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Ministry of Truth's avatar

It's difficult to say since it may be different between people, the capacity to detox PUFA and is probably also influenced by the amount of stored PUFA. I've heard of 8g as the upper limit for linoleic acid. Still allows an egg or two. I think there are some risk factors with restaurant foods and other hidden PUFA, for example even if they use butter it might be adulterated, the same goes for dairy products. For me what helped most was ditching pork and olive oil. I might try giving up eggs for a while too since I'm plateauing.

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Brian Moore's avatar

Giving up eggs, pork/chicken and olive oil is gonna be tough. Am I imagining things, or did I see somewhere there's a test/lab I can get that shows my current PUFA stored-ness? Maybe "omegaquant" or something?

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Ministry of Truth's avatar

Yes, Omegaquant is a popular test for this. It measures the circulating fatty acids, not necessarily what's stored but of course the circulating levels should be a mix of what's stored when fasted.

WIth pork and chicken you can still go for the lean cuts, those are almost pure protein with a little fat. They are usually also pretty boring, but there's always butter ;) Where I live I can't get any low-PUFA varieties. The same goes for eggs - there are probably ways of feeding chickens that cause them to accumulate less PUFA. Beef/Veal liver is also very difficult to find, it does have some similar nutrients to eggs but eggs simply taste better.

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Brian Moore's avatar

oh they do mail in tests? Nice. Thanks!

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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

Yea you can get it on Amazon, finger prick at home, mail it in. Very simple and easy. $99 on Amazon.

But like Nils said, the test shows a proxy for what we really want to know (adipose LA) in that it only tests red blood cell phospholipid fatty acids. So you can probably see a trend over time, or roughly how messed up you are.

But it won't give you any actionable information as in "you can eat 3 slices of bacon."

Also like Nils said: hidden restaurant PUFAs are a huge factor. If you eat eggs, you're probably fine unless you eat 10 per day.

Personally I'd avoid the olive oil and bacon (or fatty pork/chicken in general) because those are 10-20% LA and the amounts are much larger than in eggs.

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Brian Moore's avatar

I think my plan would be: fast for a few days, so therefore whatever's in my blood would have to be coming from my fat stores instead of what I ate last. Then use the results to judge my past few years. If the numbers look good, then I'll feel good about the relatively non-zealous anti-PUFA stance I'm on, if they look bad, then I'll have to work on cutting the worst offenders out (which is why I'm asking about bacon/chicken/eggs etc...) and re-test in a few months.

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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

RBCs live for about 3-4 months in your blood, so you can't do any "quick" testing like that, it'll reflect the last 3-4 months of your average PUFA levels. Similar to the HbA1c which also uses RBCs to get an average blood glucose score.

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Brian Moore's avatar

oh, ok, well, then hopefully it'll still tell me if I've been doing a good job or not, over those past 3-4 months.

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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

Yea but like I said, it can be tricky. E.g. if you stop eating PUFAs but stay weight stable for 3 months, take an OQ, then (continuing to cut out PUFAS) lose weight for 3 months, take another OQ, you could have a HIGHER linoleic acid number than before, since the PUFAs from your adipose tissue would have entered your blood stream, and could be higher than what you ate at the time.

Or maybe it's just noise.

But if you get a 10% we know you're super low in PUFA, and if you get 20-30% we know you're super high. It's just kind of a blunt tool, be warned.

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☔Jason Murphy's avatar

in the bloodstream, like loose in plasma/serum? or in erythrocyte membranes?

I don't know for sure but I'd be surprised if pufas let loose from adipose tissue migrate to erythrocyte membranes.

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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

Yea I meant as free fatty acids, where they would be available as building blocks for newly formed cell membranes. I suppose also as triglycerides? It's actually complicated and I don't know that stuff too well, tbh.

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Brian Moore's avatar

well, maybe I should just go off symptoms then. What would I expect to see, going from "moderate PUFA consumption" to "lower PUFA consumption"? Is there a post/thread/reddit that'll let me back into an idea of where I'm at?

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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

Yea on r/saturatedreddit people post their OmegaQuant results all the time, so you can just do that and people will explain the results to you.

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