Do I need to eat fish twice a week? 5 times? Do I need to supplement because there is no way to eat enough fish?
Would love some practical guidance tacked on to this
The correlative effect is quite clear, i.e people who have high omega 3 levels (eat a lot of fish) have health benefits.
But in random controlled trials Omega 3 supplements have not had convincing effects.
It might be because the supplements aren't very good, or because there's actually something completely different going on, like fish displaces less healthy foods from the diet.
Some people aim for huge amounts of EPA/DHA but I don't think there's really much evidence that you need 3g/day or whatever the latest broscience is.
Mackerel is particularly high although it doesn't taste great to me compared to salmon, 100g of mackerel has ~4g of EPA/DHA so eating that a couple of times a week is probably more than enough.
Also there is some (although much less) in white fish, there can be significant amounts in shellfish, and tinned tuna has a surprisingly high amount. So all of that adds up if you eat those as well
Unless you’re also consuming all the oil from the can, prefer fish canned in water to canned in oil — because apparently the omega-3s can leach out into oil, but they’re not water-soluble.
Btw, trout is also up there (though not as high as salmon) and is a lovely mild-flavored fish.
It's not thaaat fishy, I didn't grow up eating it. After having it a few times it really grew on me.
Super cheap and an easy way to get it into my diet. I have 2-3 tins per week. I eat it for breakfast mashed on bread (our bread is like a hard cracker), sometimes with a bit of mustard, or butter spread first.
Maybe genetics, I'm guessing all my ancestors grew up eating dairy and some meat and not so much fish.
It used to be traditional in England to eat kippers for breakfast once a week but that's more or less gone extinct
- hemp hearts (complete protein, goes best with oatmeal for breakfast, on salads, or in soups for an extra bit of nutty / fatty flavor)
- pumpkin seeds (also good source of iron, iirc)
- algae-based supplement (currently taking an omega3 + vit D + vit K combo capsule from nordic naturals)
Cows eat grass for protein, we can't really skip the middle man and eat grass to get protein.
I don't know if it's true, but it wouldn't be unusual for there to be benefit from getting omega 3 from fish rather than algea because of something like this. AFAIK, we mostly only know about the benefits of eating fish.
for example, you can tell exactly how much protein is in 100g of a complete protein like tofu when compared to 100g of something gross like beef.
similarly, my algae-based capsules contain 1210 mg of omega3s per serving, with 660mg of EPA and 440 of DHA.
> we mostly only know about the benefits of eating fish
nope, this study describes consumption of omega3s, not fish per se.
So here we go again. First it was cholesterol, which was then rebutted, so people (myself included) started eating eggs every day. And now this. You can't win!
Eggs are believed to lead to adverse outcomes because of: 1. Their high cholesterol content. 2. Their SFA content.
I'm not sure what you mean by cholesterol being rebutted. The only thing like that I'm really aware of is the dietary guidelines de-prioritising dietary cholesterol, but that decision was made because when making DGs, people want to focus on the biggest levers we can pull. Dietary cholesterol _does_ have a negative impact on health, but it also has a threshold effect at around 400mg/d after which it has considerably less impact (unless you're part of the ~20% of the population who are "cholesterol hyper responders").
Because most people eating a SAD are already at that threshold, the decision was made to take dietary cholesterol off the headline recommendations, but if you read the details in the DGs and the meta-analyses that drive them, they still point to lowering dietary cholesterol as a smart health move.
I frequently see this change portrayed as "no longer recommending the lowering of dietary cholesterol" or "admitting they were wrong about dietary cholesterol", but that's not really what happened.
This is what I was referring to regarding the eggs themselves: https://youtu.be/w_cKTN1l7r4?t=1516
That take on eggs sounds about right regarding numbers per day and risk. If you look at the ACM risk associated with various food groups in figure 2 from this paper (https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S00029165220492...) then you can see the ACM risk hitting significance at around 55g/day, which is about 1 large egg.
Dave Asprey is such a wild dude. Who is eating rice for protein? Bizarre straw man!