What can we learn from 100+ OmegaQuants?

Making sense of the data

I launched the Omega Tracker about 5 months ago, borne from a spreadsheet that was manually maintained by r/SaturatedFat user OneSmallHumanBean.

The goal of many people on r/SaturatedFat is to deplete the linoleic acid content of their adipose tissue, typically having accumulated lots via decades of eating the Standard American Diet, which is very high in linoleic acid.

As long as your body fat still contains excess linoleic acid, it’s the same as feeding yourself spoonfuls of soybean oil each day.

Every time one of the members of the subreddit took an OmegaQuant Complete and posted the results, OneSmallHumanBean would collect the data in the spreadsheet, update & post a graph of the results. Thanks again, Bean, for this great idea!

Five months ago, we only had about 20 data points from a handful of users.

Since then, dozens of new people have reported a lot more test results, and we now have a pretty big dataset of (at the time of this writing) 102 data points:

The horizontal lines represent users who have reported only a single data point.

If you’re looking to see how people in that subreddit are progressing in their goals toward low LA levels, it can be helpful to turn those off. This way, you’ll only be shown users that have reported more than 1 data point:

We can see that a few people have made quite a bit of progress, but not all have.

Highs & Lows: the 11% endgame

Let’s look at the whole picture again:

We can tell that nobody has ever tested above 28% linoleic acid, and even that is an outlier. It gets real thin above 23%.

At the same time, very few people have ever tested much below 15%. Even just-under-15% and <11% is a huge difference, with only a handful ever testing <11%.

Then there are 3 tests that are drastically lower than even that, at 5-6%. I believe that the difference between these and the 10-11% people is actually more a testing artifact of the OmegaQuant, and I’ll explain why later.

The first OmegaQuant from a known super-strict, 9-year PUFA avoider I ever saw was at 10.57%.

And the number of repeat testers show something similar: people who deplete very effectively tend to run into a “floor” at about 10-12%. A few have broken through 10% once only to bounce back up to the 11% area. This could be due to fasted vs. fed state when testing, or just a little bit of natural fluctuation.

For these reasons, I consider <11% the “endgame” state of linoleic acid depletion. We don’t have a single test from anyone reaching that low without being very strict for years.

That’s good because it means no false positives - nobody gets the signal “you’ve won!” without actually having put in a lot of work. That means the signal is probably good.

It’ll be interesting to see how people in r/SaturatedFat test going forward. We have a few people at 3 years, but almost nobody longer than that with continuous data.

Being Judgemental

Just from having seen over 100 data points now, here’s roughly how I would describe the landscape:

These are obviously a little arbitrary, and the test can be noisy: I’ve seen as much as 2% difference fasted vs. fed myself. So you could find yourself on the border of “good” vs. “great”, or “normal bad” vs. “good.”

I think the trend is the most important thing here. We suspect that it takes 680 days of very strict & consistent PUFA avoidance, or about 2 years, to cut your linoleic acid in half. If you showed 12.1% or 11.8% on that one test doesn’t really matter.

Strive for the green. Eye of the tiger, Rock, eye of the tiger!

Normal bad/Bad

Most people tend to test high in the “normal bad” or low in the “bad” zones. I’ll admit this is probably the most arbitrary border.

Normal SAD eaters or healthy people tend not to take OmegaQuant tests and report them to r/SaturatedFat. The people who end up there have self-selected, and often don’t take their first test until several months or even years into avoiding PUFAs.

Myself, I didn’t even know about the PUFA issue until 3 months into doing ex150, and I didn’t take my first OmegaQuant until about 6 months in. That means I don’t know what my linoleic acid level was when I started at nearly 300lbs.

At the same time, if you end up digging this deep into diet & nutrition, you probably have a problem to begin with: obesity, diabetes, inflammation, something like that.

That means the average person reporting an OmegaQuant is probably coming off somewhat significant linoleic acid, even after avoiding for a while now.

Almost every test from a new person on the subreddit is 17-23% linoleic acid.

Good

The people in the “good” already tend to report huge improvements in quality of life & health. And even I myself, still in “normal bad” mode, have seen amazing improvements including losing 75lbs of fat.

The air down in the “Good” zone is significantly thinner. I have never tested <15% despite avoiding PUFAs pretty much as strictly as I can for 1.5 years, and largely for another half year before that. (The first 6 months of ex150 I was still eating fried chicken, peanut butter, nuts, typical commercial salad dressings, whole chicken, and bacon during my monthly high-protein refeeds.)

People who have <15% linoleic acid tend to have depleted their PUFAs for at least a few years, or “accidentally” done a super-low PUFA diet like beef-only carnivore. For example, my friend Sudas tested at 13.18% linoleic acid eating very-high fat beef/ghee/butter carnivore for 3-4 years.

That’s not quite long enough to get to the end zone, unless you’re starting out at a very low level to begin with, which is nearly impossible in the modern Western world.

But he’s definitely on his way, and has seen incredible improvements in health & quality of life already.

Most people in the “good” zone are in similar situations.

Great

What’s great? Originally, when I hadn’t seen that many test results from long-term avoiders, I assumed that 11% could be the cutoff. The first 2 really low tests I saw came in at 10.57% and 10.55% - incredibly close!

Then we got results of 6% and even 5% in. Wow!

At the same time, we’ve got some people with a longer history of tests working their way down from 18% to 10% and bouncing back up to 12.06%. Is 12.06% not “great?”

Again, the cutoff is somewhat arbitrary. If the linoleic acid roughly stays at that level, fluctuates from 10-12%, or even trends lower, that’s all great news.

5% vs. 10%ers: Two types of LA-depleters

So what’s up with the 10% vs. the 5% people? The very first time I got a result so much lower than 10%, I assumed the test was somehow flawed. The OmegaQuant Complete gives you a fatty acid profile of about 25 different fatty acids, and some of the other ones besides linoleic acid looked very different in the 5.4% test. I discounted the test.

Then we got a test at 6.4%. Now it wasn’t a singular instance. Eventually, we got a test from someone with under 5% at 4.97%.

At this point, I have OmegaQuant Complete results from 6 people in what I consider the “end zone,” 3 of them 10%ers and 3 significantly lower than that:

Mr. X: 10.57% LA

Mr. X is my friend who I got the first “endgame” OmegaQuant Complete from. At that time, he’d been strictly avoiding PUFAs for 9 years straight. He mostly eats starch, and moderate amounts of lean beef. Not a carnivore by any means, but high quality food.

Infamous_Article: 10.55% LA

A report from the subreddit, this guy had been cutting out seed oils for 8 years, olive/avocado for 3, and had been carnivore for 1 year. Before all that, he’d been doing Paleo. So a progression in strictness towards avoiding PUFAs, but with very significant overall time spent under the curve.

Yvonne: 10.21% LA

Yvonne emailed me her results recently. She’d been doing almost exactly 4 years of Brad Marshall’s The Croissant Diet (TCD) and following some Ray Peat ideas, which also focus on avoiding PUFAs.

Her test is very interesting because she “only” took 4 years to reach this phenomenally low LA number. The 2 previous tests are 8-9 years in, which would make us expect very low LA. But only 4 years? That’s very encouraging.

Of course, we don’t know what her number was when she started. She also lives in Australia, which might have less terrible fats in its food supply, I’m not quite sure.

Health-consultant: 5.42% LA

This test came from the health coach of a member of r/SaturatedFat:

Was only trying some Peat stuff for 2-3 months prior to the test. Been low-PUFA since 2018 but the few months before collecting this sample was super low-PUFA and was doing hyper low fat for 2-3 days before collection as an experiment.

Main foods eaten the few months before the test: Orange juice, milk, honey, potatoes, rice. Had been avoiding omega-6 for about 5 years when this test was taken.

omshivji: 4.97% LA

This test came in recently on the subreddit, and was the lowest number we’d ever seen. Omshivji is mostly fruitarian for religious reasons, but also drinks up to 2 cups of skim milk a day.

He is 7% body fat by DEXA.

M: 6.43% LA

M emailed me her test results a couple of months ago, after seeing the Omega Tracker. Her diet is close to Amber O’Hearn’s Keto AF, which is a variety of carnivore that emphasizes (ruminant) animal fats (“AF”), moderate protein, and a high fat percentage.

M was also coming off a 3 year period of severe undereating, with an “underweight” BMI.

What separates the 5%ers from the 10%ers? Very low body fat.

Of the 10%ers, 2 are normal weight and 1 is slightly overweight. Of the 5%ers, one has a crazy 7% body fat by DEXA (he’s 6’3 and 150lbs), one has a history of severe undereating and low BMI. I’m not sure how lean the health consultant is, but being a health consultant… probably pretty low too.

If you think about it, 7% of 150lbs is insanely low, only 10lbs total fat. At 32kcal/day and 2% adipose linoleic acid, this would likely yield less than 1g of linoleic acid per day. Combined with super low LA intake, that might just be too low to actually fully cover the “essential fatty acid” needs and trigger up-regulation of omega-9 mead acid.

Mead acid is produced by the body from oleic acid, the omega-9 MUFA. Unfortunately, mead acid is not reported on the OmegaQuant, but its presence is usually interpreted as a sign of “essential fatty acid deficiency.”

There is some controversy if that is actually a problem, or if mead acid can simply do the job of omega-6 linoleic acid, and maybe that’s exactly what the up-regulation of shows.

In either case, one thing we could expect in this case is high presence of omega-9 MUFA oleic acid, the precursor of mead acid. And what do we see?

10%ers

                   Linoleic Oleic
Mr. X              10.57    21.16
Infamous_Article   10.55    17.96
Yvonne             10.21    17.55

5%ers

                   Linoleic Oleic
Health-consultant  5.42     32.64
omshivji           4.97     34.88
M                  6.43     32.8

Aha! Indeed, we find oleic acid about 10% higher in those we suspect the “EFA deficiency” in. I’m putting EFA deficiency in quotes because I honestly have no clue if linoleic acid is really essential, and if there really is such a thing as deficiency, or if omega-9 mead acid can simply make up for it.

Two of the 5%ers also get the vast majority of their energy intake from fruit/sugar/honey, which are pretty much the only natural, whole foods completely devoid of fat.

Maybe that has something to do with it, too. I first assumed a super-low-fat/high-sugar fruit diet was the common denominator, but with M eating a very high SFA/MUFA carnivore diet, that couldn’t be the only factor.

LA / PUFA

I therefore don’t think the 5% category is better or more desirable to reach than the 10%. It might also not be a problem, if mead acid can really do the job entirely.

My thinking is: long before you hit “EFA deficiency,” you’re LA-depleted enough. There’s no need to go further. Mainstream nutrition would flip out and say you need to add LA because you’re deficient, but I have a hard time believing anything mainstream nutrition science says.

For LA levels <11% I think it makes sense to compare not just total LA, but also LA / PUFA (o3+o6). I mention the o3+o6 because the OmegaQuant Complete does not measure mead acid (o9), which is also a PUFA.

                  Linoleic   Oleic   LA/PUFA (o3+o6)
Mr. X             10.57      21.16   0.28
Infamous_Article  10.55      17.96   0.28
Yvonne            10.21      17.55   0.26
Health-consultant 5.42       32.64   0.41
omshivji          4.97       34.88   0.22
M                 6.43       32.8    0.25

If we look at LA/PUFA, almost all of our 6 long-term PUFA avoiders have very similar numbers, except the health consultant. The super lean fruitarian still has the lowest number, but overall 5 of the 6 are very close.

My own LA/PUFA

Another interesting tidbit I discovered when playing around with various ratios and trying to make sense of the different numbers are my own LA/PUFA ratios.

Here are my linoleic acid numbers over time:

Pretty noisy, right? Just over 15% to over 20%! Part of it might be explained by fasted vs. fed state, as I hadn’t thought of even paying attention to that until a few months ago. Note that the 3 tests on the same date (vertical line) were fed vs. fasted, and how much of a difference that made.

Now let’s look at it next to LA / PUFA:

Linoleic   LA/PUFA

16.66       0.44
15.43       0.47
17.06       0.46
17.8        0.50
20.23       0.51
17.05       0.46
17.87       0.49     Fasted     Same day 1
18.01       0.49     Fasted     Same day 2
16.28       0.49     Fed        Same day 3
18.81       0.49     Fasted
18.65       0.48     Fasted

See how much more regular these numbers look? Since I started doing the OmegaQuants fasted, they’ve been rock steady except a very tiny drop the last time, which is kind of what we’d expect. The 3 tests all taken on the same day have exactly the same LA/PUFA number, despite wildly fluctuating LA of 16.28-18.01%.

Now I don’t think LA/PUFA is the ultimate truth either, it’s easy to mess that up too. If you eat a lot of fish, your PUFA will be artificially high in relation to your adipose tissue. Maybe LA/omega-6 would be even better, because then we’re really just looking at the ratio of LA to ARA, the only other “major” omega-6 PUFA.

In short: if we just look at the linoleic acid percentage, it might seem as if 5% vs. 10% is a huge deal. I don’t think so. I think 10.5% is easily enough. It means you’re in the end zone. There’s likely no benefit to purposefully inducing “EFA deficiency” in yourself. Even though it might be harmless if endogenously-produced omega-9 mead acid can take over. Personally, I think the jury’s still out on that.

Comparing LA to total PUFA, total omega-6, or just to ARA (the only other major omega-6 fatty acid) allows us to see past that issue and likely gives us a better comparison of those in the “linoleic end zone.” It might also help give you a more steady trend in your own tests, if you keep them fasted.

OmegaQuant vs. Adipose study

One last thing: inspired by a comment on the blog, I emailed OmegaQuant and asked how representative they thought their test was vs. adipose tissue. They emailed me a study back that they use as reference, which is pretty cool:

Fasting Whole Blood as a Biomarker of Essential Fatty Acid Intake in Epidemiologic Studies: Comparison with Adipose Tissue and Plasma

They took blood and adipose tissue samples from people in Costa Rica and compared the fatty acid profiles. They also estimated dietary intake of these fatty acids from food questionnaires. For the record, “plasma” refers to the blood with the red blood cells and some other parts taken out.

from https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/162/4/373/105354?login=false

These researchers were wondering exactly what we are wondering: how does eating LA relate to adipose LA accumulation, and how is that reflected in plasma and whole blood, which OmegaQuant Complete reports?

The answer seems to be that adipose is very similar to dietary intake. A little lower, likely due to the body creating some MUFA+SFA via lipogenesis.

Yet both plasma and whole blood show vastly different levels of LA, much higher. That reflects what we’re seeing: long-term PUFA avoiders with likely around 2% LA in their body fat tissue still show 5% or 10% LA on their OmegaQuant.

Another interesting bit is arachidonic acid (20:4). Despite being extremely low in diet (0.24%) & adipose tissue (0.48%), it is pretty significantly present in both plasma (6.02%) and whole blood (9.08%).

This tells us that linoleic acid on the OmegaQuant correlates with our long-term dietary intake & adipose levels well, but arachidonic acid does not - no matter how little we eat, the body will produce quite a bit from linoleic acid.

The people in Costa Rica studied here ate (estimated) nearly 19% of their fat from linoleic acid, their adipose tissue was 15.71%, and they would’ve measured 22.38% on the OmegaQuant Complete. All those numbers are quite high, pretty much the Standard American Diet.