.org f a s t fastlearner.org look up the Omega 3 balance scores. Don't get upset at me. If almond butter and avocado is where nature or the universe or whatever you believe in decided to hide the Omega 6s, that doesn't mean they're bad. That means.

Oh yeah, well, avocado. I thought that was the superfood.

But here's the thing. If you ate this is why I call it a big fat story. If you ate six avocados a week and tons of tahini and a lot of almond butter and you didn't eat enough seaweed or flax meal and fish, you could eat all non GMO totally healthy wild crafted foods and have a radically imbalanced hoofa status in your tissues and make yourself sick unbeknownst to yourself.

Right?

Yeah. So the last thing is you can Also check out nordicnaturals.com and please talk to your primary care physicians, your healthcare providers, your naturopaths about Omega 3 and how you can benefit from it by getting more than Omega 6 in your tissues.

Well, good stuff. Stuart. Thank you so much for joining us today. And this is one complicated issue, so we look forward to learning more about it and keeping the discovery ongoing. But you've presented some great science for us. Appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

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