00:00
Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mikkipedia and this week on the podcast I speak to Omega 3 expert Greg Peoples. Greg unpacks the science behind these essential fatty acids and their impact on health and performance. Greg and I discussed the differences between DHA, EPA and those specialized pro-resolving mediators.

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the best dietary sources, including the surprising mention of tuna, and what an optimal omega-3 index looks like. Greg also explains whether we can reach ideal levels through diet alone or if supplementation is necessary. We delve into omega-3s for athletes. We cover their role in endurance performance, recovery, and even potential protection against atrial fibrillation in older endurance athletes. Greg breaks down their effects on muscle soreness,

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strength and neuroprotection in contact sports, as well as the emerging link between Omega 3s and sleep quality. And finally, we tackle supplement quality, and this is a question I get a lot, how to choose a trustworthy brand in the wake of past industry scandals. So this is a must listen for anyone looking to optimize their Omega 3 intake, and I've got to say, after hearing Greg on the Pillar Performance podcast, I was really keen to have a chat to him and begin taking

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Omega 3s myself. It's one of those supplements which I've always been meaning to but have never gotten around. Suffice to say I am on the Omega 3 bandwagon. So Associate Professor Gregory Peeples is a distinguished cardio respiratory physiologist with over two decades of experience in researching and communicating the physiological roles of Omega 3 fatty acids, particularly EPA and DHA.

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in optimizing heart, muscle, and brain performance and recovery. Based at the University of Wollongong, Associate Professor Peoples has contributed significantly to understanding how dietary long-chain omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, especially DHA, which we talk about a lot, influence skeletal muscle physiology and function.

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He leads the Omega 3 Performance Physiology, a company dedicated to exploring the benefits of Omega 3s in athletic performance and recovery. Throughout his career, Greg has authored numerous high-impact papers on Omega 3s and his research has been instrumental in translating benchtop science into practical applications for both the general population and specialized groups, including elite athletes and military personnel.

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His work continues to influence dietary recommendations and therapeutic interventions aimed at enhancing physiological function and overall health. So this is such a great conversation guys. It is definitely scientific, but it is aimed at a level that everyone can understand. So I don't doubt that you're going to get a lot from this. I've got a link to where you can find Greg on the internet in the show notes.

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But before we crack on into the interview, I would like to remind you that the best way to support this podcast, Macapedia, is to hit the subscribe button on your favourite podcast listening platform and tell a friend. Leave a review. Do everything you can that then allows other people around you to learn from the experts that I have on the show, like Associate Professor Greg Peoples. All right, guys, enjoy this conversation.

03:37
Greg, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me this morning or this afternoon. Omega-3s is something that I'm super interested in. And strangely, I'm very much sort of, or I feel like I'm on top of a lot of the research around supplements which extend beyond what you'd get in your diet. But for whatever reason, I really dragged my heels on omega-3s. I don't know what it is. I've known since the 90s that they're important, but I just haven't.

04:07
I didn't fully appreciate, I didn't really, I don't know, didn't register with me that actually beyond the servings of salmon that I have each week, it's actually probably a really good idea to just start taking them. Like, do you get that a lot? I don't know. Yeah, and what's really fascinating, I was really fortunate to study under Professor McLennan here who'd been working on them since the late 80s, 1980s, last century. He was able to provide that historical knowledge back to, we're talking,

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the 1960s and 70s because that's where really our classic studies through Diburg and the Eskimos around the low cardiovascular disease and the high fat intake that the Eskimos were consuming seemed to interrelate or have an association with cardio protection or low cardiovascular disease occurrence. so what we're talking about is half a century of knowledge that probably predominantly

05:04
occurred around the cardiovascular system. But as we sort of turned through the nineties and we came, you know, turn of the century, all of a sudden that has broadened across all of the different body systems. And that really is a good reflection of where we're at in terms of our understanding, because all of our cells have membranes and all of our membranes have phospholipids. So there's a pretty good chance that having Omega-3s as part of a consistent intake is going to be physiologically helpful.

05:34
healthy for these cells in terms of their optimization of their durability and their ability to be a cell and be optimal in their cell function. Yeah. And it's funny you say that, isn't it? you know, their initial research looked at their benefit for cardiovascular health. But I guess to your point, the whole body is like nothing's in isolation in the body. in medicine, they tend to cut the body up into like

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neurology and cardiovascular and then orthopaedics and all the rest of it as opposed to looking at everything as a whole. it makes sense. Yeah. And the interesting part about the cardiovascular system, because it is supporting other systems, improvement to the cardiovascular system, whether it's cardiac protection of the heart, whether it's blood flow to those tissues, improvement in that system will ultimately support the other tissues. But equally,

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independent of the cardiovascular system, know through cell animal research and then into human integration that other cells on their own, when Omega-3 is present, will also increase their ability to survive, say, ischemic episodes or inflammatory stress or any of those types of...

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physiological occurrences where cells potentially might fall from being a healthy cell into a maladapted cell. So it's a combination of yes, it's the cardiovascular system, but secondary to that is probably independent effects that we're starting to now learn for each of the body systems as we start to work through brain, muscle, bone, et cetera, on this topic of omega-3. Yeah. And to your point on bone, you and I were chatting off here. had a conversation with Stuart McGill, last name.

07:23
Right at the beginning of doing this podcast, and we talked about the effects of Omega-3 on bone and I guess people who are bedridden for, can't think of how else I might put that right now, but, you know, and how it could potentially be beneficial there. There's a lot that we can discuss. I'm really interested to explore some of the conversations that I have with people around Omega-3 index, Omega-3 versus Omega-6.

07:53
and just some of the well-known roles that omegas have in our health. can we sort of kick off, Greg, with some sort of fun, like, basics? Like, what we're talking about, where we get it from, and things like that. So can we first talk about the long-chain omega-3s, the DHA and EPA? And also, I've got a question actually about pro-resolving mediators. But first, can we sort of discuss the differing roles of those two and where we find them?

08:23
So even taking it back another step, if we look at the fat intake of our diet, we can obviously already put it into groups such as saturated fat, monounsaturated fat and polyunsaturated fat. So when we're considering omega-3 and omega-6, we are talking about that group of polyunsaturated fatty acids. And when we also think about fatty acids, part of the key component is the chemistry.

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how many carbons long each of those fatty acid chains are and whether or not they contain double bonds at particular parts of the chain. so, omega-6s and omega-3s fitting into the polyunsaturated group, they have double bonds present at particular parts of the chain, hence they're defined as omega-3 and omega-6 for that first double bond occurrence. And we have examples where we have slightly shorter chain omega-3s such as ALA, which is highly present in the diet.

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as well as the longer chain, EPA and DHA. And we can't forget DPA. So DPA decays a pentanocast and sits in there as well. And some of the dietary recommendations actually sum up EPA, DHA and DPA when we start to think about sort of the total recommendations that can get debated, I guess, amongst the major agencies that sort of tell us what type of intake we should have. So again, we consume fats in the diet.

09:44
We present all of those different types of fats to the gastrointestinal system. Hopefully we adsorb them quite well. And then we disperse those through the circulation. we have combinations of free fatty acids and triglycerides that are moving through the circulation and they can be used as a fuel source. They may be stored in the likes of adipose cells. Or what we're talking about here is they have a really key role in terms of the phospholipid layer.

10:12
of each and every one of our cells. And so that's that membrane that makes up the cell. It has a bilipid layer and the fatty acid tails all sort of point towards each other. But within that layer, we then have proteins and channels and all these things that help the cell communicate with the outside environment. So when we take in fats, we essentially then start to present these different fats to the cell and the cell starts to incorporate different

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types of fatty acids into its membrane. So ultimately, if we can shoot more omega-3 or more omega-6, we present more of those fatty acids to the membranes and the membranes will start to select which of those fats that they would ultimately choose or preferentially choose to incorporate into that membrane. Okay, so with that in mind, like with the different types of omega-3s, you've obviously you've got the DPA...

11:06
DHA and EPA, and then DPA is getting more air time now, although I haven't seen a lot on it, sort of the same way that I see EPA and DHA. So what is the difference between? Yeah, it's a little bit of biochemistry difference. obviously it's a little bit, so DPA sort of sits in the middle. It's a little bit longer in terms of its chain length than EPA, a little bit different in terms of its construction compared to DHA. It's present in red meats.

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for example, so we're all consuming DPA. The interesting part about it is there is some biological endpoints that have been discussed. There have been some health-related outcomes that have been discussed. But the body doesn't quite seem to incorporate when we talk about incorporation, incorporation taking up into the phospholipid layers. When presented in a body, it doesn't seem to incorporate quite as much as the EPA and the DHA, which sort of suggests that when all three are present,

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EPA and DHA seem to have a more predominant incorporation or physiological role in terms of that cell saying, okay, if I get a choice, I'm really starting to focus on those two that we're seeing on the back of our fish or capsule bottle, for example. what we know is that the EPA and DHA have very different roles. They incorporate differently into different cells.

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And they also have downstream products that are different too. And we can talk about those as we go through. So in other words, what we mean is once in the membrane, it doesn't necessarily just stay there forever. It can be cleaved off and then we can produce intracellular downstream products, which can be then used by the cell in terms of, for instance, mopping up inflammation is a good example of that. Yeah. And Greg, as I understand it, there is a couple of things. First of all, the conversion of the

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omega-3s that you find in plants like walnuts, flax, and chia. These are often purported to be high in omega-3s. But as I understand it, there could be a conversion issue for a lot of people in actually converting them into the EPA and DHA. Am I, have I got that correct? Yeah. So again, this has been a very interesting area of debate in the last half century. There are elongase and desaturase.

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enzymes. So what we mean by that is if we have a shorter chain omega-3 like ALA, we can elongate it, we can add more, and we can desaturate it, we can add more double bonds. The enzymes that are responsible for that are present in all of us, but the efficiency of that enzyme in actually providing that conversion is quite low. And so you often hear numbers around 5 to 10 % efficiency. So in other words, the theories in

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terms of, I don't need to consume EPA and DHA because I can convert from the shorter chain, MEG6 and MEG3, don't necessarily play out in vivo or in biology. And really that comes down to classic enzymatic principles, doesn't it? The enzyme is only present by so much. It can only perform so much kinetics in terms of its turnover. And what we know, like most enzymes, kind of up and down regulate. So if we don't consume

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a lot of the very long chains like EPA and DHA, it can get a bit busy, but it really is not what we know from the Omega 3 index, which we'll talk about as we go as well. It really isn't enough. It keeps us at a basal level. But equally, if we start to take in the longer chain, EPA and DHA, that enzyme will say, well, maybe I don't need to convert as much of these, and so I'll downregulate. So we need to remember the basis of enzymes that they don't just sit at a steady state. They'll up and downregulate according to our intake.

14:51
I think the take-home message is that the efficiency for those enzymes to elongate and desaturate is not enough to simply take in, for example, ALA and expect that our EPA and our DHAs can be enough. In other words, we need external dietary sources of both of these longer chain fatty acids as a critical part of our human health. Yeah. ALA is the type of omega-3 that we find in the seeds and the nuts.

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Is that correct? Yeah. Is there an evolutionary basis, Greg? I've often heard people say that if your ancestors, I'm not sure how far back, if they lived coastal and they had ready access to say salmon and other fatty fish, then you're less likely to have good or high enzyme activity. Whereas if you were landlocked with no omega-3s around, then potentially your enzyme would be a little bit higher.

15:49
Is there any truth to that? There's probably some good hypotheses that we could set around that. But it does seem to be varied from individual to individual a little bit. But what's also really curious is if you take an individual that does their very best not to consume EPA and DHA and you measure, for example, their Omega 3 index, they still have an Omega 3 index that's above zero. So in other words,

16:18
The enzyme sits there for where there is a lack of opportunity to take in and kind of creates a basal level, still not fantastic. our vegan diet is a really good example of that. you measure the omega-3 index of a vegan versus a pescatarian, they are extremely different. But the vegans still want zero. They don't have zero EPA and DHA. So it kind of then sets a

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of a floor or baseline that the enzyme can at least pick up some of the shorter chains and at least provide a minimum level of EPA and DHA to cells in the longer term. All right, cool. I mean, people are probably aware that dietary sources of omega-3s, EPA and DHA, salmon, sardines and mackerel are two that I often talk to people about. often the acronym SMASH

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gets pulled around. S for salmon, M for mackerel, A for anchovies, S for sardines and H for herring. Oh, big of course. Yes, yes. So if you think about sort of the smash acronym, you get some pretty good rich omega-3s. But what's also interesting, the tuna doesn't come into that, but it's still a good source. It's still got a good DHA. And if you think about those fish, they're kind of

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predominantly cold water fish, they're at a certain depth. And it's something you've got to remember is that the fish themselves are consuming algae, and it's the algae that's providing the DHA. in essence, is then, and algae is not a plant, we often think, oh, algae is a plant, algae, pure listic, is not a plant. But algae can form a non-meat option for those that want to consume EPA and DHA without consuming the fish.

18:14
So if we go back to those fish, what's really important is that not every fish has the same concentration of EPA and DHA, which kind of is then a reflection of, well, just because I've got 200 grams of a fish on my plate, it doesn't mean I'm consuming the same amount or total long chain Omega-3 fatty acids. So if you have just a white flathead, that's going to provide you with less total EPA and DHA than if you have a plate of salmon.

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with the same number of grams. So those fish that we mentioned, the smash fish plus tuna, I like to think a tuna as well as a good source. And people generally like to use tuna as an easy option, particularly the tin-based tuna. It's fantastic combination of protein and a meat through, isn't it? In one bowl. Yeah, totally. And is there a difference between the tuna that you get in a poke bowl versus the cans?

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Yeah, so gets a bit into the food technology in terms of how that fish has been cooked. So is it cooked prior to the can or is it cooked in the can? So you do see some... Oh, interesting. ...chains of canned food and think tuna's potentially cooked out of the can and put in and so it's a little less. That's why you don't get quite as much where if you take your sardines and some of other...

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tin salmon, for example, it's cooked in the can and so it retains a little bit more. But equally, we start to pick at the very fine details. What we do know is that independent of does it contain 150 or 200 milligrams, what we do know is it's just consistent intake over a lifetime is actually the really critical thing and not getting too caught up on the minor details of this one contains slightly more than this one.

20:04
But the fact that it's going to affect most of the body's total content of these is that you are engaged in consuming these fatty acids 365 days a year and not see it as often. It's a quick fix of consumer and I'm all fine now and I don't have to worry anymore. it's about sort of that behavioral choice of food, whether it's choosing a marine based product or choosing to use, for example, algae, if that's the case.

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choosing it for the long term and then having that incorporated into the dietary patterns that you kind of choose to follow, guess is the best way of putting it. Yeah, that's really helpful because as I'm hearing it, it's the saturation of the membranes that is important. It will build up over time and your level will be determined by how often you have it. So is having four times a week enough of any of these particular foods or are omega-3 supplements to your

21:03
Yeah, they're essential. So again, we have the most evidence around the cardiovascular endpoints, whether it's stroke, myocardial infarction, blood pressure, and you'll often see recommendations and communication around the two to three fatty fish meals per week. So that easily translates to say that if you're consuming two or three salmon meals per week, you are consuming at around about

21:31
600-700 milligrams of particularly DHA every day. And that seems to be the minimum intake that we kind of see good uptake into the membrane. And what's interesting is if you then look at sort of recommendations of, you know, Australian, New Zealand, if you look at EPA plus DPA plus DHA for women, it's actually back down at 90 milligrams per day and for men it's 160, so it's very low. Then if you come up to say the Australian Heart Foundation, they'll recommend between

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250 milligrams to 500 milligrams, which is starting to get us into that two fish meals per week. And then you'll see recommendations from international societies such as ISVAL for fatty acids, and they'll be saying sort of 500. So what it boils out to be is that the starting point we should all be looking towards is 500 milligrams of EPA plus DHA. But I also like to sort of think about it is

22:29
That's great, but we could also start to have a conversation about should that be more DHA predominant? In other words, when we look at how those two fatty acids enter the body from the fish that we have on our plate, for example, it seems that that tissue such as heart and brain and muscle and nerve, for example, are really interested in incorporating DHA. so 500 milligrams of the two in combination.

22:57
what you have to think about is what the fish is on, what fish have I got on my plate? Is it just a white flathead that probably doesn't have much or have I got a DHA rich salmon? Which case that salmon is absolutely providing me with enough if I'm consuming two to three per week. Sorry, that was a long story to bring us back to that two to three per week. Yeah, yeah, no, that's fine. Like I always wonder about nutrition recommendations. I'm not sure how you see it, but I feel like they're very conservative on all fronts, particularly when it comes to

23:27
supplementing or recommending anything which they feel that people might blow people's budgets or people won't like. don't know. It's like they don't want to make recommendations that enhance beyond minimal survival. And what's interesting is if we've got most of the population consuming 100 to 150 milligrams per day across a week, there's no...

23:57
obvious deficiencies. So we don't break out in a rash or we don't. So there's nothing there to sort of indicate to us that we're not getting enough of these. It's only in the long term around sort of that whole body chronic disease type story that we then potentially see things like survival from myocardial infarctions being less in individuals that haven't consumed omega-3 over their lifetime or cognitive function.

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enhancement for older adults that are consuming fish versus not consuming fish. So it takes a long time to demonstrate that the benefits are in consuming and aiming for 500 milligrams per day. And it doesn't play out as in I'm not consuming enough. And it's really obvious because there's a sign or symptom. that make sense? Yeah, no, it totally does. Greg, you mentioned DHA. Can you just talk to us what DHA does compared to EPA and where those differences are?

24:54
Yeah. So I always like to think about in terms of if we've consumed those two fatty acids and they're presented in the circulation, the first thing that we should know is if we eat that plate of salmon or we take some supplements, as we described before, that goes into the circulation. That's just like glucose, just like proteins and amino acids. So it's presented to the circulation. And what you'll note is that, and we call it the area under the curve, that

25:21
area under the curve, the presentation, depending on the amount that we've consumed, will spike within a day or two, stay quite high, and then gradually come back down. What we also know is that there's a slightly different area under the curve for EPA and DHA. In other words, DHA spikes early and comes down, and the EPA holds in the circulation for a bit longer, looking for where it needs to be used, either as a fuel or incorporated into a tissue.

25:50
But what happens then is that in terms of the difference, the different cells are presented with that. And if I'm a heart cell, I become very interested in the DHA. So if we break up the heart cell membrane and have a look at the amount of those two fatty acids that then eventually appear over the long term, so what we're talking about is months, not days, that the DHA seems to incorporate preferentially into cells such as heart, skeletal muscle, nerves, and brain.

26:19
EPA seems to incorporate into a little bit more into potentially immune cells and endothelial cells, which can then sort tie us back to say the blood vessels and the aggregation or the anti aggregation that we see the EPA provides. that is actually a really good place to start because when we, particularly scientists, when we set a hypothesis, and we've done a lot of commentary on this recently, it's not just providing someone with a visual capsule. It's actually understanding that you need

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to differentiate those two if you want to actually investigate differences in what those two fatty acids are doing for us either in terms of health, supporting physical activity, supporting physiology during physical activity or after physical activity. We've got to recognise that those two fatty acids are going to the different tissues and being incorporated differently and therefore supporting those tissues differently. So again, take heart. Heart's a good example if DHA is incorporating into heart membranes.

27:17
we know cardiovascular disease risk becomes lower. One of the really interesting observations that if someone is consuming DHA over a long period of time, months to a year, their resting heart rate becomes lower over time. And it's only by... And we're talking about resting heart rate, by two, three, four beats per minute. But what's interesting about that is that incorporation of that fatty acid into the heart membrane and particularly the

27:47
The rhythm part of the heart means that a slower resting heart rate results in increased coronary flow over the period of day. So in other words, that heart is now receiving more oxygen because of the lower heart rate. And so that beautiful sort of relationship between the DHA affecting heart rate and heart rate itself going on to affect our coronary flow and our coronary flow then obviously improves our heart health. But we're learning about lots of different things. So if we go to the brain, we've got some good examples now where

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there's potential for DHA in helping to mop up inflammation in the brain. So if you think about sort of the brain injury story, we can talk about this more as we go, the brain injury story that we have a head knock and there's some inflammation, there's some emerging evidence now and we know DHA is really important for brain development. And that's why you see DHA on all the baby formula tins, don't you? DHA has a role in terms of producing what we call pro-resolvents.

28:45
And that's very different to EPA and those pro resolvins aren't an anti-inflammatory. They're actually resolving the inflammation once it's produced. And I guess that's another key component difference is the EPA is often regarded as the anti-inflammatory part, where the DHA is actually in terms of downstream products is producing resolvins. So the inflammation can occur, but the resolving of that inflammation can be supported or could be a little bit more.

29:13
optimal whenever a cell is put under stress. Yeah, because if I, a couple of things there. So to your last point, inflammation is often, you know, part of the adaptation in certain instances or physiological processes, right? Like, I don't know, exercise part of, and with injury, you're often told don't dampen that inflammation down too early. So DHA sort of supports that process. Is that what you're saying?

29:41
Yeah, that's right. And that's a question. So we do a bit of work with some high level athletes. And that's always the first question that the coach will ask is, we're not blunting the inflammatory response, are we? Yeah. And the answer to that is, well, which fatty acid do you want to use? Do you want to just use a general official where you're to present both? Or do you want to actually have a look around to see if we can find either an EPA or DHA specific supplement? And they're present. So again, if you take algal oil, you can get very high DHA only.

30:10
oils, then you cannot worry about the EPA, which is the anti-inflammatory. To get back to your point, you can allow training to occur, you can allow the inflammatory response to occur because that's a really important part of adaptation. You can also then support the pro-resolving of that inflammation. In other words, if that inflammation can occur, we can have the spike, we can have the presentation to the cell. It's about then mopping that up, the inflammation up faster so it's not then hanging around for

30:38
72, 96 hours and we can actually try and bring that information back to baseline, particularly if someone is in a high training state where they want to turn around and be able to be ready to train again within a certain time period, ready to perform again, ready to put their body under stress within a time period. If we're not resolving inflammation in that time period, there's always the risk of the inflammation, the basal inflammation can slowly creep up over time. So in other words, every time they present to another training stimulus,

31:07
their inflammation baseline is a little bit lower. The concept of pro resolving is you try and bring that baseline as near back to its basal state prior to the next training stimulus. And so you mentioned it before around the work that's been done looking at the neurological effects in athletes who have like a TBI or have like head injury or something like that. Can you?

31:36
actually talk us through your research there, Greg, and what you were looking at and what you've found with the use of omega-3s? Yeah, maybe if you don't mind, if we sort of focus on the muscle first, because that's where probably most of our work has been, then we could flick over to the brain, because we are seeing an emergence of new data coming out of subconcussive head trauma. But really, where this started is the idea that if we perform exercise,

32:05
And if you think of the classic cell that kind of gets damaged, it's the skeletal muscle cell. that plays out in delayed onset muscle soreness, doesn't it? So you exercise, you get a bit sore, you become inflamed. But what's interesting is certain muscle contractions seem to stimulate that more. So if you think about the eccentric muscle contraction, the lengthening muscle contraction, that seems to be, and we know it's the contraction that generates the most amount of this mechanical

32:34
pull and stress on the fibre itself. And we know that obviously then stimulates an inflammatory response. that can be in the gym. But it can also be simple as a downhill running. If you're a mountain runner and you're running downhill, you can turn out to be pretty sore for the next couple of days. And what's interesting about that is if you represent yourself to that eccentric stimulus,

32:57
over a period of time, you become less sore. So already it tells you that the body has a natural capacity to be able to adapt to that stimulus. Interestingly enough, if you don't spend time in eccentric muscle contractions, you will then get sore again. So it's obviously a system that turns on and off. However, if we get to the omega-3s, this is probably, if we look at all of the papers, and we've seen a real acceleration sort of since 2000 to 2005.

33:24
the most amount of papers is focused on can Omega-3s support the recovery of muscle from eccentric bladed damage and inflammation. We wrote a review on this about two or three years ago, 2021. And in that review, we had a look at the evidence. And the first thing we noticed is that, and this is just a little bit of a soapbox around sort of scientific design, is that I'd...

33:53
Ideally, you would actually design these studies a lot better. So part of the issue has been, like I talked about before, providing an omega-3 supplement, generic, to contain EPA plus DHA, having different doses and durations. Some studies give a couple of thousand milligrams, but they might only give it for seven days. And other studies have given a thousand milligrams, but they've given it for four weeks. So we've got this kind of real mix of dose and duration.

34:21
What we do know, if we go back to the incorporation theory, is that we need to present to the muscle enough DHA in this instance, because we know DHA is incorporated in skeletal muscle cells over the long term to maximize muscle incorporation. Overall, we see that generally resulting in weeks of supplementation. So any of the studies that have had issues or claim to have reduced muscle soreness or improved recovery, but I've only given fish oil for three days,

34:50
We've questioned in that review, but we've actually then set and written a second review in the meantime as well. We've set some parameters now to better design studies to make sure we get a good dose. You choose EPL or DHO, you give it for months rather than weeks. And then we look at whether or not end outcomes such as reduced muscle soreness is improved. We think there is definitely some good theory that it is. And we think it's

35:18
related to the inflammatory response. We've just finished a trial ourselves where we only looked at DHA and this is yet to be published. And we also looked at some of the cytokines that are produced and we didn't see a lot of difference in the cytokines, only some fractional differences, which then point to the idea that it's not a anti-inflammatory effect. One, we didn't get BPA. And second, we know DHA produces pro-resolvents.

35:44
problem that we've got again in research is actually measuring those resolvents is extremely tricky at the moment. But the reason why I wanted to talk about that, that gets us across to the brain. Because if we have a look at what's happening in the brain, someone has a head knock, like the muscle fiber becoming mechanically damaged. The brain also has a mechanical shear stress that's occurring. The neurons, particularly in a twisting action, can have neural

36:14
damage and that obviously stimulates a low level inflammatory response to that. There is definitely some interesting early evidence to suggest that if omega-3 and particularly what we particularly think DHA is at higher levels, that DHA is available to the neural cells, just like it is available to the muscle cells. And if we follow the pro-resolving pathways to that,

36:41
there is some evidence to suggest that those neural cells might be supported under that stress. How do we know that? another part of my research is I've done a lot of animal model work at the same time. So in our lab, we do some human work, we do some animal work, we do some human work, we do some animal work. The reason why we do animal work is you can actually sort of get a better mechanistic idea of what's occurring. Now, we personally haven't done any animal work on the brain story, but there are others that have.

37:11
It does sound a little bit harsh, but there is actually concussion models in rodent models where a small weight is dropped on the animal's head and they look for the inflammation that occurs from that. But the benefit of doing animal models, you can actually look at the amount of DHA that's in the brain and whether or not that DHA is being depleted when those concussion incidences are happening. And there's good evidence to say that if you're not providing DHA in the diet,

37:39
the animal experiences concussion, the DHA levels gradually fall in that animal's brain. Now, if you sort of put that story together, that's a good scenario to suggest that any DHA that's present is being broken down into pro resolving elements to try and support that brain tissue in terms of its recovery. Just one more, I know this has been a long story, but one more win for that is that

38:03
that if we go back out to the human work and there's been some good college, NCWA college studies that have supplemented Omega-3, commas again, broadfischl, to college athletes that have been exposed to head knocks over the course of the season, you can kind of indirectly measure the inflammation that they're kind of being exposed to by what we call these little neurofilaments that...

38:28
shouldn't be present in the circulation at higher concentrations, but if you have head knocks, they go up. We've just published a kind of, I wouldn't call it a meta-analysis, but it was an aggregated analysis with Jeff Hillson from the US where we've managed to pull together data from three studies. And we looked at whether or not they were presented with official or not official over the course of the season. So it's long-term data. And the outcome was neurofilament lights. So neurofilament light.

38:57
shouldn't be in the circulation. But those that were presented with a fish oil and were consuming a fish oil had lower levels of neurofilament light over the course of the season compared to those that were kind of just being exposed without the presence of omega-3 inverted commas in the circulation. does that, I know that's probably about a seven or eight minute. That was good. It's brilliant. So does this therefore mean that the

39:24
prophylactic, just taking DHA, not as a rehabilitation from head knocks, but actually just as part of your diet, may protect you from subsequent damage. you take it first rather than just wait for the damage to occur.

39:45
Yeah, so I think that's the key. So it's a may at the moment. So what we've got is early evidence in animals from other research labs, some expanding evidence in some human trials using non-invasive markers like neurofilament light, that being proactive to have that in the circulation, being incorporated into cells such as the brain cells, ready to be cleaved off from the membrane and used as a pro resolvent rather than

40:14
having the head knock, taking the fish oil the next day, putting into the circulation. Well, it's going around in the circulation. It's not at the neural cell where it needs to do its work. And the reason why that would be a good hypothesis is we go back to the cardiac studies. What we know is omega-3 actually has direct effects on cardiac tissue. So it's not the circulating omega-3 that protects you from the, or reduces your risk of,

40:41
your survival from having a myocardial infarction, it's actually incorporating into the heart cells. So if we use all the knowledge we have from heart cells and how heart cells better survive myocardial infarctions, it's about membrane incorporation. So we take that across to the brain cells. The hypothesis that you would reasonably set is that that DHA needs to be incorporated into the nerve membranes. It can't just be floating around in the circulation or taken as a bolus.

41:10
the next day hoping that somehow it's going to make its way into that cell that's damaged. So that parallel, I think, is really important. Yeah, no, it makes sense. And then obviously, we're focusing on EPA, oh, sorry, DHA. And are people now thinking that they need to go and get just a DHA supplement that's the most important thing, or is actually getting just a good quality product that incorporates both going to be sufficient?

41:39
Yeah. So what we're saying is EPA still plays an important role. So EPA is more likely to be also then supporting, say, blood flow because of its anti-aggregation effects. And actually gets us onto that whole concept that, you know, for a while we're talking about, oh, you know, there's an issue with these fish oils because it's causing our bleeding time to increase. And that's a negative. Bill Harris, Professor Bill Harris has spoken about this a lot. So he's in the States and he's obviously set up.

42:07
Omega-3, the company that actually quantifies your Omega-3 index, that really what we're looking at is rather than seeing it as an increased bleeding time, which is a negative, it's actually returning to our normal physiological state. That's the state that we need to be in rather than this short bleeding time. So yes, it is an aggregation. Yes, there's prostacyclines being produced from EPA, but really we should see that as a normal resetting. And EPA is still really important for those reasons.

42:36
history on the EPA and the DHA and the fact that EPA ends up being quite, I guess, predominant in the stories. If you go back to some of the original fish oil supplements like Maxipa, they were EPA dominant oils. If you went to the supermarkets in the 1990s, last century, you wouldn't really find DHA dominant.

43:01
oils at that time. And it's really because the industry was sourcing its fish from fish that were more EPA dominant and therefore the oils became EPA dominant and therefore investigators were investigating studies with EPA dominant oils. And then everyone thought, well, I've got to replicate that study. So I've got to use EPA. And DHA really didn't get a lot of attention probably until the late 90s turn of the century where all of a sudden we're realizing actually this is DHA.

43:30
acting differently, and now we know it is, and now we know it's incorporating very differently into cells. But from a consumer point of view, we now understand that the different fish will provide us with a different ratio of those two. And from a supplement point of view, we've now got options where we can get the more classic EPA, if we just think of the really small fish or capsule, 180 milligrams per capsule of EPA, 120 DHA, so we call that an EPA dominant.

43:58
but there's equally DHA dominant oils. It just means that that oil has been derived from a different source of fish. Like for instance, I've mentioned before, tuna is a DHA dominant oil that you can produce from tuna as a sample. I I take Pillar performance supplements and you use them in some studies that you did independent of the company as we were talking about. I'm not sure if that was online or offline.

44:28
I'm to assume that that's actually just a good product to take. so, a PILA is an example of still an EPA higher oil and that's fine. But I guess what the practitioner needs to think about is rather than total EPA plus DHA, they need to think about what is the DHA of this oil and what is my target DHA level. And that's fine. It just means that you'll probably be consuming

44:55
more than enough EPA if you take an oil that's dominant in EPA, if your target is 1,000 milligrams of DHA, you're just going to simply end up with plenty of EPA. Yeah, okay. It's not a negative. It's still in combination. If we talk about what is the top end in terms of safety, Food Safety Organization talks about safety limits up at 5,000 milligrams of EPA plus DHA per day. So even

45:24
consuming sort of the three standard, decent capsules that might provide 500 EPA, 300 DHA, you're still going to be way under that 5,000. But that's actually a really important part as well, because a lot of the studies that you'll, and again, we've commented on this on a recent review, a lot of the studies don't think about the dose. And we've done some really good sort of what we call dose responses into tissues. And

45:53
And it's this kind of rule that when you have not much of anything, just adding something gets the real big effect. So the classic is if you're a sedentary person, just getting off the couch and doing exercise has a really powerful effect. Kind of the same rule with presentation of EPA and DHA. What we notice, and this is why the 500 seems to come out as kind of where you should be at least starting your targets, is that when you get the five and 600 milligrams of EPA plus DHA, you get some

46:22
pretty decent rapid incorporation into tissues, but that incorporation obviously starts to plateau off. And if you are in it for the long term, you don't need to be consuming thousands of milligrams per day. It's probably more like, and again, it depends on the circumstances, whether you're an athlete or whether you're just hoping to be physically active and healthy. It's probably more like targeting around the thousand to 1200 milligrams per day.

46:51
in terms of being able to sustain a high omega-3 index. I know we haven't spoken about the omega-3 index as Yeah, we're getting there. Yeah. Yeah, we probably should just qualify that at some point. Yeah, and we will. First of all, one, with the PILA, what dose did you use in your study? Like two capsules a day? So for that study was part of, as I said, that was independent of PILA at all. We just happened to be working with a local elite rugby league.

47:21
women's team here in Australia and they were using Pillar as their supplement choice. And that kind of is another story as well because part of an elite athlete group is that they have to have their supplements and fish oils included. They have to have them batch tested. And so there is only a certain number of obviously brands that are batch tested for elite athletes. So in that study where Pillar was

47:49
the supplement in a women's rugby league team. It was a kind of a translation to practice study in a way. What we were doing is we baseline tested with the Omega 3 index, all of the female athletes prior to the season starting. So it was in their preseason and the Omega 3 index is taken with a fingerprint blood sample. What we're looking for is we're using the red blood cell as a biomarker for the other tissues. So in other words,

48:17
the omega-3 index is the red blood cell membrane relative proportion of EPA plus DHA. so people might be starting to become aware of numbers like my number is less than 4 % or it's between 4 and 8 % or it's above 8%. Those thresholds are very cardiovascular disease related thresholds, but they're still useful because what it tells you is if you're less than 4%, you're probably not taking much EPA plus DHA.

48:44
you're between four and eight, you're consuming some and if you then are above eight, you're probably at least getting a solid 500 milligrams per day, if not more. So what we did is we tested them all and classically, they were an Australian baseline. They were operating sort of around on average about 5%, meaning that there was probably a little bit of intake through a variety of marine sources here or there, but nothing consistent. The sports dietician that was at the club, she was

49:14
wanting to use the, in this case, it was the Pillar supplement. So she provided a dose to the athletes over the course of the season and we came back at the end of the season and we resampled the Omega 3 index. And we were just simply using it as a engagement in the program measure. that's a really interesting thing for athletes. If you've got 30 WNRL athletes and you say consumer fish or capsule, not everyone is actually very

49:43
up for consuming a capsule. Some people actually don't like consuming capsules and that's part of the whole story, isn't it? You didn't go through food, you go through supplement and so on. What we noticed is there was a full spread at the end. So there were some girls that their index was above 8 % and it was really high. There was other girls that were kind of moderate and there were some girls that just disengaged in the program. We didn't force them. It was just that kind of what would they do if they were presented with the opportunity. And it really did boil down to we looked at sort of self-reported intake. looked at other...

50:13
forms of intake as well. And really what it, if you actually simplify this is those athletes that followed the program consistently use the supplement got the best results. In other words, they were the athletes that then had an MEG3 index over 8 % over the course of the 10 or 12 week season that they were experiencing. So it isn't like these responders and non-responders? So in terms of this, these were non-responders as in

50:41
Non-adhering. Yeah, not choosing. And if you were doing a real, like a kind of an in laboratory study, we're really into adherence, aren't we? We're checking all the time. But this one we purposely, we used it as more of a field environment. So what would happen if, and we had some non-responders, they chose not to take the supplement. And that was their choice. That was fine. But they didn't get a change. Those that kind of half engaged in the program got a moderate change. And those that fully engaged in the dose that we provided them got the

51:11
best chance. So again, if you simplify the message, that really showed that and the girls that were engaged in the dose that we provided, it simplified the message for these girls. It was slightly in excess of thousand milligrams per day. We knew that there were high energy requirements for athletes. training most days, they're playing on the weekends. So we wanted to not only go beyond the 500, we wanted to take them up to a thousand total.

51:37
and we wanted to make sure that that was a solid total that was, achievable for them. We weren't asking them to swallow hundreds of capsules per day, but two, was in our dose response knowledge, it was a good dose that we would see good omega-3 index change as long as they stuck to the program. Yeah, nice one. And therefore, you would assume that with a higher omega-3 index, they're going to be able to recover better from

52:06
their training, so from a training perspective and therefore able to complete their training, potentially perform better as a long-term outcome, which I'm not sure whether you had the capacity to measure any of that, but that's what we would assume. Yeah, we didn't measure any endpoints in these girls because we knew it was a field study and we thought, just about engagement in taking Omega-3s, but if we bring it back to the laboratory environment to say what benefits potentially could they have got, and it's a...

52:34
Here in Australia, you're probably aware we've got the Australian Shooter Sport Supplement Committee and that's led by Louise Burke and Gary Slater. They regularly meet and they look at the evidence for different supplements and then they categorize them into Group A, Group B, Group C, Group D. Group A, you're classic, high level evidence for both medical and performance related outcomes, one or either or both.

53:02
Group B is that there is emerging and promising evidence across categories of endpoints, so for Omega-3, and Omega-3 fits into Group B here in Australia. So it's a Group B supplement, meaning that there is definitely some room to continue to improve collecting that evidence, but the evidence seems promising at that point. Group C supplements then really are

53:28
of a little bit more anecdotal and the evidences of lower quality. And obviously Group D is sort of our band group sit down at the bottom. So for Omega 3 generally and Fishall generally, we sit in a Group B Australian Shoe Support Supplement Category or Group at that point, meaning that there's still work to be done. But certainly, there is certainly some decent evidence at this point with rigorous trials to support it. However, I would

53:58
saying this is what we did in our latest review with our recent PhD student, we're actually calling for lot more rigor in the way that anybody conducting an Omega 3 study in the future should be a lot more careful about how they design that. And I think I've been pretty clear that the classic is we supplemented with Omega 3. And to me, that is like, okay, EPA, DHA, what mix, how much, how long.

54:25
Did you use a biomarker to actually confirm that the Omega-3 was present in these people at the end of the trial? And you'd be surprised, there's a lot of studies that just make an assumption if they do a capsule count that somehow it was going to appear in the tissues. Haven't measured it. Yeah. Yeah. Do you exclude anyone or not include anyone? You can't make a decision if you don't take a biomarker like the Omega-3 index. Yeah. Nice one. Greg, is it determined on body weight or

54:54
biological sex or anything, are there any differences that we know as to how to sort of set a dose or your sort of 500 milligrams of DHA that's, you know, regardless of body weight? Yeah, so there's a nice study, this is like 2013, population-based studies. So it's not necessarily athlete specific, but at least it's a very good study from about 10 years ago that looked at

55:22
across a population of those supplementing with omega-3 and not supplementing, so they have full range of doses. What are the contributing factors to ultimately a high omega-3 uptake into the tissues using a biomarker like the red blood cell? And what was really interesting in that is if you combine sex, male or female, physical activity, body anthropometry,

55:48
bit of family history, all of those factors combined only explained around about 10 % of the uptake. The thing that came out the strongest, and it's actually really useful for us, is that about 65%, 66 % of the explanation of why someone has a high Omega 3 index and high Omega 3 status is that they consume it regularly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the thing.

56:15
That's the thing. look, no doubt, you take 140 kilogram prop forward for the All Blacks versus the half back maybe at 80 kilos, yeah, the same dose is going into a slightly different level of plasma volume. But at least we know that that is a small contributing factor compared to are you taking it consistently? Are you consuming marine based products consistently? That is always going to be the thing that wins out the most.

56:44
in terms of making a difference in terms of the body's content storage. So you mentioned that Omega 3 index of about sort of 5 % for, to your point on the athletes you were working with, it's pretty standard in Australia is what you might expect. What determines the Omega 3 index other than, is it just that they're consuming low Omegas in relation to Omega 6? Because that's often something, you know, people

57:14
I feel like that story's changed a little bit over the last 10 years. It's less about the index and more about just getting your Omega 3s up. What is actually... Can you explain to us that relationship? Yeah, look, if people aren't aware, Ken Stark from North America, he's done with others, his colleagues, a fantastic global map of the Omega 3 index. Now, it obviously doesn't include every country because it's derived from

57:42
studies that have reported Omega 3 index and they collate all of that data and then they basically color-code the world map and saying, well, obviously these are countries with on average, based on the studies that are conducted there, higher Omega 3 index without kind of intervening. So you get your classic, you know, the Japanese diet, example, Greenland, know, Scandinavia, they're tending to be sort of towards the 8%.

58:12
Then you have the ones in the middle, which is the 4 to 8%, which is big range, but it's the majority of the globe. Then you have those that are less than 4%. But really, if you look at that map, there's not a lot of green on the map. It's majority orange and red. What's interesting is that you guys over there in New Zealand are...

58:36
a little bit better than us in Australia. You come out on average a little bit higher. And in fact, depending on what version of the map you look at, actually, New Zealand's been color coded a little bit better than Australia on a number of occasions, depending on which variation of that map in publications. But certainly the last one, New Zealand's doing pretty well. Still not as high as say the Japanese, but it's kind of sitting in the middle. So I guess the question is then, where on average do we sit?

59:06
If we take an average Australian population, and we've done this in a military trial that we did recently, there were recruits that turned up to military base. So in other words, they've been consuming their normal diet in the community at home. And we took their Omega 3 index before coming into the military environment. It came out on average just a fraction of 5%. And that seems to be fairly standard. What's interesting is if you then revert back to

59:34
say North America, and this is probably where we get the most amount of data out of athlete groups is North America, particularly because the NCAA and the amount of data that's been collected there, it's generally a little bit lower. We see values more in the 4 4.5 for those American groups. That's fairly typical of the American style diet, isn't it? It's lower. Now, what's interesting about that, and this gets back to the question is, the six, maybe six is actually really important. It plays a really

01:00:03
critical role in terms of what say the arachidonic acid breaks down to. It's all part of that inflammatory pathway and we need inflammatory pathways. But what you'll note is that depending on where we're looking at around the world, you can experience slightly more omega-6 such as arachidonic acids in certain diets. my observations have been if any studies that have published, if they've published a full fatty acid profile of say American NCAA athletes that arachidonic acid seems to a little bit higher than what we see say in our military study here.

01:00:33
The question is, is that important if I want to change my omega-3 index? You're right. There's been a lot of commentary around, I've got to get my balance right. I've got to get my ratio right. As I mentioned before, I studied under Prof. McLennan here. He's now retired, but he did a lot of work on this, again, using animal models where he presented diets with different ratios on exactly this basis. What if I put it in a higher omega-6 background?

01:01:03
and I then present say the DHA or the EPA, would that prevent that uptake? The answer is no. So it's actually kind of irrelevant what the background is in Omega 6, as long as the EPA and DHA is presented, the cells will identify that and the Omega 3 index will still go up. Now it's not to say that we shouldn't, where possible, reduce our Omega 6s if they're high. So that's probably the story around sort a...

01:01:31
more collective thought on what is a good balanced diet and where are we sourcing that? And if our omega-6s are high, it's probably potentially because we're eating too much processed food, for example, and don't could afford to come down for that reason. So you're not bringing it down because it's going to prevent my omega-3s being taken up. It's because you're probably trying to improve your diet as a whole diet in terms of diet quality. And there's a lot of debate on omega-6s. I've heard you sort of talk about it before as the

01:02:00
the presence of those industrial seed oils and the diet. Whereas if you listen to a lot of people in the nutrition space, they're like, it's fine. It's just about the quantity of omega-6. It's not the quality of the omega-6 in the diet. And I don't know if you've got opinion on omega-6 fats. Again, classic graphs and papers that show that through the industrialization process, our omega-6s have gone up. There's no doubt.

01:02:29
There's lots of graphs that show that. And when we've sampled data out of the US as well for say a college study that we did with athletes. And it's another marker that we haven't talked about. In terms of the whole blood, there is a ratio called the AA to EPA ratio, arachidonic acid to EPA ratio. Now that's trying to kind of dig into those two fatty acids that will break down potentially using similar enzymes into

01:02:59
cytokines that are involved with either inflammation or anti-inflammation. where we talk about Omega 3 index being over 8%, when we look at that ratio, we look at it around about 11 in terms of 11 arachidonic acids for every EPA being kind of what we need to get that ratio below. When we've collected some data out of the US, that ratio has been as high as 30, meaning that, the EPA was low, but

01:03:29
The arachidonic acid was quite high in that college-based food that we're eating. What that meant is that when we presented in that study from a couple of years ago, we presented an algal oil and that one would just... This is interesting. We presented the algal oil that was high in DHA. We still managed to bring down the arachidonic acid to EPA ratio with DHA. Even though DHA is not part of the ratio, when DHA enters the membrane, the membrane is only so big in terms of relative space.

01:03:58
So, was some displacement. Yeah, displacement of arachidonic acid. So, we brought that arachidonic acid. It still wasn't great. We still brought it down into the 20s. But we brought it down without even adjusting the arachidonic acid or the EPA, just simply presented the DPA. Now, it back to the idea of how much EPA that we need. To get that ratio under 11, if people are running around with very low EPA in their red blood cell membranes and therefore other tissues, we only need to bring that EPA up.

01:04:26
a little bit to actually have a very powerful effect on that ratio. And that ratio can be brought under 11 very simply by consuming again, we get back to that baseline 500 milligrams of EPA plus the HAA. Always come back to that as that should be our minimum target. If we just try and hit that, we're probably doing a pretty good job. The question of more is always like, am I an athlete? Am I training more? Am I experiencing more?

01:04:53
inflammation and should I be presenting more EPA and DHA to the system? Totally agree. I'm mindful of your time. just have two, hopefully quite quick questions to ask you. That's all right. First of all, the Omega 3 index, is this a consumer test that anyone can get to your understanding? Yeah. Look, I mentioned Bill before, Bill Harris, Professor Bill Harris developed the Omega 3 index over 20 years ago and

01:05:23
just to give everybody a feel for it. We were using it before the commercialization in the same way. if you want to use the red blood cell, you have to take the sample out of the vein and you have to spin the blood down and you've got to pull the red blood cells out and you've got to then analyze, take the membranes and analyze red blood cells. As an honest student, I was doing that. took three days to do that. Bill thought, Oh, I wonder if we can take this to...

01:05:52
everybody and make it a fingerprint blood sample and he has. MecaComp was obviously the first company that provided that through the US market, which is as as red blood cell. Sorry, it's whole blood put onto a blotting paper, so a sample pack and it's all sent to the consumer if you order one.

01:06:18
It's called a dry blood sample. So you will let that blood dry on the paper. You package it back up, you send it back to the lab and they analyze the red blood cell and all the fatty acids across that whole blood sample and then send back your omega-3 index plus a few of those ratios as well. We've got a lab here in Australia. It's called Fatty Acid Laboratories in Melbourne using the same techniques.

01:06:45
the OmegaQuant use. And there's a couple of other labs popping up around the world as options for people now just to go online, order the pack, get sent to you, do your blood sample, just like doing a blood glucose and send it back. within about a week, you'll get your results on a PDF. Greg, Pro-Resolving Mediators, SPMs, like I have specialized Pro-Resolving Mediators. I've listened to podcasts, there are supplements like that.

01:07:15
That's what's doing that work of DHA that you discuss, isn't it? So is there an advantage to doing both DHA and SPMs? Are they sort of doubling up? Do you have an opinion on that? Yeah, look, I personally haven't done any research with supplementing with SPMs. But what we do know about them when they are in biological form is they're really hard to measure because of their half-life and the fact that they're doing their work intracellularly.

01:07:45
So it does raise some interesting questions that if you present what is then claimed to be a stable SPN to the gut, to be absorbed, to be available to the body when it needs it, you then have to then start to think about, what's the timing for that? Is it in circulation at the right time? So I can see that there is some

01:08:13
potential excitement around, well, I can just directly provide the SPN. But the counter argument to that is, well, when are you going to provide it and how are you going to behaviourally time your provision of that SPN? Because if it eventually breaks down when you need it, then that's no good to you. The advantage of using the in vivo production through DHA is that DHA will be triggered to provide that SPN when it's needed.

01:08:42
Yeah. So look, I can't comment on sort of the studies to date that have provided them. I haven't spent enough time thinking or reading what they've done and particularly sort of in the athlete area. But I can hypothesize that if we found doing Omega-3 trials tricky, that is very, very tricky to prove that those SPNs are actually being biologically available.

01:09:10
at the time that the physiological support is then needed, whether it's a heart cell, muscle cell, brain cell, whatever it happens to be, bone cell. So I'd like to think that there is something in it, but I'm still quite hesitant at this point. And I just think it's probably more likely that providing them naturally through DHA, membrane-incorporated DHA is going to be

01:09:38
a more precise way of the body actually upregulating those SPNs when they need them. As long as that DHA source is high enough, it's got that availability. Yeah. No, that is awesome, Greg. Thank you. And I think you've mentioned several times the doses we should be aiming for. And I guess the last thing is a quality fish oil supplement. Do you think you should look for an independently tested one to make sure those levels of DHA and EPR are as they say they are?

01:10:08
Is fresh air that kind of thing? Yeah. yeah, this has got a lot of air play as well. And it's true because if you leave your supplements on a shelf in the sun and they heat up, that's not going to be great for them. And it's highly likely that what the package says is providers no longer need the case. these fatty acids do oxidize. And there's been commentary around that, know,

01:10:37
what you pick off the supermarket shelf might not be exactly the same. I think the industry in the last decade has become better at being able to audit that process. But equally, I think from an athlete point of view, the batch testing is also really important too, because the mass market for Omega 3 supplements aren't batch tested. there are only a small number of brands that actually do have the has to clearance for

01:11:07
well down in doping and the batch testing to be more confident that they also are clean as in not containing other banned sources that might be impeding for athletes in terms of being able to make sure that they don't breach the rules of the competition. So I think within reason, I think what's more important is that once you buy your fish oil, if that's fish oil or your algal oil, if it's algal oil,

01:11:37
that you store it correctly, you make sure that you look after that and you don't then leave it for a year and think, oh, I should take my Omega 3s. And it's just been sitting in the cupboard. I would suggest that probably they would definitely not reflect what they're on the packet after a year. The assumption is that they're going to be bought and used within a timeframe. And your average tub of Omega 3 is probably going to be around 12 weeks.

01:12:06
it'll be gone. you know, there's longer than 12 weeks you'd be thinking, oh, maybe I should get some fresh, fresh batch. Okay, cool. Do you take them, A combination of both. So I do. I am an advocate for eating fish. Our three kids love eating fish, life as well, and myself. So we are consumers of marine products. And then we also take a small top-up dose on the whole family every day. So in combination, and as you imagine, we

01:12:36
I have everyone check their levels every four weeks. We're fully loaded in our family with all around 10 % in the Omega 3 index. Amazing. These are goals, man. I'm going to test my Omega 3s in the next eight weeks and sort of see where I'm at. Just on that comment, you can eat your way to above 10%. There is absolutely no problems that you can do it. And we've had some really interesting

01:13:03
studies, I would call them, where individuals have come back at 11 and 12%. And as soon as I see that, just think, oh, like, no, just, you know, as well as obviously the data we collect, I'd love to have a chat sometimes to some of these individuals. And I've come across some 12 % that are just purely being driven by a pescatarian diet. And so it is absolutely possible to eat your way to above 10%. And again, if you talk to these individuals,

01:13:31
They are just really, really consistent with their fish consumption or their marine-based consumption. And the body builds that tissue up, the omega-3 up over top. That's a hopeful story, Greg, for anyone out there who is thinking about this and wondering whether they're going to have any issues in the space. Because I feel like it is so important. And I'm pleased that I listened to that podcast with you and Dan, because it really sort of sparked my

01:14:00
my own adherence and behaviour. and I'm going to pop that in the show notes as well for everyone. Thank you so much, Greg. Really appreciate your time and we'll link to your Google Scholar page if that's the best page. Anywhere else where people can go to find more information about your lab and your research? Yeah, so on our UOW, University of Willigong site, we've got UOW scholars.

01:14:24
page as well and that will directly link to a profile of me and it's got my students and papers and research and grants and all sorts of stuff and obviously contact details if anyone wants to get in contact in the future. Nice one. Greg, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. That's alright. No worries.

01:14:53
Hopefully you got a lot from that and this might have sort of swayed you to begin thinking about taking a fish oil supplement if you're not a very regular consumer of those Omega-3 rich dietary fatty acids. Next week on the podcast I have returning guest Dr. Philip Prins to discuss carbohydrate requirements during exercise on the back of a very recent

01:15:23
paper that's been published looking at what the role of carbohydrate is in our workouts. Such a great conversation, I think you're really gonna love it. Until then though, you can catch me over on Instagram, threads and Twitter @mikkiwilliden, Facebook at mikkiwillidennutrition or head to my website mikkiwilliden.com and book a one-on-one call with me or sign up to my recipe portal. Why not? 12 bucks a month, regularly updated, amazing recipes that are

01:15:52
Macro calculated, take the thinking out of it for you. Alright guys, you had the best week. See you later.