OmegaQuant endgame: test results after 9 years of no PUFAs

Might this be what we're aiming for when dePUFAcating ourselves?

I recently met a guy and we got to talking about health stuff. As I mentioned my recent adventures in diet and losing fat, he brought up his own diet.

A few minutes in, I realized: holy cow, this man is eating just about 0 PUFAs!

“How long have you been doing this?” I asked him.

“Oh, about 8… no, 9 years now.”

He knew what PUFAs were, but he wasn’t consciously avoiding them. He just happened to, as a side effect of his idea of what a healthy diet was, and what sort of foods he liked. Lucky bastard!

I convinced my new friend, whom we might call Mr. X from here on, to get an OmegaQuant Complete test.

By the way, if you’re interested, Mr. X is lean, if not bodybuilder-shredded. Just normal person lean. He did lose some weight as he began eating like this, but he was never as obese as me to begin with.

I’ve previously written how seed oils explain the 8 mysteries of obesity, and analyzed my own OmegaQuant results here.

But I didn’t know, back then: what should the optimal OmegaQuant result even look like? OmegaQuant tests the phospholipid composition of red blood cells, a somewhat specialized form of fats in the human body. Because of the various functions that cells perform, and red blood cells in particular, the fatty acid composition will not 100% correspond to the fatty acids in your adipose tissue or the free fatty acids (FFAs) floating around in your blood. There is some sort of regulatory process in there, and even eating <2% PUFAs for 9 years will likely not bring your OmegaQuant PUFAs to <2% because some of them are required in the cell walls.

This natural experiment was a perfect opportunity to find out what the end state might look like. Most PUFA theorists say that it will take between 4-7 years to entirely rid your body of the vast majority of PUFAs, bringing them back to a healthy, “ancestral” level. The half-life (reducing PUFAs in your body by 50%) was described in one study as nearly 2 years, although I’m not clear if this was from turnover at a stable weight or including fat loss.

9 years should therefore easily be enough, including a 2 year buffer even to the highest estimate I’ve seen.

The results: near 10% LA, oh my!

Linoleic acid: 10.57%

The most obvious thing that jumps out at me is that Mr. X’s linoleic acid is nearly down to 10%. My own has slowly gone down from 16.6% to 15.4% over the course of a few months, so maybe that’s where we’re all headed: slowly sliding down toward the 10%, never quite reaching the goal?

The fine folks on the r/SaturatedFat subreddit have been posting their OmegaQuant results for a while there, and user OneSmallHumanBean has created a neat chart of linoleic acid of users over time:

Linoleic acid in users’ RBC phospholipids over Time. Credit: /u/onesmallhumanbean

We can see that one outlier began as high as 28% linoleic acid, but the next highest is at 23%. Most people, when starting out, seem to cluster between 16-23%.

User whats_up_coconut (in blue) has dropped from over 18% to 11%, one of the lowest levels ever recorded in that subreddit. She is one of the most prolific and knowledgeable anti-PUFA people in that subreddit, and has been very strict for years.

There was actually one reported OmegaQuant test of a person (Mr. Y? lol) who’d been avoiding PUFAs since 2015 after going Paleo even before that, and this person reported a linoleic acid number of 10.55% - almost exactly the same value as Mr. X’s 10.57%. That was reported in early 2023, about 7 years into total PUFA avoidance as well. So we might be onto something here. I suspect that Mr. Y won’t go much lower in his linoleic acid even if he continues avoiding PUFAs as much as he can.

We can reasonably suspect that Mr. X likely hit his current LA level a few years ago, and it’s probably been hanging around the 10.5% since then.

Arachidonic acid: 14.53%

The next thing that jumps out at me, and I’m not sure what to make of this: Mr. X’s AA is much higher than mine at 14.53%. Mine previously tested at 11.9% and 10.59%.

Now you can get AA from consuming it, but the body also turns LA into AA via desaturase enzymes, namely D6D and D5D. Because of this, it is not necessarily a good marker of your dietary intake: high AA could be caused by high dietary intake of AA, but it could also be caused by your body’s high D6D and D5D activity, turning your LA into AA.

It is thus hard to say whether a certain AA level is “good” or “bad.”

As an example, let’s do some speculation: maybe the body wants to maintain the phospholipid composition of RBCs at around 10% LA. As long as you eat a lot of LA and AA, it simply cannot do this. But once you stop eating PUFAs, maybe it now has the ability to lower your existing (say 20%) LA by converting the excess into AA.

Just by looking at the AA level, we can’t tell if this is good or bad.

In an analogy, imagine that there’s a lot of trash on the curb in front of your house (AA). It could be bad - trash is bad. But it might be a sign of improvement - all that trash might’ve been INSIDE your house (LA) before, and you’ve done the first step by carrying it outside. Now you need to call the garbage truck to haul it all away.

To know if the arachidonic acid on your curb is an improvement, we’d need to know both your linoleic acid level, and its trend - hopefully, it’s been decreasing.

(By the way, it’s my understanding that the body can NOT make linoleic acid on its own, so the LA pool is “original” coming from your dietary intake, and we can judge it without context/history.)

Is Mr. X’s arachidonic acid coming from dietary intake or from his D6D/D5D activity? Not sure. Most food I’ve checked that is “high in PUFAs,” even omega-6 PUFAs like LA/AA, seems to be about a magnitude higher in LA than AA. It thus seems unlikely that Mr. X somehow managed to eat an extreme amount of it, since a diet low in LA would be even lower in AA, one would think.

Interestingly, Mr. Y, the 7 year PUFA avoider, has an AA of 11.69%. That’s about my level!

What this could mean, of course, is that AA simply isn’t a great marker for us, as both people who’ve avoided PUFAs for a long time (Mr. Y) and people who’re still quite new to it, and high in stored LA (me) have similar levels. Maybe, the AA level of RBC phospholipids isn’t as tightly regulated here.

Or, maybe, Mr. X has very high D6D/D5D activity for some reason. Let’s do the ratios Brad likes talking about in his videos.

Oleic, stearic, palmitic: very similar to my levels

Mr. X’s oleic acid was at 21.16%, my last test was 22.66%. His stearic was at 12.28%, mine at 12.77%. His palmitic acid was at 21.73%, a few percent lower than my last reading of 25.12% - but then, my slightly older test showed 22.94%, very close.

Mr. Y’s readings are very similar here: stearic at 12.74%, oleic at 17.96%, palmitic at 22.97%.

Quick comparison table:

Stearic Oleic Palmitic

Mr. X 12.38% 21.16% 21.73%
Mr. Y 12.74% 17.96% 22.97%
Me #1 10.9% 20.91% 22.94%
Me #2 12.77% 22.66% 25.12%

We can see that most of these are in a pretty narrow range. Maybe the 2 outliers are Mr. Y’s sub-20 oleic level, and my 25% instead of 22% palmitic level that one time.

Dairy fat is extremely high (over 30%) in palmitic acid, which could explain why mine is so high.

Certainly we don’t seem to see any extraordinary changes between the very depleted (7 and 9 years) and the newly initiated (me at <6 months at that time).

DI18, D6D, D5D, DNL

If you’re not familiar with these, I recommend you read a lot of Fire in a Bottle and watch all of Brad’s videos over the next few weeks. Super interesting, entertaining, and informative.

The basic idea is: using certain ratios of these fatty acids we get from the OmegaQuant test, can we deduce how active certain enzymes in the body are? And can that tell us if things are going good or bad?

If I’m honest, I don’t understand all of these very well. I’ll just think out loud as I compare the numbers. By the way, really lame that Substack doesn’t seem to support tables and I have to draw these via ASCII art in code blocks lol.

DI18 D6D D5D DNL

Mr. X 1.72 0.031 7.7 2.06
Mr. Y 1.41 0.011 14.1 2.18
Me #1 1.92 0.009 10.1 1.38
Me #2 1.77 0.016 7.5 1.63

Let me try to explain:

DI18: Desaturase index for fatty acids with length 18. Defined as Oleic/Stearic, or: how much oleic acid is your body making out of stearic acid. Both the dePUFA’d people had lower DI18 than me, if not by much (1.72 in Mr. X vs. my 1.77 one time).

D6D: Delta 6 desaturase. Converts linoleic acid (LA) into gamma-linolenic acid (GLA). Defined as GLA/LA. How actively is your body converting LA into GLA? This is a step in converting it further to e.g. AA. Mr. X had significantly higher D6D than either of my tests, and Mr. Y’s number is somewhat between my 2 results. No clue what this means.

D5D: Delta 5 desaturase. Similar to D6D, but further down the line: defined as AA/DYL (dihomo-y-linoleic acid, FML). This makes arachidonic acid (AA). Mr. X’s result is very close to my 2nd result, whereas Mr. Y’s number is much higher than even my highest. Again, not sure what this means.

DNL: De-novo lipogenesis, which means “creation of new fat.” Both Mr. X and Mr. Y have higher DNL than me in either test, somewhat significantly. This could simply be because I’m eating an extremely high-fat diet, at 88%+ kcals from fat. My body might just not need to make very much fat. In addition, both of these gentlemen have way lower body fat than me, which would also explain why their bodies would need to make more new fat than mine - I got plenty from adipose tissue floating around.

Overall, I’m not sure that these ratios tell us all that much. There seems to be no drastic difference or trend in DI18, D6D, or D5D between the dePUFA’d people and me. And DNL might just observe who’s eating a high-fat diet and is obese, and who isn’t. Nothing we need a blood test for, we can tell with the naked eye.

Omega-3: 7.92%

This one is cool because Mr. X doesn’t eat much fish, if any. And he still has a very impressive omega-3 ratio (for reference, my own was 3.31% last time, nearly 2/3 lower).

I like this because it proves that you don’t need to “eat fatty fish” as people will have you believe, you can get to a healthy omega-3 ratio just by avoiding omega-6, or PUFAs.

Mr. Y, the 7 year avoider, has an omega-3 ratio of 13.25% (!). But he also says he started eating lots of fish and began consuming cod liver oil the 3 months before he took the test. So his levels might be somewhat “artificially boosted.”

For reference, the OmegaQuant test tells you not to eat any fish in the day(s) before taking the sample, as the lingering FFAs from your food intake might not be representative of your stored levels.

Conclusion: LA converges on 10%, fish not necessary, rest unclear

The biggest takeaway I have from all of this: most of the numbers on the OmegaQuant test don’t seem to tell us that much. Even the ratios might be more indicative of some substrate fluxes within the body, not necessarily of overall metabolic health.

The one thing that seems pretty solid: linoleic acid as % of RBC phospholipids seems to have a lower bound of around 10-11%. We could use proximity to that as an indicator of how PUFA’d/dePUFA’d someone is. As we’ve seen in the colorful graph, many people start in the high teens (like me) or even twenties, up to a 29% (!) LA.

But even the 29% person got his LA down to around 15% in 2 years. And the lowest LA level person in the chart got to 11% from about 18% in less than 2 years, too.

In other words, it might not actually take 4-7 years, at least to get pretty big benefits. I’m about to take another OmegaQuant test and am excited to see where my levels are now, another few months down the road. Hopefully, I’ll have dropped quite a bit from 15.43%, maybe into the 14% or even 13% range.

And it seems clear from Mr. X’s results that one does not need to “eat fatty fish” to get an excellent omega-3:omega-6 ratio. Simply abstaining from seed oils and other PUFA-laden foods seems to be enough.