Bro, do you even re-saturate: OmegaQuant results

Fatty acid composition analysis of my red blood cells

Why is the fatty acid composition in your body important?

If PUFA theory is correct, then it matters which fatty acids you eat. And you are what you eat - many things in your body, for example cell membranes, are made out of fatty acids. If different fatty acids behave differently in the body, the ratios of them in your cells could make a vital difference in your health.

I previously got my Omega-3 to Omega-6 ratio tested. But that test didn’t list all of the fatty acids, focusing mostly on that ratio. This is a more mainstream factor and the recommendation for a bad ratio is usually “fish oil!” Recently, Brad from Fire in a Bottle mentioned in one of his videos a more comprehensive test from OmegaQuant, called the OmegaQuant Omega-3 Index Complete.

The neat thing is, you don’t even have to get blood drawn at a lab, or get an Rx. You just order the kit on Amazon. It ships with a blood pricker, similar (but bigger and stings a bit more) to a blood glucose pricker. Then you drip a drop of your blood onto a piece of paper, which you mail into their lab. The shipping & analysis is included in the price of the kit, about $100.

I liked the simplicity. Get a thing on Amazon, prick yourself, mail it in, forget about it. A week later, they send you the results.

The Complete test also included many more fatty acids than the complicated, more expensive test I got last time - and, I think, it was more accurate. More on that later.

Complete Fatty Acid Report

This is what the results look like. More fatty acids than I’ve ever heard of.

My Omega-6 fatty acids, especially Linoleic and Arachidonic Acid, are quite high. While they are within the given reference range, populations around the world and in history have very different fatty acid distributions.

Brad’s theory is basically that metabolically healthy people have more saturated fatty acids in their body, and especially lower polyunsaturated ones.

His post on Fire in a Bottle on The History of Bodyfat Composition lays this out nicely.

Compared to Old Timey Ohians

Compare to this table from 1943, from Ohio:

Picture from Fire in a Bottle’s The History of Bodyfat Composition

As you can see, the Linoleic Acid is only 8-11%. Mine is 1.5-2.0x as high. They also had Oleic Acid around 45%, whereas I’m at 20%. Interestingly, my Stearic Acid is higher than theirs at nearly 11% vs. 5.8% for their atherosclerosis victims or 7-8% for their healthy people.

Maybe this is because of my high dairy consumption? I sent the OmegaQuant test in before I started supplementing stearic acid a few weeks ago, so that wouldn’t be it.

Interesting Ratios

Saturated / Monounsaturated / Polyunsaturated

I’m at 37 / 23 / 38. That’s almost exactly as saturated as 1943 Ohians, but I have way more PUFA and lower MUFA.

Edit: multiple people have pointed out that you can’t directly compare the lipid profiles of adipose tissue, as in the Ohians, and cell membranes. Interestingly, the saturated content seems almost identical, but apparently the cell membranes are generally higher PUFA than adipose tissue.

DI18: Desaturase Index

Note the desaturase index Brad mentions in that image: the ratio of oleic acid (18 carbon MUFA) to stearic acid (18 carbon SFA). My own ratio seems to be 1.9 - extremely low, even compared to WW2-era Ohians? Not sure what’s going on here - it seems that this is artificially low because I have much lower MUFA and much higher PUFA than people used to, although I also have slightly higher SFA.

Maybe a ratio including linoleic acid, the polyunsaturated 18 carbon fat, would be more useful?

Edit: Brad and some others have let me know that I’m comparing apples to oranges here. The Ohio study is showing fatty acids in adipose tissue, not phospolipids (cell membranes). These are naturally different.

Here’s a post by Brad with a long table, comparing various phospolipid profiles over time and populations.

Taken from Fire in a Bottle, various DI18 indices.

As you can see, compared to this table, my DI18 of 1.9 is actually quite high, higher than all but 2 of the listed numbers: Italians in 1987, and Brad himself in 2020. I’m slightly lower in DI18 than Brad, possibly because he’d just started resaturating himself at the time. Not sure what the Italians in 1987 were doing - too much olive oil maybe?

D6D Index: GLA / LA

Another ratio from Brad’s excellent post on the history of bodyfat composition, in one study they compared the lipid membrane composition of lean vs. obese people.

Picture from Fire in a Bottle’s The History of Bodyfat Composition

The ratio of gamma-linolenic to linoleic acid is considered by the fine folks at /r/SaturatedFat an indicator for D6D (Delta-6 desaturase), an enzyme that converts certain types of fatty acids into others. Check here for their thread on comparing OmegaQuant results and D6D related ratios.

As you can see, the lean people have a lower ratio than the obese people, so lower is probably better. Your enzymes are converting fatty acids in a direction that’s good for you.

My GLA/LA ratio is 0.15 / 16.66 = 0.009. That doesn’t seem super terrible, but also not great, when compared to many numbers in that thread. They seem to range from 0.004 into the 0.1x.

Note that my D6D index is lower than that of the lean people mean in the study, maybe because of the short-term effects of eating a practically zero-PUFA/high-SFA diet over the last 3/4 year.

Compared to my previous test

Last time I got my Omega-3 : Omega-6 ratio tested. Because of this, the test didn’t list nearly as many fatty acids.

Previous test: only really shows Omega-3s and AA/LA.

My linoleic acid was pretty high. It’s actually a bit lower than now, at 15.59% vs. 16.66%, but that might just be the difference between the two tests or daily fluctuation.

My arachidonic acid was extremely high, 33% then vs. 11.9% this time with the OmegaQuant. That number is so far outside of what other people have seen that many in /r/SaturatedFat suspect it was a measurement error.

That seems somewhat validated by the OmegaQuant: would my AA really be cut by 2/3 in only a few months?

Interestingly, the reference range for LA on the 2 tests is quite different, although they ostensibly measure the same thing (fatty acid composition of red blood cell membranes). 3-10% for the old one vs. 13-31% for OmegaQuant. They don’t even overlap!

If my AA was drastically different and the reference range for AA was different, I could see that they’re doing something different. But the reference ranges for AA are almost identical at 5.5-19% vs. 4.8-21%.

Who knows.

Is the goal to saturate yourself as much as possible?

One of my favorite things about PUFA-theory is that it can explain the path-dependency of fat loss and other ailments: why can 2 people eat the exact same diet, or even 1 person at 2 different points in life, and get different outcomes?

Path-dependency is the concept that the outcome doesn’t just depend on the current input, but also historical paths taken, aka historical input. In PUFA-theory this would be the PUFAs you’ve eaten historically, and which have been incorporated into your body fat, your cell membranes, and other tissues. Fat is a structural component in the body, so this is like building your house with rotten lumber or broken bricks.

Luckily for us, we can re-saturate our body over time. It doesn’t seem quite clear how long this will take, but I’ve heard 4-7 years thrown around.

Yes, that’s a long time. Luckily, a lot of the benefits accrue very quickly. Different tissues in the body have different turnover, e.g. red blood cells apparently live about 3 months. I lost weight very quickly on ex150, which contains practically zero PUFAs, and have seen various other random benefits in about half a year to 3/4 year time: reduced gum bleeding, don’t burn as easily in the sun, less GI distress and acid reflux..

Of course some of these could be coincidence or caused by another change than the (lack of) PUFAs in the diet.

But most people seem to agree that a lot of the benefits of cutting out seed oils accrue in the first six months to a year, and after that it’s asymptotic. So if it really takes 5 years to saturate yourself all the way back to a healthy state, you’ll have reaped 4 years of massive benefits and 3 years of even more, pretty good benefits, and hopefully you’re on the home stretch, feeling great and being healthy.

With 37 (SFA) / 23 (MUFA) / 38 (PUFA), it seems I have a pretty good saturated ratio already, slightly higher than those healthy Ohians of old (36 / 43 / 10). But I have to shift a ton of my fats from PUFA to MUFA, it seems, at least 20-25%.

(Edit: As noted above, several people have pointed out that the MUFA/PUFA in adipose tissue and cell membranes is not necessarily comparable, so that might be an unrealistic goal.)

Since my D6D index and SFA% are in a good place, I think this means I’m on the right track. I’ll just keep on trucking, take the OmegaQuant again in a few months, and see what happens.