Rebuild from Depression Blog

Every day it seems that there is new evidence that Omega 3 fatty acids can alleviate depression, heart disease, Alzheimer's, and improve overall health. The Omega 3 supplement industry has soared.

Clinical trials on depression use high doses of Omega 3 fatty acids and find that people struggling with depression get some relief. Omega 3s are important in brain function generally and the western diet has been rather deficient in the fat for the last century.

What your best strategy is to improve your Omega 3 fatty acid status is to take an Omega 3 supplement and to add foods to your diet high in Omega 3 and low in Omega 6. (I will be writing more about these issues soon and depending on when you read this post, you might find them linked at the bottom of the post as track backs.)

How much Omega 3 do I need? Do I really need to take a supplement?

With research coming out all of the time on the importance of Omega 3 fatty acids for brain function (and particularly for depression), quite a number of people have emailed me about how much Omega 3s they need. And the answer is: it depends.

What we do know is that we need an appropriate intake of Omega 3s to balance our Omega 6 intake. Many people in the U.S. consume fifteen or twenty times the amount of Omega 6s as Omega 3s (or more) - an Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio of over 15 to 1. It should be 4 to 1 or, ideally, even 1 to 1. A 1 to 1 ratio simply means you are consuming a gram of Omega 3s for every gram of Omega 6s.

How did we get so far from our ideal intake? The answer is at least another article if not an entire website, but the short answer is that our current diets of processed foods rely too much on high Omega 6 ingredients (most notably vegetable oils). Our meat supply has far lower levels too. Animals that eat grass have higher levels of Omega 3s in their muscles. As we have replaced a diet of wild game with meat from animals finished on feedlots, our own meat has less of the necessary Omega 3 fatty acid.

How Much Omega 3?

There are different types of Omega-3 fatty acids. The form found in plants (ALA or alpha linolenic acid) is the only form considered essential, but researchers are finding EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) to be the key Omega 3 fat therapeutic for depression. There is no question that the best food source of EPA is fish, other seafood, and fish eggs. However, if you are allergic, seafood and the fish oil family supplements themselves are a very bad idea.

If you are allergic to fish but need to improve your Omega 3 fatty acid status, you can take a three-pronged strategy:

Omega 3 fatty acids are critical in the depression fight. The fatty portion of our brains are made up largely of Omega-3 fats. Depressed folks tend to be low in them. (Actually all of America tends to be low in them.) Clinical trials show that these key fats alleviate depression.

There is a lot of information on this site on Omega 3s and depression, it’s just hard to find. I also plan to add more any day (or month) now. :) In the meantime, I put together a round-up article on the main site to help you access the information on this site a little better.

Omega 3 Fatty Acids, Food, and Depression

I was reading several articles in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition a few weeks ago about Omega 3 fatty acids and brain health. Research comes out weekly on the importance of these fats for our brains, but some words stuck with me in this particular AJCN editorial on Omega 3s.

The editorial points to other articles in the issue about the link between Omega 3s and brain health. One article studied people in their 70s and looked at the relationship between cognitive performance and fish intake. The participants with the best cognitive skills ate more fish. In another study, people with high blood levels of Omega 3 fatty acids experienced less cognitive decline.

The studies are not about people already suffering from a cognitive disease, but rather about the decline of brain function as we age. It would appear that Omega 3 intake can prevent disease or at least prevent the speed of decline in cognitive function. The editorial points to the need for more research on prevention of disease.

The words of the author have stayed with me are:

We are well aware from previous work at Oxford that the time frame over which dementia develops and brain volume shrinks can often be measured in decades.

Just for some good repetition:

Our brain volume shrinks over decades.

Omega 3 fatty acids may well be a key to reducing that shrinkage. Read the editorial.

Young or Old: Your Action Item

Younger folks among us may assume that youth is protective from processed and junk food. Indeed, young folks tend to get away with a lot more than they will as those years march on. However, young people need to appreciate the long game they are living with the food choices they make every day. You may be decades away from old age, but this current decade will affect your health four or five decades from now.

Older folks might be discouraged by their past bad decisions and wonder if they really can make an impact on their brain health if brain degeneration takes place over decades. But in the context of brain health, there are studies that show Omega-3s slow the progression of mental decline. Someone otherwise “doomed” to some degree of mental decline might make a change today that will lead to more health years in the future even if the outcome is ultimately the same. That is, you may still be able to capture a whole lot more healthy brain years by taking action now.

What strikes me about whatever our age happens to be is that Chinese Proverb someone who reads this blog once sent me:

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is today.

So I took the cod liver oil supplement today and made a big Thanksgiving meal pitch to everyone at the table to do so as well. I’ll do the same at Christmas dinner and perhaps will pass out some supplements as gifts. High Omega 3 foods are good options as well. A change in your diet is a critical element in this long-term game. Other food choices you make will affect your need for Omega-3s. Trans fats inhibit your Omega-3 metabolism. A diet high in Omega-6 fatty acids increases your need. You can read a lot on this blog about Omega 3 fatty acids and foods.

A good rule of thumb to follow in improving your nutritional status is that food sources of a nutrient will be superior to a nutritional supplement. However, a recent study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that fish oil supplements worked as well as fish at improving the Omega 3 status of the study participants.

Participants were given a daily Omega 3 supplement with 485 mg of EPA + DHA (specific types of Omega 3s) or a diet of fish with about 3400 mg of EPA + DHA over the course of a week. The fish diet group consumed an equivalent amount of Omega 3 fatty acids as did the supplement group over the course of a week. Researchers followed them for sixteen weeks.

What this means for you is that if you do not like fish or do not have access to fish you do like, fish oil is a good option for you to meet your Omega 3 requirements. Keep in mind, however, that fish itself is rich in vitamins and minerals that you will not be getting in the fish oil bottle. From an overall dietary perspective, the actual fish is going to be your best bet (with the usual caveats about finding fish low in mercury and other toxins).

Read more at this site on Omega 3 fatty acids:
Omega 3 Round-Up

Read more offsite on fish selection
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on fish
Sustainable Choices from the Monterey Bay Aquarium and from Environmental Defense (Ocean’s Alive).

In the book, Rebuild from Depression, I identify foods highest in depression-fighting nutrients. An assortment of fish and seafood made the list. Three fish would have made the list based on their nutritional content (shark, king mackerel, and tilefish) but the Environmental Protection Agency warns us of their high mercury content. Don’t eat them. Some species of mackerel and tilefish are safe and if you have access, you can consider them to be depression busters.

Of the remaining depression-busting fish and seafood, I was able to obtain the Omega-3 content and mercury content for all seafood except the most obscure. Of our depression busters, I list here the top five with the most favorable ratio of Omega-3 fatty acids to mercury. For your seafood meals, start with these choices.

• Wild salmon
• Sardines
• Anchovies
• Herring
• Oyster

To examine your seafood choices more thoroughly, visit the Environmental Protection Agency, Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, and Environmental Defense.

“Let’s get the fish and chips.”

“That stuff will kill you. Get the steamers instead.”

“But the fish and chips are crispy goodness. You can’t come to the beach without getting fish and chips.”

“It’s the crispy that will kill you. Those restaurants are probably frying in a pool of trans fats.”

“But the Omega 3 fatty acids in the fish more than make up for the trans fats in the fries and batter.”

“Except that the trans fats in the fries and batter will reduce your absorption of the Omega 3s in the fish.”

“Do you ever have any fun?”

Somehow Easter snuck up on us this year and I am still trying to face the fact that I have given no thought whatsoever to holiday celebrations, nor am I even really ready for spring to be here. Luckily for me, I have on hand the key ingredient for Easter excitement: Easter egg dye.

We have spent the last two days dying every egg in our house. We had given my dad a dozen eggs last week and asked him to swap that dozen for a fresh batch. Eggs that are too fresh do not peel well. Use older eggs in the Easter basket.

Now we have another entire dozen to boil and dye. There is nothing more wonderful to an almost-six-year-old who is into color mixing. Luckily we all like egg salad.

Eggs are a great food. If you can find eggs from hens who are wandering eating bugs, those eggs will be far higher in beneficial fats than the regular eggs at the market. The high-fat yolks will, in fact, help you fight depression. To think that I used to eat egg white omelets.

Read more here about eggs:

• Omega 3 Eggs
  
• Deviled eggs (with boiling tips)
  
• Egg salad (stuffed in a bell pepper)
  
• Sweet Omelet
  

This time of year in California’s cattle country in the Sierra Nevada, we don’t see a lot of cattle. Ranchers have either sold their younger feeder cattle or have moved their herd to higher elevations in the Sequoia National Forest where they will summer on grassy ranges. Every summer I look for the perfect picture of cattle grazing in the Sequoias and I continue my hunt this season.

We buy a steer every couple of years from one of the local ranchers and typically have him finished on grain for a few weeks. The grain finishing reduces the Omega 3 fatty acids in the meat, but the steer never had a whole lot of Omega 3s to begin with (see Omega 3 fatty acid levels in grass fed beef). You can read here about a steer we bought last winter when “I met my meat.”

So while I’d like to claim that I buy the steer grass finished and buy it for the Omega 3 fatty acids, we actually have grained them a bit before slaughter and I also recognize that if I am really after Omega 3s, I should look to an animal that swims a little better than a steer (see fish and Omega 3 fatty acids).

We buy the beef like we do to avoid that whole feedlot stage with the food we are eating. It just seems like a crummy place to live if you’re a steer and it makes more sense to put the money directly in the hands of the rancher. Of course, he will only sell me a live steer which gives me the excitement of hiring people like Ted and taking pictures like the one below.