Posted by Larry Hoover on November 18, 2002, at 17:08:28
In reply to Re: Fish Oil » Larry Hoover, posted by Bob on November 18, 2002, at 16:08:47
> Is anyone aware of how much fish oil one should take? I've seen many different recommendations, but some of them scare me.
It all depends.....I know, you want a straight answer. ;-)
A recent study, using only EPA (the 20-carbon length omega-3), found that 1 gram/day was more efficacious than 2 or 4 grams per day. The problems with this study are two-fold: Pure EPA is not something that is readily available (or cost-effective); and, who is to say that EPA alone is responsible for all the antidepressant activities in fish and/or fish oil? I just looked at a study correlating fish consumption and depression incidence, and there was a highly significant inverse relationship (r = -0.84, p< 0.005). Fish has high levels of selenium, and DMAE (dimethylaminoethanol), also important for a healthy and happy brain.Most people settle on 5-6 grams/day of fish oil. Others take twice that amount. You can't overdose (I'm not looking at digestive effects here).
> They are based on the amounts of DHA that should be ingested, thus requiring something like 12 to 16 pills of fish oil. Is anyone really doing this on a long term basis? If I did that, I'd never get off the toilet.
Chances are, your body would adapt to that amount of fish oil, given some time. I can see that you would probably have some digestive difficulty if you went straight away to 16 grams a day. I think there are some things where intuition will guide you. What's right for *you* doesn't depend on what *I* think.
I've been doing some crude calculations, which lead me to believe that you should probably aim for around 1 gram/day of DHA from all sources. Given that the brain weighs about 1.5 kg, and is about 60% fat, with maybe 25% of that fat being DHA (ideally), you should have about 225 grams of DHA inside your head. Assuming about a 1% phospholipid turnover/day (a low estimate), and 50% recycling of the DHA already present (based on half-life studies), you'd need about a gram a day of new DHA supplies to keep your brain optimized.
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:128125
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20021116/msgs/128173.html