Do your OmegaQuant Complete fasted

Why I did 3 OmegaQuants on the same day

pictured: author, performing OmegaQuant tests

Omega Confusion

A few months ago, I reviewed the book Omega Balance by Anthony Hulbert. I also started collecting & visualizing the data from volunteers using the OmegaQuant Complete test to measure their linoleic acid in the Omega Tracker.

One tidbit that confused me: I was under the impression that the OmegaQuant test only measures the phospholipid content of red blood cells (RBCs).

But Hulbert asserts in the book that the total PUFA (omega-3 + omega-6) ratio of cell membranes was pretty much completely fixed. Yet in collecting this data, and even performing many tests on myself (I’m up to 10 now), I saw total PUFA content from 13% all the way up to 42%.

I emailed Hulbert and asked him about it, and he asked me: are we sure what exactly the OmegaQuant test measures? Are we sure it’s only RBC phospholipids?

So I double checked the OmegaQuant report PDF and it literally says this in every one of them:

Duh! I’d never read the BOLDED, ITALICIZED fine print. OmegaQuant’s flagship omega-3:omega-6 index is calculated only from RBC phospholipids, the other fatty acid numbers are “whole blood” - meaning the RBCs, and any other fatty acids found in the blood at the time.

This explains a lot, and it’s actually somewhat good news for us linoleic acid-avoiders, I think.

Let me explain.

Why do we even OmegaQuant?

The whole goal of Modern PUFA Theory is to bring down total body levels of linoleic acid to around 2%, which is considered the “ancestral” level found in peoples that have never eaten a Western, industrialized diet. Therefore we avoid consuming linoleic acid as much as possible. Can’t drain the bathtub while the faucet’s still wide open.

What do we mean by “whole body?” The fat we eat gets burned, but it also gets built into cell membranes, and stored in adipose tissue.

Assuming you’re eating a very low linoleic acid diet (e.g. 2% LA), measuring your RBC phospholipids would indicate how much LA has come from your adipose tissue. Over time you want to deplete your adipose tissue of LA, but it’ll take a long time - its half life in adipose tissue has been measured at ~680 days, or nearly 2 years.

That means it’ll probably take 4-8 years, depending on your starting position, to get close to 2%:

Year 0: 20%
Year 2: 10%
Year 4: 5%
Year 6: 2.5% (close enough)

So, wouldn’t it be nice to know where you’re at? What is your linoleic acid % right now?

The real answer to this would be to perform an adipose biopsy, i.e. cutting out a tiny piece of your body fat and analyzing it for the fatty acid composition.

I asked my doctor for this and got laughed out of the office. Turns out doctors don’t just willy nilly prescribe you biopsies because of some stuff you read on the internet.

OmegaQuant as proxy for adipose linoleic acid

But the OmegaQuant Complete is prescription free, costs only $100, is available on Amazon, and can be done in the comfort of your home. I’ve done 10 now. Considering just adding it to my monthly routine, like DEXA scans.

The OmegaQuant Complete (and only the Complete version!) gives you a percentage of linoleic acid that we can use as a proxy for adipose levels.

Now, you cannot simply translate the OmegaQuant number to adipose. As we learned above, the OmegaQuant tests the “whole blood” - red blood cell membranes, white blood cell membranes, and plasma fatty acids, and maybe even triglycerides.

For one, the phospholipid composition of cell membranes is tightly regulated. If your cell walls were all saturated fat, they would freeze and burst in the winter when you got cold, and you would die. If they were all PUFA, you would melt like a blob. Therefore the balance is very specific, per cell type, and narrowly managed by the cells.

You’ll probably never have 2% linoleic acid in your RBC membranes. You’d freeze up and burst like the T-1000 in the cold.

But the RBCs do use the PUFAs in circulation to build their membranes, because that’s what they’ve got available. The idea is that we can map these numbers in the RBC cell membranes to the adipose tissue LA numbers, even if they’re not exactly equal.

For example, let’s say somebody hasn’t eaten a PUFA in 10 years and his linoleic acid on the OmegaQuant is 10.5%. Somebody who just learned about this has 27%.

We’d expect the first person to probably stay at that level forever, because there isn’t much lower he’d go - after 10 years, he’s had plenty of time to half-life his adipose linoleic acid down to the ancestral level.

On the other hand, we’d expect the second person, if avoiding PUFAs judiciously, to slowly go lower and lower, eventually hitting roughly that same 10.5% number after 4-8 years.

(I’m using 10.5% because that’s the number we’ve gotten from two 8 & 9 year strict PUFA avoiders, check here: https://omega.exfatloss.com/)

Whole Blood

RBCs make up about 45-60% of your blood by volume, depending on the source you look at. That’s why your blood is red. Khan academy says that it’s about 45%. White blood cells are only about 1%, so we can safely ignore them for these purposes.

The rest of your blood is plasma, which is water with stuff in it. Some of the stuff is fat.

Where does the fat in your plasma come from?

Fasted OmegaQuants

If you just ate fried chicken with ranch (=soybean oil) sauce, you’ll have a bunch of PUFAs in your plasma.

If you just ate a brick of butter, you’ll have a bunch of SFAs and some MUFAs in your plasma.

If you just fasted for 12+ hours… the fat in your plasma comes from your adipose tissue!

Wait, isn’t that exactly what we want to know anyway? What we asked our doctor for when we got the door slammed shut in our face?

Now, previously, I was under the impression the OmegaQuant numbers were solely RBC membrane fats, because that’s what they advertise for their Omega 3 Index. The red blood cells last about 3-4 months, and so it would be a relatively long-term value like the Hba1c, measuring your average linoleic acid over that time. Not necessarily great to measure short-term progress, and we also saw a surprising amount of fluctuation.

But if the OmegaQuant Complete fatty acid numbers are “whole blood,” then a significant portion of the number comes from plasma. And if you haven’t eaten anything in the last 12 hours… it measures fat coming from adipose tissue.

Long Story Short: Fasted vs. Fed OmegaQuant

That was all just a lot of preamble to explain why I did 3 OmegaQuant Complete tests in a single day.

I wanted to know how big the difference was between fasted & fed. My normal diet is extremely fat heavy, over 90% of my carolies come from fat. I drink a ton of coffee with heavy cream throughout the day, and my main meal is 80/20 ground beef with lots of butter AND beef tallow added.

Clearly I could just do an OmegaQuant in the morning, fasted for 12+ hours, and then another, a few hours after lunch. The difference would be about 1,500kcal of mostly fat in between.

How much of a difference would it make in the OmegaQuant?

To make sure that I wasn’t just measuring noise, I decided to add a third OmegaQuant that I would take within seconds of the fasted one.

Since nobody (to my knowledge) had ever done 2 OmegaQuants back to back, we weren’t sure how reliable & repeatable the numbers are to begin with.

I.e., if the OmegaQuant is off by 2%, then seeing a 2% difference between fasted & fed would just be noise. But if they matched down to 0.1%, a 2% difference would be very significant.

My test setup therefore looked like this:

9:00am, fasted: OmegaQuant test 1
9:01am, still fasted: OmegaQuant test 2 using the same finger prick site

2pm, fed: OmegaQuant test 3

The hope was that test 1 & 2 would be nearly identical. If so, the test’s repeatability is excellent, and any difference between 1/2 and 3 would be meaningful and not just noise.

The Results

Test 1 linoleic acid (fasted 1): 17.87%
Test 2 linoleic acid (fasted 2): 18.01%

Test 3 linoleic acid (fed): 16.28%

All the other numbers between test 1 & 2 were also nearly exact matches. Of the major fatty acids, none were off by more than 0.25%.

Great news! The 2 fasted tests from the same finger prick site were extremely similar, only 0.24% apart.

On the other hand, the fed test had somewhat significantly lower linoleic acid. If we take the average between the 2 fasted tests, the fed test had 1.66% lower linoleic acid:

=> ((18.01 + 17.87)/2) - 16.28
1.66

1.66% might not sound like a big difference, but remember: the total range we have so far on the Omega Tracker ranges from 9.5% to 28%, of which 1.66% is nearly 1/10th. Most people seem to start out in the 15-20% range, and their end goal is probably around 10-11%.

A difference of 1.66% could therefore be quite significant. On your way from 15% down to 10%, being off by 1.66% would mean being off by 1/3rd of the entire range!

The shift also happened in the expected direction: I ate a lot of SFA and MUFA, and my linoleic acid and arachidonic acid (PUFA) percentages went down. On the other hand, oleic, palmitic, and stearic acid percentages all went slightly up.

If you ate a bucket of KFC with soybean oil ranch dip, I’d expect the opposite to happen.

Here you can see all my OmegaQuant linoleic numbers I’ve done over time. The vertical bar on the very right side shows the difference between fasted & fed. It’s about half the total variance I’ve ever seen!

Me not knowing about the fasted vs. fed difference could very well have contributed to the variance in my previous tests. I’ll take only fasted ones from now on so that they’ll reflect adipose flux as much as possible.

Making sense of a $650 total serum fatty acid test

This fasting/fasted state, and the revelation that the OmegaQuant Complete fatty acids are actually total blood, explains a weird test result I had months ago.

I had gotten a $650, very hard to find test for serum fatty acid profile. The goal was to do this fasted, as a proxy for adipose tissue. I took an OmegaQuant on the same day (obviously!) to confirm and true the results.

To my disappointment, the results from the $650 test were almost exactly the same as the OmegaQuant. At the time, I assumed this meant the expensive test mostly tests red blood cell phospholipids, too. I called them, and the lab said it tests ALL fatty acids in the serum, including RBC phospholipids and triglycerides.

So, as we now know, pretty much the same thing as the OmegaQuant Complete for its individual fatty acid numbers.

Here’s a comparison spreadsheet I made:

As you can see, the difference in the major fatty acids (palmitic, linoleic, oleic, stearic, arachidonic) is very small. Linoleic in particular is <1% off. Stearic a little more than 1%, and palmitic 2.74%.

The good news: You don’t need to do the expensive, hard-to-find, doctor-prescribed serum fatty acid analysis for $650. You can just do an OmegaQuant Complete fasted, for $100, and in the comfort of your home!

Conclusion: do your OmegaQuant fasted!

This explains quite a bit about surprising results we’ve had with the OmegaQuant results in the OmegaTracker so far.

Since nobody was aware of the fasted vs. fed difference, people got somewhat unexpected results that would fluctuate.

But this is pretty good confirmation of what Hulbert suspected in our email conversation: the OmegaQuant Complete fatty acid analysis doesn’t just measure the phospholipid composition of your red blood cells, it also measures what you’ve recently eaten, or if fasted, what’s coming from your adipose tissue.

That means a fasted OmegaQuant is a much better proxy for your adipose tissue than previously assumed.

If you’re interested in doing an OmegaQuant Complete, please remember that only the Complete variety covers the entire fatty acid profile, which includes linoleic acid.

It’s available for $100 at Amazon. You prick yourself in the finger, put a drop of blood onto a piece of paper, and stick that in the mail. A few weeks later they email you the results.

Should you decide to do it, please consider emailing me your results at hello at exfatloss dot com so I can add them to the Omega Tracker.