The Most Important Daily Habits For Health & Longevity - Dr Rhonda Patrick (4K)

Are low omega-3s worse than smoking cigarettes?

(laughs) Um, I don't know that they're worse. So omega-3 fatty acids are es- you know, they're essential for many things. And, um, I think you're referring to one specific study that came out of, uh, Dr. Bill Harris's group. He's the head of the Fatty Acid Research Institute, and he's actually the pioneer of the omega-3 index test, which is how you should measure your omega-3 levels. Um, they're measured in our red blood cells rather than what you'll 99% of the time find if you get a o- omega-3 test, it's plasma levels. So red blood cells take about 120 days to turn over, so it's a long term marker of your omega-3. Whereas if you go and get a omega-3 plasma test, it's kinda like, "Well, what did I eat for dinner in the last week?" Right? So you, you may have had a bunch of salmon, but maybe you don't usually eat salmon. So, so anyways, the omega-3 index is e- a way to measure omega-3 levels, and he had done a study looking at omega-3 levels and what's called all cause mortality, so people dying from all sorts of non-accidental causes. Cardiovascular disea- disease is always at the top of the list because that's pretty much what everyone's dying of. That's like the number one cause of, uh, death in most developed countries. And so, um, he was looking at all cause mortality and correlating that with the omega-3 index, which essentially is measuring omega-3 le- fatty acid levels. And, um, what he found was that... So people that have a low omega-3 index, so that would be 4% or less, ha- and then comparing it to people that had a high omega-3 index, so that would be 8% or higher. So people that had the high omega-3 index had a five year increased life expectancy compared to people with the low. Now people in the United States on average have about a 4 to 5% omega-3 index, so it's pretty, pretty standard, th- pretty standard, I would say, in terms of like what people in the US have in terms of their, of their omega-3 versus Japan, where they eat a lot of seafood. Their omega-3 index is like 10%. So... And they have a five year increased life expectancy, by the way, compared to people in the United States. Um, so what he also did, uh, him and his re- his colleagues, looked at... They stratified da- the data and looked at oth- other factors, physical activity, you know, BMI, smoking. And this is where it got super interesting because, um... And I, I, I just... The graph of this data does it like more ju- justice, you know, 'cause you can visually see it, but he looked at all cause mortality, and people that like lived the longest were of course with the high omega-3 index with no smoking, right? So like non-smokers, they had the longest life expectancy. And then people with the lowest life expectancy were smokers with a low omega-3 index. But then when he looked at people that smoked but had a high omega-3 index, either they're eating a lot of fish or supplementing, they had the same life expectancy as people with low omega-3 but didn't smoke. So in other words, having a low omega-3 index was like smoking with respect to all cause mortality. And that's, you know... And of course, I get all the smokers out there going, "Oh, so all I have to do is supplement with omega-3." And I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no."