[EP.14] Why Omega 3 Accomplishes Longevity & Why Omega 6 isn’t the Almighty Devil?

Dr. Joel Rosen:Hey guys, welcome back to another edition where I’m excited to announce our amazing guest Dr. Bill Harris as he’s been a leader and leading researcher in the omega-3 three fatty acid field for over 40 years. He has over 300 scientific papers on fatty acids and health, the vast majority on omega threes. He has been on the faculty of three medical schools and has received five NIH grants to study omega threes. He was the co-author of three h A statements on fatty acid and heart health as the CO inventor of the Omega three index, which we’ll be getting into, and the Omega three blood tests and founder of mega quant analytics, Dr. Harris has been ranked among the top 2% of scientists worldwide based on the impact that he’s had with his research. Dr. Bill, thank you so much for being here today. Dr. Bill Harris:Great to be here. Yes. Dr. Joel Rosen:So I always like to do some research so that I can ask intelligent questions before we get here. I know that initially in the 70s, you were asked to study dietary fat and its effects on cholesterol. At that time, we knew that animal fats raised cholesterol, or at least now we know triglycerides and vegetable oils lowered cholesterol or triglycerides. But as you mentioned there we weren’t sure why. So potentially over the 40 years, I guess that’s a good starting point to know where we started from and where we are now. You know. Dr. Bill Harris:And so do we know why liquid oils, lower cholesterol, and saturated fats raise cholesterol? I think we know better. I think we know now that you’re changing membrane fatty acid composition with the different fats that we’re eating. and a high saturated fat diet does change the the way that the liver and liver cells process or remove LDL cholesterol LDL particles from the blood that’s of course, that’s the way statins work they upregulate the LDL receptors and remove more LDL from the blood. And if you’re getting more saturated fat versus polyunsaturated fat, those LDL receptors are not as efficient at moving LDL out of circulation. So LDL levels go up. That’s kind of shorthand of what we know now but there is a physical selling biochemical reason for why different fats have different effects on cholesterol outs. Dr. Joel Rosen:Okay, great. So So then as far as springing forward from that we know so much about the Omega threes and the longevity studies and why they’re so important for human health. Maybe we can get into that. Dr. Bill Harris:Sure. Yeah. We’ve been interested in, of course, Omega Three for a lot of time. And until now, I don’t know maybe 10 or 15 years ago, nobody looked at total mortality or effects. They’ve looked and looked at people with cardiovascular disease and the effects of Omega three on those people typically lower the risk for cardiovascular events, which should translate into a longer lifespan. You have fewer events. More recently we’ve been part of a group called Force fo RCE, which stands for Fatty Acid Outcomes Research Consortium, it’s a group that started at Tufts University in Boston. And it’s a collaboration of multiple individuals who have access to different research cohorts like the Framingham cohort, or like epic, or Mesa, or Eric, are these acronyms that we throw around the most people don’t know, but they’re fundamentally groups of people that have volunteered to be in a lifetime study. You know, like in Framingham, they took like 4000 people out of the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, in the 1940s, when they started, and they did every test known to man in on these people, they’re all healthy people, you know, middle-aged people. And then they just followed him for years and looked for the relationship between some something, they measured either a sum, they developed the term risk factor, the Framingham group, there’s nobody used that term before. And nobody knew it that nobody knew that smoking was related to a high risk for cancer or heart disease, they didn’t know high blood pressure was they didn’t know high cholesterol. So that’s how they discovered these risk factors. And so they’re like Framingham, there are cohorts like that all around the world. And so we have a collaboration with many of those cohorts, and the ones that have measured fatty acids in the blood and the ones we work together. And we found when we asked the question, of all these cohorts and several, several 1000 people together, is there a relationship between the blood Omega three-level and your risk for dying over time? And of course, you know, the window, the average window of time between blood drawing and when we stopped following up on people, it’s like 16 years, 1316 years, something like that. So it’s a, you know if you study Omega three levels and 10-year-olds, and ask, what’s the mortality in the next 10 years, you’re not going to find anything because nobody’s gonna die. You’ve got to study people toward the ...