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Comment by solinent | Hacker News Reader

It's important to also reduce your omega-6 intake if you can, it's really about the ratio of those two polyunsaturated fats. Look for foods with a high omega-3 to omega-6 ratio.

You could just eat some oily fish once a week too. It's tasty when you finally get it right, I promise.

Another nutrient great for brain health is B12.

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... high being roughly around 11 for n6/n3. As always with supplements (if that's how the omega-n3 is taken) more does not equate with better.

> Another nutrient great for brain health is B12.

Why? I'm very sensitive to supplements and usually notice effects immediately even on humble doses but B12 (I've tried 100%-20'000% RDA cyanocobalamin pills) doesn't feel doing anything I could notice. The combo of dish oil + B12 seems preventing menstrual pain in ladies though.

If you're not vegan and you eat at least one serving of meat a day, (or if you're taking a multivitamin) you're probably already getting all the B12 your body can use, and supplementation is unlikely to have much effect.

Souce? I don't think the RDI is a maximum, you can have quite a bit more B12 and still get benefits. When I have time I'll update this with my own search, but maybe you're more educated on this topic than I am.

Typically negatives with overuse only exist with the supplements in my 1 minute glance. This is common amongst many different supplements actually. If you eat actual food you get full, so it prevents too much nutrition from being an issue. I don't think B12 is really something your body will reject, we are able to efficiently filter out any extra with minimal load on the kidneys & liver.

Skip the Cyanocobalmin. Enough people have problems metabolizing that form, and it also shouldn't be consumed solo.

Cheap and effective B Complexes exist that use better forms of the various vitamins exist; only lazy manufacturers still use stuff like Cyanocobalmin. A good multivitamin should also be covering your B need as well, I ended up making a short list of good multis, and Life Extension 2-per-day Capsules ended up being the least expensive of ones that made the list... you pretty much have to go to Thorne and pay more to get better.

Have you tried fish (eat wild-caught)? Mackerel is tasty if you don't like salmon. Those two are both very oily, you can eat one or two servings a week and get enough omega-3. B12 is present in any animal product usually so I recommend eating more meat, cheese or other dairy. You really need the full B spectrum, but B12 in particular is the one to focus on.

I am not an expert, experts may disagree for other reasons, but I do know my math and read the studies for my own benefit.

> Have you tried fish (eat wild-caught)? Mackerel is tasty if you don't like salmon

I like both, salmon especially. But I don't like the prices: fish prices vary wildly between countries and are too high for everyday consumption in many of them.

> Those two are both very oily, you can eat one or two servings a week and get enough omega-3

Now this becomes interesting. I thought one has to get a relevant dose of every nutrient every day.

Yeah I'm from Canada so fish prices are very high here--I generally eat beef which has a great ratio, and avoid omega-6 laden foods. Sometimes I actually need to eat omega-6 heavy foods if I get too much of 3 I think, it's all based on taste for me.

It's very expensive to have a healthy diet, unless you only eat a small selection of foods.

But what about microplastics and various other man made contaminants that are increasingly present in fish?

Go for Omega-3 sourced from algae, that's where the fish get it from. The algae are grown artificially, so you avoid both pollutants and participating in the destruction of our oceans.

I take Opti-3 [1], it had the highest (DHA + EPA) / price ratio last time I checked. Not affiliated, just a fan.

[1]: https://www.vegetology.com/shop/opti3-omega-3-epa-dha

You're getting far more microplastics in your diet just from interaction with packaging and household materials than what you're going to get from an ocean-caught fish.

The issue is really with dioxin, you need to source your fish from somewhere where they are fed properly and there's no pollutants like dioxin.

Do you have a source for that claim?

Nope, but given the prevalence of plastics in human households, packaging materials and the fact that we literally eat with plastic forks and straws and drink from plastic cups...I'd say you're getting a lot more plastic in your diet than a wild salmon off the Alaskan coast.

That doesn't intuitively make sense to me. I'd say for 90% of the packaging of various products I consume, the plastic has been wrapped around the product for a very short time.

I imagine consuming something that has involved multiple steps of digestion of plastics is probably not the same.

It's a bit like comparing water that I put in plastic container a few days ago to water that's been bottled and sitting there for weeks or months.

I'm not saying there's a difference there, just that at least intuitively it seems that way to me. so a source for such a claim is pretty crucial.

B12 is good but also known to accelerate certain cancers

I'm not an expert, but I don't imagine any study that could be designed that would determine this to any practical degree of certainty--B12 is correlated with so many other risk factors, like smoking for example. People with healthier brains possibly take more risks, but it's just a vague guess too.

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