S2_EP_31: All About Fish Oil, Essential Dietary Fats and More with Brent Uken

Or watch on YouTube:

SimpleCast, iTunes, Stitcher

Rock On!
Dr Mike

P.S. Catch up on any missed Flex Diet Podcasts!

Transcript:

Dr. Mike T Nelson (00:00):

Hey, welcome back to the flux diet podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in today. We’ve got an awesome program with my buddy Brenton. You can, or we are going deep on all things fishy. That’s right. Fish oil, or in terms of supplementation, Omega three to Omega six ratios. We’ll explain what those are, and even talk about different types of supplements, such as the rock hedonic acid. Are there ways that you can improve your fatty acid balance and just, why are these fats so important? And we also get the inside scoop on a new study that he is doing. We won’t have the results for a while, but super fascinating. And also if you’re interested in improving your tolerance to stress, potentially reducing your resting heart rate, increasing your cardiovascular health, and maybe even increasing your performance in the gym at the same time, definitely check out this interview. If you enjoy all things in the realm of nutrition and recovery, make sure to check out the flux diet podcast here and also a spot to buy the flux diet certification. So as of listening to this one on January 11th, Monday

Speaker 2 (01:34):

2020,

Dr. Mike T Nelson (01:36):

Wow. The flux diet certification will be open for about one week. So go to flux diet.com or hit me up and you will be able to register there. Well, right now the flux diet cert opens about four times per year. So if you want a complete system of how to do nutrition for both yourself and your clients, in terms of prioritizing the key things to put first and reducing all of the crazy amount of information they’re using research and put it in into a complete system that you can use, go to flex diet.com. So check out this interview from my good buddy, Brent, all about fish oil. Thank you so much for listening. Enjoy, Hey, what’s going on and start to Maxine, Alison here with the flux diet podcast and I’ve got my buddy Brenton UCAN on the show to talk about fish oil and some other cool stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:41):

Let’s go great. How are you Dr. Mike?

Dr. Mike T Nelson (02:42):

Doing good? Doing good. Yeah. So give us a little bit of background. Like how did you end up being a older person, no disrespect to going back to school with all those young folks to learn about fish oil. I say that as an older person, myself, which sounds weird to say

Brent Uken (03:01):

No, none taken it I’ve been called much worse. By the way, it was I think the real story is this Dr. Mike,

Dr. Mike T Nelson (03:11):

Oh yes. The caffeine and exercise for performance positions then is finally out. But you can ask Trish about that process. It was very long and involved and I’m happy it’s done.

Brent Uken (03:26):

Yeah, she did. She did mention that as far as me heading back to to get a master’s in exercise physiology, Kennesaw state, I actually retired from a long professional services career in global consulting back in June of 2018. So I had a, had a nice run there the last 20 years as senior partner. And I’ve always had a passion for health and fitness. So I’ve been an athlete my entire life. And I knew that a retirement was, was imminent. You know, once you get into your early to mid fifties you’re, you’re sort of taking that last lap around the track with those firms. So about 10 years ago, I said, look, what, you know, what are we going to do when we grow up, you know, chapter two type stuff and, and really dove back in to the reading, just for pleasure and, you know, for my own personal benefit and decided, you know, what, why, why don’t we take the next step? And I went after several of the certifications. So I sort of ran the table at NSCA with the CSCs T SAC AF CPT picked up the CIS as set along the way. You had my, my guy Adam fight on your podcast last month, Adams went through PN. So he was my coach and mentor.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (04:45):

Awesome. Very cool.

Brent Uken (04:47):

A very small world and connecting up some of these dots. So I actually in, in you and I met, I think four or five years ago, one of the conferences and I ended up going through the carrot program. So part of the original cohort there

Dr. Mike T Nelson (05:02):

Performance program, which was great.

Brent Uken (05:04):

Yup. Yup. So based on my experience with Carrick and I got to meet Dr. V there, Tricia and you know, chatted her up and went to one of the local chapter meetings at Kennesaw state. And she talked to me about potentially joining the program, showed me the, you know, the lab and gave me a tour and we kept the dialogue going and I joined joined the program last summer kind of tough to believe on starting the last semester next Monday.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (05:32):

Oh, wow. That’s crazy.

Brent Uken (05:34):

Yeah. It’s I can’t believe it’s not

Dr. Mike T Nelson (05:37):

Nice. Oh, that’s awesome too, to see someone going back and doing what their true passion is too, which it’s always super cool to see because I get people that are even quite a bit younger than me that are like, Oh, I just feel like I’m too old to go back to school. And I’m like, dude, I’ve finished my PhD when I was 38. And I know people like who are going back to school that are older. And that just to me, I don’t think age has anything to do with it. It’s just, you want to learn and do you want to put in the work to get the knowledge, if you do cool, then just go for it.

Brent Uken (06:11):

And then you have some pretty funny stories too, like showing up at the bursar’s office to make a payment. And they’re asking if the payments for your daughter and timing out on the the measles, mumps and rubella vaccination. And there, you know, like you can’t really do that. He’s been dead for 30 years.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (06:30):

Yeah. Very cool. So how did you, you’re mainly looking and the effects official idol and how did you get interested in fish oil? A lot of all the different sort of topics and things that you could pick to do further in-depth studying?

Brent Uken (06:47):

Well, I think in my T Nelson fashion I think I should formally change my name to any equals one. I’ve just, I’ve had a blast with the, you know, all the personal experimentation with, you know, supplements and exercise protocols. And you know, really stumbled into this during the carrot program when we were talking about HRV I’ve been in HRV for a little while, but, you know, we’ve had some, some great advances with the wearables, for example, you know, supplementing, HRV for training and elite HRV and, you know, on and on and on. When we talked about that actually started to supplement there and noticed some interesting changes. Again, it’s all in equals one, but know, because I hadn’t changed anything else in terms of exercise, protocol and nutrition. And so have you you know, really started to notice some interesting changes around HRV, a resting heart rate. So some of the cardio related benefits with with the omega-3 supplementation, they got better. Oh, they got significantly better. And again, in saying equals one controls, you know, being what they are or not. The other thing I noticed on the the blood lipid levels, in addition to the, you know, direct measures like the omega-3 index and the, and 60 and three ratio was looking at my triglyceride levels, which, which plummeted by HDL went up significantly. Hmm.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (08:18):

Do you know about what the changes were for people listening? Just for context?

Brent Uken (08:21):

So, yeah, so the I triglycerides were down by about 40%. Wow. That’s a big change. Yeah. HDL went up by about 30%. So, and the the total cholesterol went down significantly too. I you know, consistently was running in the, you know, kind of, you know, 200 to two 20 and it dropped down to one 70. So, you know, saw those benefits too as say you know, a nice side effect of, of of the supplementation that, that, wasn’t why I did it, but test and what kind of these, these things, that was a, that was a nice pickup. So that was really the launching pad. And I started thinking, gosh, maybe there is something to this, let me dive into it. So instead of the you know, developing a I’ll call it sort of an intellectual interest in running around with the omega-3 hammer, looking for the nail, you know, sort of what the other direction I had some personal experience with it you know, maybe the benefits are attributable attributable to it. Maybe not, but let me, let me dive in. And the deeper I dove into it, the farther down the rabbit hole I wanted to go. So, you know, realizing that with the phospholipid bi-layer that you’ve got EPA and DHA, you know, integrated into literally every cell in your body,

Dr. Mike T Nelson (09:39):

Every cell membrane,

Brent Uken (09:41):

Exactly differentially. So between different parts of the body, like a DHA is being picked up more predominantly in the brain retinal cells, that those types of things is, you know, trying to unpack differential effects. So going beyond just the, you know, the omega-3 interests, really trying to unpack the differences between the two they’ll make it threes that appear to drive bumps through the of the health benefits.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (10:07):

Cool. And if our context we’re talking about a mega threes are going to be primarily EPA and DHA, and that they actually, like you said, get pulled into the cellular membrane of literally every cell in your body. Right. Cause I always think of in terms of a supplement, what are the principle effects, right. Does the physiologic story, even at face value, just logically makes sense. And as you said, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to pan out in the research, but if we can’t even come up with a story of how this may affect things, and maybe we should look at something else out of all the things to look at, and then as you’re doing go further down into more formal studies to see, does that story actually hold true or not?

Brent Uken (10:54):

Yeah. And you do get some you know, when you look at the, the mechanisms of action and also going back to school, I get to learn all, you know, a whole raft of new acronyms and great phrases, like being able to fully elucidated something. So you know, the, to your point, the storylines there, because of the incorporation into the cells, so myocardial cells and the theme meal cells into the sarcolemma, I, you know, obviously you’re, you know, with, with you and what you do, you’re, you’re very focused on you know, anabolic effects and, and muscle accretion. So the storyline is there it’s really trying to dive into some of these call them new. They’re not new areas per se, but, you know, research takes decades to unfold. This, this really started to be studied heavily in the seventies with the some of the similar research where they noticed in the the Greenlandic Eskimos, the cardioprotective effects, the height high-fat diets, they were that they were on. Yeah. So we, as you’d expect the, the initial research was really around the cardioprotective effects and, and inflammation is another huge area. And, and now it’s starting to branch out more heavily. In fact, there was a an article that just came out recently. I haven’t read it yet. Oh,

Dr. Mike T Nelson (12:14):

Interesting. I haven’t seen that one yet.

Brent Uken (12:16):

Yeah. So you know, there’s, there’s more, I’ll call it sports related or athletic performance related or human performance related studies within the last, probably 10, 20 years that are looking at various effects on endurance athletes strength power applications and so forth. But, you know, initially it was really all around the, the, the cardioprotective effects and kind of flushing that out. Yeah.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (12:44):

And the Eskimos studies, and it was a diverse, I think that that would, if people think back far enough, if they’re old enough, like we are, that was back when like fat was like demonized. It was like, Oh my God, [inaudible], they’re eating all this fat. They must have just massive cardiovascular risk. And then they found the direct opposite. They’re like, Oh, wait a minute.

Brent Uken (13:06):

Yeah. And I think you know, too, that you know, you tie the diet in some of the the observational data plug here for for your friend that, that, that you hooked me up with Dr. Beavis and we’re going to do studies. So the [inaudible] ratio, you know, we’ll say a marker for quite some time in looking at the traditional Western diet, you know, heavy on the pro-inflammatory Omega six fatty acids. And historically they said that you know, man sort of gravitated around you know, one-to-one, or maybe a two to one ratio, but very low. And now you see those, these ratios, you know, 15 to one, maybe even excess of 20 to one, you know, pro-inflammatory to anti-inflammatory and you know, all the wicked nasties that take place in a chronically elevated high inflammatory body state, biological state.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (14:03):

I had a guy who tested once he was 40 to one. So 40, if you go with a ratio, right. So a mega six, so kind of the oils we want to avoid, which is an oversimplification, but in his Omega three was almost like non-existent. So his ratio was just skewed and yeah. He got better though. We got him down to somewhat of a normal, he ended up being around 10 to one or something like that. I don’t remember the exact ratio was at the end, but it was a lot better. He felt a lot better as, you know, achy joints and all this other weird stuff he had going on kinda kinda cleared up. But that was the worst one I’ve ever saw.

Brent Uken (14:42):

That’s pretty bad. That’s pretty bad.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (14:44):

And if you do a dietary analysis, like no fish, like very hardly any, I would say real food, like tons of food, fried food, processed oils. So it kind of jives with what he was eating.

Brent Uken (14:58):

Yep. Yep. And the you know, the other interesting thing around that is the the metabolic pathways around the insects and the in threes that they share the same enzymes and the same metabolic pathway. So, you know, you don’t hold your, your insects level static while you vary the, you know, the omega-3 levels. If omega-3 goes up, I’ll make a six level will go down because they compete. So if you look at something and, and to, to leverage off one of your points about the, you know, inflammatory state is, you know, at 40 to one is bad, you know, we try to drive these things down. And as humans, we tend to, you know, kind of look at these as binary States. Well, therefore I should just max out. I should just make a dose, you know, like, like, heck yeah. And if inflammation is bad, can I get to a, a noninflammatory state and, you know, clearly you don’t want to do that. I don’t think. And, and, you know, I’ve had prior conversations on this. I don’t think you run the risk of completely suppressing your, your immune system, but you, you can have some immunosuppressive effects if you go too far for too long anabolic state, you know, we talked about this too. And prior conversations to elicit some of the body’s adaptations, you have to have a certain level of inflammation, but if it’s elevated chronically that’s problem.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (16:16):

Yeah. So you’re saying some of the old protocols from like [inaudible] and other, other people may be, you don’t need tens to 20 grams of fish oil a day,

Brent Uken (16:31):

A staggering amount, even if you’re taking these,

Dr. Mike T Nelson (16:34):

I don’t remember the exact amount he recommended, but it was just some astronomical amount. So, yeah,

Brent Uken (16:41):

I think to that point you know, one of the other things in in your newsletter, so I think you do a great job of laying this out. Some of the, you know, the biological concepts that the relief you, you know, are at play here, like homeostasis and curvilinear relationships and, and things of that nature we’re ongoing with this is you have, it’s a very alive, and in this area you have threshold levels and ceiling effects. So, you know, will you be a high responder? Well, it depends, you know, what your baseline levels. So, you know, the, the Jen that you tested, it was 40 to one. It’s going to be a high responder, even, you know, really low doses, right. Because it’s just so suppressed. But as you, you know, you start to work your way down in that ratio, you’re going to get, you know, law diminishing returns. So there is a, if you look at the omega-3 index, the sort of two cut points are, you know, if you’re below 4% you’re sort of in that red or danger zone, you know, if you’re above 4% now 5%, 6%, you know, you’re not getting the full cardio protective benefits until you get up to about 8%, okay. Time, you’re going to get, you know, you’re going to be a higher responder than somebody that’s already in a relatively high.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (17:55):

And so the mega three index for people listening are that’s actually, they take the red blood cell, I put it in a little detector and they blow it up and they look at the amount of EPA and DHA it’s actually incorporated into the cellular membrane, which is, to me more useful than a whole blood is a pretty good analogous, but I always liked looking at the ratio of what is your whole blood amount, what is your RBC, red blood cell content amount, making sure those are relatively, you know, decent next to each other. So then we know at the end of the day, if they’re, they’re pretty good, but you’re just low that, you know, taking in more Omega three fish oil is probably going to bump both of them up. I’ve only seen like one or two cases where those were like really skewed and I just sent them back to their dock and they had all sorts of digestion issues and that they were just a metabolic train, train wreck.

Brent Uken (18:47):

Yeah. Since I’m a, I’m a heavy believer in the applied knowledge. So one of the things, if you, if you are going to supplement first of all, from a dietary perspective, oily fish and macro that if you’re going to supplement it’s best to take the supplement with a meal containing fat for that very purpose so that you get better digestion bioavailability another fine point if the people want to get into the, to the details form can matter whether or not itself the Lester or triglyceride form. So, you know, as with many supplements, you get what you pay for. The more expensive supplements tend to be in a more bioavailable form shocker. But you know, making sure that you do your homework on that to get to eat the better supplements, but when you take them, try to take them with a meal containing fat to get the uptaken and reduce the GI potential GI impact.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (19:41):

Yeah. So what is the difference between those two for people listening? Like if I take a standard fish oil off of the shelf, what form is that? And could I just potentially take more of that, even if it’s not as bioavailable? Like, what is the difference and what are things people should look for?

Brent Uken (20:00):

Yeah, the, the cheaper versions tend to be the F molester version. The more expensive tend to be the more viable bioavailable triglyceride version. I just in shorthand. And if, if you look at the label and it really is key that in going into this, I thought, well, we’ll know, mega three is an omega-3. There wasn’t any, you know, sort of gradation to this, but there are several mega threes and you made the point early on the two that are most important are EPA and DHA. So when you look at a label, you need to make sure that you’re actually buying an omega-3 supplement that has EPA and or DHA in it. EPA tends to be the more common of the two. You tend to see these in blends. It’s relatively rare to find a DHA only, or DHA predominantly I found one that the GNC that’s that’s, you know, predominantly DHA, but most are blends, you know, in nature. I think the ratio is 18 to 12 EPA to DHA. So you’re going to see more blends at the end of the day, but definitely read the label and make sure that you’ve got sufficient amounts of both. Some of the cheaper supplements may have literally zero or just trace them out.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (21:16):

Yeah. And is there a way of looking at the label to know what form it is or do they have to look at something like a crude oil to know that it’s a different form or how would the consumer be able to tell any difference

Brent Uken (21:28):

Really tough? They tend to be silent on the labels and you can pick that up from something like consumer lab or you know, somebody that’s done a review or, you know, if you want to do the research, maybe call them or go to the website to see, but I haven’t found too many that actually put that on the label itself.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (21:47):

Yeah. And I think crude oil is technically a phospholipid, is that correct? And that’s supposed to be even more bioavailable. So is that true, but it’s also significantly more expensive too.

Brent Uken (22:02):

Unlike many of these things I’ll generalize. It it’s, you know, could you get a small uptake or, or more benefit to it? Sure. But, you know, is it really worth it at the end of the day? And I’ve, I’ve taken the epolesters and had good success with those I’ve taken the triglyceride form. I’ve had good success with those. So it’s not a, you know, a wide gap between the different forms. So, you know, is it more bioavailable? Absolutely. But does it matter at the end of the day? Yeah, maybe not. I mean, if you’re taking and any other thing I’ll mention on on doses, you want to get at least a gram a day combined of EPA and DHA. That seems to be based on the, the decades of research, sort of that threshold level. The other thing is consistency, like many supplements. These things take a while to accumulate in the body for effect. So you’re not going to go, you know, dose for a week. And thank you. If, you know, you just kind of go back to the way things were. So this literally is one of those supplements that you start taking and potentially take for life.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (23:07):

Yeah. Do you think there, is there any way to hyper load on a fish oil, meaning that if I got my results and they’re super low, and I’m one of those crazy people that wants to get to the saturated level in a short period of time, like we know you can do it with creatine ride taking 20 grams per day for four to five days, they’ll get you to the same amount of 30 days of doing around five grams, but because the pharmacokinetics are different with fish oil and the corporation rate, is it even possible to hyper dose to get up to a level relatively fast, like say in a week, or is it better just to take a higher dose for four to six weeks, get retested, see where you’re at and then kind of come back down on the other side?

Brent Uken (23:55):

Well, it’s a great question because the you know, the other nuance I picked up and, and getting acclimated to this area is she got sort of three you know, areas that you can measure the concentration of, of those two. And, you know, one is in plasma and I’ll give a an analogy. The best analogy I can give is it’s sort of like fasting glucose relative day one C you could make a dose, right. And that’s in the transport system. I can measure it in plasma and I can see that within hours. But if you’re talking about cell membrane incorporation they’ve tied this to the lifecycle of a red blood cell. So you can get 112 days, but you know, basically four months ish, before you can actually see a, you know, a significant change as it is incorporated. So you won’t see it. You know, it’s not that there’s no change over that period of time, but it’s going to take at least four months to get the full benefit of the, of the supplementation at any dose, you know, one gram, two grams, three grams, your storage in, in lipid cells. And that, that literally takes years.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (25:05):

Yeah. So would you agree that I, what I’ve done is the people were pretty low. I’ve said, eh, you know, this is probably going to be on the higher side, and these are obviously healthy people. We’re not treating any diseases or anything like that, but I’m like, I’ll probably push a little bit on the higher side, knowing potentially some of the cardiovascular effects and maybe some theoretical performance benefits. So I’ll tell them, Hey, if you can take two to three grams per day of combined EPA DHA, I normally don’t specify what type, just buy a high quality supplement, whatever that ends up being. And then man, if you’re really want to know, maybe we’ll retest in like three to four months and see where you’re at. Do you think that’s a reasonable type thing? Or is there anything you would change in that?

Brent Uken (25:50):

No, I think that’s very reasonable. I think that, you know, especially if you’re splitting that dose, you know, throughout the day with the morning meal or an evening, the only, the only potential issue, and I think it’s been significantly mitigated with the advancements in the intera coatings and things like that would be any sort of, you know, just general GI distress. Yeah, well, yeah, fish burps. And you know, if you’re not used to you don’t have a lot of fat in your diet and, you know, you may end up with some, you know, some other GI issues too. And that’s, you know, from a side effect perspective, when you look at all the studies, there aren’t really any major adverse effects. Typically it comes down to some sort of GI issue. So, you know, the only potential fine tuning, you know, to that would be, if you have somebody with known GI issues, you know, maybe you start them out at a, you know, a gram a day to see if there’s any impact and graduated up at two to three grams a day is sort of in that sweet spot, 30 pharma pharmacological levels by the prescription levels are, you know, four grams and North the four grams.

Brent Uken (26:55):

Yeah.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (26:56):

And that’s primarily for high triglycerides. I think they’re trying to lower the cutoff. It wasn’t a cutoff like triglycerides of like 500 or something just freaking astronomical.

Brent Uken (27:07):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s yeah. But yeah, the, the prescriptive level, the therapeutic level is four grams and above. Yeah,

Dr. Mike T Nelson (27:17):

No for prescription stuff, they’re trying to use more mixed EPA and DHA. I know for quite a while it was, they were trying to get more like just purified forms of EPA and DHA. And last I heard they’re using more of a mixed form. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Brent Uken (27:34):

Yeah. Yep. No, no, you’re you’re right on that one. I think the other, the X-Factor on this going forward is there are, there are also companies that are starting to produce at scale. Algebra-Based omega-3 so the interesting thing there is you know, going back through this, and again, this was just my ignorance of, you know, it’s not the fish per se that have the EPA and the DHA, they, they get it from eating allergy. You know, if you’re looking for you know, long-term availability and sustainability and, you know, the, the, the green effect that if you will, you know, getting algebra-based omega-3 is a sort of, you know, potential wave of the future, here is something that you can sort of, you know, grow at infant item, if you’ve got the facilities for it.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (28:21):

Yeah. It’s similar with technology. Like if you looked into like ASTA’s Zen thing, which is a red carotenoid that shows up in shellfish and they actually make it from this red algae plant, there’s like three or four me three processing sites now. So they’re able to get the, literally the exact same compound, but in a more efficient form. And I remember like years ago, talking to Dr. Peter Rouse in California, Oh man, this is maybe eight or nine years ago asking him. I said, well, I have like a vegan. And I think fish oil is beneficial, but they won’t take fish oil because it’s obviously from, you know, fish and he’s like, Oh, there’s an Al algae source at that time. And it was just its own oddly expensive. But it’s been cool to see that the price has slowly gone down. And to your point, maybe in the future, that becomes even a better alternative. So you don’t have to worry about as much environmental stuff, potentially heavy metals, cleaner processing and all of that. It may just replace some of the other fish oil entirely.

Brent Uken (29:22):

Yep. Yeah. We you know, part of the good news is with the the study that in, in Dr. Van Dusseldorf is my senior faculty advisor on the study. We, we got some grant money for it, which was pretty awesome. But we also had a company approach us to see if they could, and it’s, it’s an agile form if they could supply us for the study. So we’re still in conversation with them to see if we have a win-win

Dr. Mike T Nelson (29:48):

Cool. And briefly, what is this study that you’re looking at?

Brent Uken (29:52):

So the study I’ll give you just a quick sidebar. So on the research itself, part of the challenge is because of the incorporation taking, you know, several months, a lot of the prior studies no surprise, you know, many were eight to 10 weeks in duration. Yeah. Trying to measure the effects. So you know, you’re, you’re sort of on the, you know, the borderline or maybe, you know, below the line of, are you really measuring the right effect or, you know, the primary effect of incorporation into, into cells? Our study is going to be a 16 week study. It’s going to be men and women apparently healthy ages, 25 to 50. So trying to hit a different population there will be an exercise intervention along with this three time points. So, you know, day zero, eight weeks in 16 weeks full blood draw and a whole host of other biomarkers, a resting metabolic rate you know, get them up on the treadmill and do a group study with the, you know, the mask and, you know, measuring pretty much everything that we can, we’re gonna capture a lot of data and hopefully you know, spin out a couple of papers from the, from the study.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (31:09):

Cool. What is kind of your main hypothesis with it?

Brent Uken (31:13):

One of the things that we wanted to look at was you know, is there a differential effect of DHA and EPA? So in the studies out, there are from a blended perspective. I’m not saying that there have been none that, that have examined this, but the predominant a number of studies have been on the blind side. So one of the things that we’re going to try to do is to see if, if there is a difference between the two at a, at a similar dose the other is, you know, regardless of whether it’s DHA or EPA is there an impact from an exercise perspective on things like exercise, economy RPE resting, metabolic rate HRV, again, something know cardiovascular related items to see if there’s any impact there.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (32:02):

Cool. Oh, that sounds awesome. And if all goes well, when is the estimated kind of wrap-up time? I know it’s been challenging as of late, but to say the least. Yeah.

Brent Uken (32:12):

Yeah. So the you know, we were right on the cusp. We, we got through IRB literally in March, so, you know, right down. And I had before that, because, you know, we, and I think it was Brennan 2018, the postdate, the best practices of the paper on these types of studies are around dose response and threshold levels and duration. I uncoupled the study from my graduation requirement.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (32:42):

Oh, cool. Why is mad?

Brent Uken (32:45):

Yeah, I’m out there. I said, look, let’s do this right about you, something else for that, for that project. And, you know, you can maintain your graduation statistics. I’ll get the degree in may, but let’s have a longer tail to this and, and do a right. We’re also looking to have maybe 80 to a hundred participants. So pretty aggressive with addicts. That’s good. And, you know, trying to mitigate the you know, the crop outright, but, you know, 16 weeks is a long time. So to answer you directly on that, if you can onboard, let’s say five people a week, you know, it’s going to take a few months just to get a full cohort of any dropouts, and you’ve got a, you know, four months study. And I, my estimation is we’re, you know, we’re probably the 12 to 18 months, you know, if, you know, knock on wood.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (33:36):

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. No, that sounds awesome. I’m super excited to see the results from that too. And going back to your end of one experiments, I know you did some stuff with a rack hedonic acid and what, what is a theoretical perspective? They’re more related to kind of potentially muscle building and it’s been out as a supplement for many years. People may recognize it. I remember the first time I heard about it was maybe over a decade ago. I think when it first came out as a supplement, and I remember my knee jerk reaction was, does a horrible idea. Right? Cause in my head I’m like, Oh, arachidonic acid, it’s a Omega six, it’s all bad. It’s all pro-inflammatory. And then I started reading some of the studies and I’m like, Oh, maybe not. And then fast forward many years, I don’t think it’s as bad as what I thought, but is it acutely anabolic? I don’t know. And anecdotally, I just, just don’t hear of many people using it, but it has some interesting data on it. So it kind of, what did you find in your end of one experiment on it?

Brent Uken (34:45):

My and equals one was that it really didn’t do much for me, but I’d put that in the broader context of you know, there’s at least three or four facets. So, you know, you’ve got age, you’ve got gender, you know, trained and untrained status, are you apparently helped or not? I mean, there’s so many, you know, twists of the Rubik’s cube. So frayed, you know, a male in his early fifties, apparently healthy, you know, I’m way out of that, you know, 25 anabolic windows. So, you know, but, but from this, you know, by that same token, you know, prevent you know, muscle mass decline, I, I don’t know, I didn’t really control around that, but there really was no significant muscle accretion during that time. And I was taking you know, we had discussed before and I took your recommendation on the, you know, the dosage. I was definitely at the high of the, you know, the recommended dose there. What was really interesting to see that was taking a look at my next idea. This is about every four months or so with, with Dr. Beavis is it’s getting my you know, panel on the omega-3 Omega three index in the [inaudible] ratio is seeing how that varied during the arriving on a gas and supplementation clearly something was happening because the N six, 10, three ratio went up pretty significantly during that time.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (36:08):

And could you show actual blood levels of arachidonic acid did increase? I believe they did. Yeah.

Brent Uken (36:15):

Yeah. Significantly. It wasn’t just a little blip. It was significant. I don’t remember the numbers. This was about a year and a half ago, but it was significant for us.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (36:25):

Sure. Yeah. So do you think to potentially see an effect if we assume those are a real effect, which again, it’s an NMR and all the caveats, blah, blah, blah. I get that, but there’s been some hypothetical stuff that maybe you have to drive down paradoxically omega-3 and even EPA and DHA as you increase arachidonic acid to have a better anabolic effect. Any thoughts on that?

Brent Uken (36:52):

Yeah, I think theoretically, yes. And I think the, the theory behind, if I understood the, the CIS ism presentation around this appropriately was, look, if you need an inflammatory stimulus and maybe a higher maybe a supplementally induced inflammatory level, that’s higher than normal could produce more than a, you know an adaptive effect from an anabolic perspective. That’s the theory as I understood it. So, and, and naturally, because again, very, you know, with that metabolic pathway of, you know, moving up and down between the and 603, you know, actually if you driving in six slough, you’re going to drive in three down, that’s just, you know, that’s biology.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (37:36):

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, shout out to build a Whelan who did that talk at? I have so sound that I was at my probably two-ish years ago now. And he’s the main patent holder inventor of X factor, which is an IRAC hedonic supplementation through molecular nutrition. And yeah, I mean, he’s, you know, to his credit, he’s looked at it when everyone else told him he was that crazy. And he, you know, did actually help sponsor a bunch of, you know, studies and trying to at least push something a little bit different forward. Again, science is a very long kind of slow process. We’ll see if it turns out to be beneficial or not, but it’s always, I always like seeing people who put a lot of thought into it, even if they turn out to be maybe not correct or wrong or whatever word, because it’s just not a lot of stuff that turns out to have positive effects, but yeah, it’s still super cool to see that he’s done a lot of the work in the background to at least to kind of push the idea forward. I couldn’t agree more.

Brent Uken (38:36):

And I you know, you know, one of the things I have a deeper appreciation for, you know, now is as you and Dr fight you know, went through just, just how challenging these studies are and so hard, ridiculously hard, so, you know, nothing but the gratitude for for Llewellyn for doing that. And again, you know, if you’re looking at you know, me, you know, early fifties and, you know, clearly a different, you know, biological state at that time, maybe I’m not the right person to be supplementing with that. So, you know, it’s, it’s not part of the, you know, twisting the Rubik’s cube and looking at all the various combinations.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (39:12):

Yeah. And I made the argument that if we’d been looking at the effects of carbohydrates and exercise performance for easily over a hundred years, I mean, I think I found a reference was a Montague like 1896, that was a published reference about athletes eating bread before a competition was supposed to be an ergogenic aid, you know, and we’ve had the burgs from needles since what, 1963, where we can do muscle biopsies and look directly at, you know, glycogen and muscle fibers. And we’ve learned a lot, we’ve got a pretty good idea of how they work, but, you know, fast forward to even some of this stuff looking at, should you do work on depleted muscle glycogen because maybe you see higher enzymatic changes in different adaptation in the muscle. And then if you bring carbohydrates back in later, do you see a big benefit? You know, like Mark had, did a study and showed huge changes in like three weeks. And then Gail did another study showing no changes in four weeks, you know, so something like carbohydrates, which we think, Oh my gosh, we must understand this by now a hundred plus years later, we’re still like, not really sure on some stuff.

Brent Uken (40:22):

Well, and just the, just the challenges of, you know it may be the best she can do as an animal model, you know, you know, sort of obvious reasons or limitations on populations or study duration or all the things that you and Dr. Fight went through. I don’t need to repeat those agnostic, but so many practical limitations on it. You’re sort of inferring things and trying to connect up dots. And so,

Dr. Mike T Nelson (40:47):

And you’re only going to get so many crazy people to get into a study. And you read some of these studies where they did like frigging eight muscle biopsies or some crazy stuff. And then you go on the old internet and people are like, Oh, but why didn’t they do that in a lead to athletes? It’s like, I, I always tell them, like when I was at university of Minnesota, you know, Cal Kaldi’s was a coach there and he’s still a coach there. And if I went over and told him like, Hey, man, I want to grab like your top level college athletes. These are not even elite athletes. These are high-level D one college athletes. I want to steal them for this training study and nutrition intervention for just eight weeks. We’re going to poke the out of them. We’re gonna do muscle biopsies and all this stuff you tell me to get lost, right?

Dr. Mike T Nelson (41:28):

Because his job is to get athletes the best result in the safest way. Possible job is not to loan athletes out to me to do whatever harebrained experiment I want to do on him either. You know, it’s, even if you get to an elite level, especially with the invasive stuff, you’re asking someone to potentially screw with their career and cost them maybe millions of dollars, you know? So in all of the other caveats of doing science and experiments and IRB approval and all the other hoops you have to jump through, it’s like, of course, I want to see that data. Of course, I would love to see that. I think it would be amazing, but you know, there’s a lot of real world limitations there that are very hard to get over to. Yeah. Awesome. So as we wrap up here for the average person listening, is there any sort of blanket recommendation you would have, which I know is always dangerous in regards to omega-3 supplementation or things they should consider doing as action items?

Brent Uken (42:29):

Sure. Yeah. And I’ll just always give the caveat of not prescribing, I’m not an B on that, but all that having been said, I think going back to some of the points that we touched on, I think trying to get a high quality supplement that has a blend of EPA and DHA at least a gram a day, a consumer with a meal so that you don’t have any GI distress make sure that you’re going to, to commit to taking it consistently because that’s really the ticket it’s, it’s taking this over time, not just for an acute period I think is, you know, that’s sort of the foundation of the the supplementation element and you know, some of the effects that, that, that, again, I’ll sort of recap that, you know, so the, the benefits you’re going to get things like lower triglycerides and that’s pretty well documented in some of the other cholesterol related items. Some of the benefits on the cardioprotective, what I noticed on the exercise side is better efficiency lower, lower pain thresholds. You’re seeing things like Tory threshold. So we’re starting to see some really interesting pickups. And I’ve noticed those myself, whether I’m on the rower, whether I’m on the treadmill, you know, same level of effort just, I’m not feeling as you know, as gashed on some of those exercises. So, but that would be my recommendation.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (43:53):

Cool. Yeah. And that’s something that’s pretty easy to do. Very, you know, even a high-quality fish oil at a couple of grams a day or even one gram a day isn’t really that expensive anymore. So it’s something I think is super doable with at least what we know on research, not much of a potential downside either. So

Brent Uken (44:12):

Yeah. And to that point, just to be clear there with all the studies that are out there really no significant adverse events to speak of at all.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (44:21):

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. If you want to be found anywhere, is there a place you can be found or you’re just going to keep hiding in the lab?

Brent Uken (44:32):

Well, yeah, I’m sort of using reverse graduate research assistant, so I’m spending a fair amount of time. But now the, the best email for me is Brent at omega-3 study.com, which is a website I set up around our study in case you’re interested. You take a look at our protocol more deeply you can also find me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty heavy on that when I’m concentrating efforts, I’m not on every platform known to man social media, not in the, not in the lab. Cool.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (45:06):

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate you sharing all your knowledge and taking the deeper dive and actually going back and doing all the hard work and the research and the reading and all the stuff associated with that. And I’m super excited about we’ll play maybe a year or two to see the results of the study too. So

Brent Uken (45:25):

I appreciate it, Dr. Mike, thrilled to be on. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (45:30):

Big. Thanks to Brent for that awesome interview there. I appreciate all the time that he has spent reviewing the literature and setting up a great new study. That’ll expand what we know about fish oil supplementation going forward. So I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks again for listening to the podcast as always, we would love any feedback reviews on whatever platform you are listening to. Please drop us a review there or drop me an email. Currently as of January 11th for 2021 for about seven days or the flex, the diet certification is open for enrollment. So if you want a complete system of how to do nutrition and recovery, everything from protein to fat, we talk about some supplements like fish oil, neat fasting, ketogenic approaches, a basic exercise sleep, and a lot more and go to flux diet.com F L E X, D I E t.com.

Dr. Mike T Nelson (46:39):

And you will be able to enroll there. If you enjoyed this interview, we’ve got a ton of expert interviews there that have not been released anywhere else. Everything from protein, featuring Dr. Stu Phillips from McMaster, Dr. Jose Antonio, to flexible dieting with Dr. Eric Helms, a sleep and much more. Dr. Dan partied, Dr. Hunter Waldmann, Dr. Steven GNA on there talking about how your brain interprets different signals of satiety and hunger and many other interviews that are also so go to flux diet.com. It’ll be open for about one week. If you’re listening to this after that period of time, you can still go to the same link and get on the wait list to be notified as soon as it is available. Again, thank you so much for listening greatly. Appreciate it. Talk to you all soon.