Fish oil may not be all it’s cracked up to be. As a matter of fact, fish based omegas may not even be something our bodies are evolutionarily adapted to, and it’s probably time to “change your oil” to a plant based alternative.
Get the skinny on Omega 3, 6 and 9, and how you can improve your health, reduce pain, and get rid of inflammation through correct omega supplementation.
Pure Life Science‘s Medical Director, and Co-Founder, Dr. Jeff Matheson obtained an HBSc (Biochem) degree from the University of Western Ontario, followed by his MDCM Degree (Doctor of Medicine, Master of Surgery) from McGill University in 1991.
And all of his training and medical expertise have shown him that getting enough omegas, in the right form, can make a world of difference in a persons health.
When did this aspect of Fish oil and Omegas come into play for you?
My undergraduate work was in lipid biochemistry, so I learned a lot about this sort of stuff. Not really realizing the significance of it cause it didn’t apply to my everyday life. When I got into chronic pain management, after doing 15 years of emerge, I was an allopathic doctor doing Western medicine, prescribing medications and doing a lot of interventional work.
But I was running into a wall. The patients weren’t getting better. They were maxing out all their doses and nobody was going back to work, and people just kept gaining weight, feeling worse and complaining every day. It was actually a pretty awful existence.
And so when I got healthier and lost 20 pounds and 6 inches off my waist I said, ‘wait a minute, there’s something to this dietary thing that we don’t learn about in medical school.’
So I went back and did my anti-aging and regenerative medicine. And I ran into an interview done with the developer of Pureform Omegas, and he was talking about lipid biochemistry. And that’s exactly what I learned in my undergraduate work that I’d almost forgotten about 20 or 25 years earlier. So I got a hold of the product and realized I did feel better.
Then I got patients felt better, getting all these really neat clinical results.
That’s when I sorta just got more passionate about it and basically relearned everything that I’d sort of forgotten in undergraduate. And the more I’ve learned, the more important it becomes. It’s one of those areas of science that has been ignored for years.
Listen to this podcast episode with Dr. Jeff Matheson and learn why you should change oil here!!
Fish Oil versus Plant Based Oil, which is healthier?
There are only two essential fatty acids or plant-based oils, and two essential fats from oils and they’re plant-based. They’re not from animal sources, they’re not from a fish source. And it all has to do with creating a healthier cell membrane, which is where all life starts from. So without healthy cell membranes you can’t get healthy cells. And so our goal is to make everybody’s cells healthier, making the person healthier.
One of the issues that bogs a lot of practitioners down is they’re so concentrated on pathways. They forget about structure. And every cell in our body is wrapped by a membrane. And within that cell there’s lots of organelles that also have membranes. And it turns out that membrane is 50% fat or lipid. And by far, the majority of that fat is the plant-based 18 carbon omegas, that being linolenic acid, which is the Omega 6 and alpha lilonelic acid, which is the Omega 3.
There’s actually very little DHA and EPA in the cell membrane. And it’s important to have the healthy LA and ALA and cell membranes for proper function. Because cell membranes are not only structural, they actually have a very important function in the overall health of the cell itself.
So, our contention is that if you do not have a healthy cell membrane, you cannot be healthy. And that’s been known since the early 20th century. And why we’ve gone so far away from that today is mostly a function of marketing and not really a function of a properly done science.
How does DHA and EPA, the main ingredients in a fish oil supplement, damage the immune response over time?
A lot of people who use fish oil in higher doses can feel better at least temporarily. And anyone who’s had a cortisone or prednisone or any sort of steroid can attest to that. Yes, their inflammatory level does drop at least temporarily, but it’s not something that you can stay on for a long period of time because there are effects down the road that you don’t want, including osteoporosis. And you can get a vascular necrosis of the hips and lots of other longer term things that are a problem with steroids.
And EPA and DHA or fish oil has been shown to have a steroid like effect, but in long term it actually depresses your immune system and makes you more susceptible to issues.
In fact, if you look at most official studies, by far the majority of them are three months or less because they know that the effect wears off. It’s interesting that some of them will carry out to a few years, but once they get to that stage they realize it doesn’t have any benefit at all.
But people do feel a little bit better on fish oil but only for a short period of time. Then it starts wearing off and you start getting into trouble. And anybody uses high dose fish oil for a long time will probably notice age spots on the skin as you’re forcing fish oil into skin where it doesn’t belong. And as it oxidizes, you’re probably going to have coagulation problems.
So increased bruising, nosebleeds, things like that are quite common on high dose fish oil. Hence, if you’ve ever have surgery, the surgeon always tells you to stop taking fish oil before surgery because they know that it’s going to have a problem with increased bleeding while you’re undergoing surgery.
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The Myth about Omega 6 as completely inflammatory…
Omega six has been touted as inflammatory and Omega 3 has been touted as anti-inflammatory. Well, the world’s not black and white like that. In fact, if you look at the Omega six pathways, which is the fatty acid cascade everybody refers to, Omega six actually goes down a path where it makes almost equal amounts of both inflammatory and anti-inflammatory, prostacycline.
I don’t want to get too much into the biochemistry, but it’s a very balanced synthesis of all these different chemicals from the Omega 6. Which makes sense because you can’t have all one way or all the other way, nature doesn’t work like that. If you had completely anti-inflammatory factors in your body, if you cut your finger, you would bleed to death. You need some inflammatory factors to help start healing.
To try and label the Omega 6 as completely inflammatory is false. In fact, Omega 6 actually is the pathway essential for making prostacycline E1 or PGE1, which is one of the most potent anti-inflammatories the body makes. And so right there the argument breaks down.
There is a bunch of unhealthy Omega 6 people are getting, but that gets conflated with the healthy Omega 6 that we ought to be getting.
The way most vegetable oils, canola oil, corn oil, and any generic vegetable oil and margarine are manufactured, it literally would make you sick. What they do to these oils is they heat them up multiple times, which actually turns them rancid. They smell like rotten fish and they deodorize and de-colorize them.
Then they put them on the shelf as a healthy oil. And then people say ‘that’s got lots of omega 6. So it’s obviously causing problems. It’s not because of the lots of Omega 6, it’s because it’s got lots of damaged Omega 6 in it.
Effects of getting lots of damaged Omega 6…
When you put damaged oils in your bodies, you put damaged oils in your membranes which results to membrane issues. This leads to all sorts of conditions that we see today, like arthritis, cancer and heart disease. The range of diseases is immense when you have unhealthy fats in your cell membranes. Because when your cell membranes don’t function properly, the entire cell doesn’t function properly, and you’re gonna run into trouble.
It turns out that smokers on average will get cancer about 16% of the time, but people consuming adulterated processed vegetable oil will get cancer 83%. So it’s way more dangerous than smoking.
This must be people who are eating fried foods every day. The average amount of home cooked meals that people get in the United States is just horribly low. In fact, I read a study where they surveyed some families in the Southern U.S. and on average they ate a home cooked meal only three times a month.
That’s incredibly stark. And of course now we have a situation where cancer’s now outstripping all other diseases in killing people, death rates from cancer now exceed heart disease.
People who are mostly eating unhealthy foods and rarely eating home cooked meals have high rates of cancer.
The latest stats that I’ve read state that at least 60% of all of us will get cancer at some point in our lifetime, and it’s only going up.
If we look at an animal with a shorter life you’ll see these effects faster. Look at the average dog population. Cancer rates are exceeding 80% in dogs now and it’s rare to see a dog over the age of 14 or 15.
When I was a kid the two dogs that I had both lived over the age of 20, and that’s not seen anymore. And they’re eating the same process foods that we’re eating in pellet form. But if you look at the ingredient list, processed oils are in almost every dog food.
How much EPA, DHA do we need?
The NIH looked into this and they’ve calculated that the average human being needs about 7.3 milligrams per day of DHA and EPA. And of course the average fish oil capsule has a thousand milligrams in it. And if you’re taking four of them that amounts to 50 to 60 times overdose.
I mean, if you’re taking high dose fish oil, look at your hands. If you’ve got age spots on your hands, that’s oxidized fish oil, that’s not supposed to be there cause it’s a sign. Your body doesn’t want it. I can tell you all the statistics you want and some people will never believe you, but if you point something out in their own body, it’s quite shocking.
There’s this interesting new study that just came out in 2018. They looked at DHA and mitochondria from cardiac muscle tissue, and it showed that if you force a DHA into the membrane of that mitochondria, it actually loses up to 50% of its effectiveness. And so for people with heart disease, that’s probably the worst thing you do is make your cardiac mitochondria more inefficient. And when they gave back the LA or the Omega6, it actually corrected itself.
The importance of fats
In 1960s, they came out saying all fats are bad and we should have a low fat diet, high carbohydrate diet, and everybody got sicker.
Patients were listening to exactly what the government was telling them and it was making them sick. And it turns out that fats are extremely important to health.
Dr. Otto Warburg, who is probably the world’s greatest biochemist of the 20th century, proved that fats were extremely important to health. Yet nobody seemed to get the message. But he demonstrated quite eloquently that fats are really important in the 50s. He won Nobel prizes and it’s one of those things that’s sort of lost to history and we always think that newer is better. And it turns out it’s not.
The cruel joke that was played on the American people was when they started coming out with low fat milk. The farmers were left with all this butterfat that they’ve extracted from the milk. Well, the federal government decided to buy it up because the farmers are screaming. But they’d had all this extra product leftover and guess what happened to all that extra butterfat? It was made into processed cheese.
They destroyed all the nutritional content and so the Americans not only were they getting milk that wasn’t good for them, they’re now eating cheese that had been adulterated. They were consuming a high, adulterated fat diet.
It’s just astounding how the system has just totally lied to the average person in the United States or in Canada. And we’re paying the price with high rates of chronic disease that we’ve never seen before in history.
Why you should clean up your diet!
One of the interesting things about cleaning up your diet is, for even a month or two, try and go strictly organic, gluten free, dairy free, all that sort of stuff. And what happens is, your body cleanses out pretty quickly. And when you do cheat and you put something you’re not supposed to eat, your body will actually tell you about it really quickly.
If you look at the way wheat is harvest today, it’s not the way it was harvested even 30 years ago. In 1999, the farmers started spraying our wheat with Roundup and they didn’t tell anybody. It’s an unregulated act and we don’t even measure the amount of Roundup in our wheat supply.
But with gluten intolerance problems went from almost being unheard of to 30% of the population with only a few years of doing that. And anyone that actually goes gluten free, as soon as they add gluten back in, they know it.
Now Roundup is glyphosate and glyphosate is a chemical analog of glycine and glycine is an essential amino acid that we have to get from our food. And what happens is if you look at the three-dimensional chemistry of Roundup, it looks very similar to glycine and the body makes a substitution error. What happens is you start accumulating glycine in your protein structure. So you may not feel it right away, but you’re going to feel it eventually.
One of the big problems in the United States right now is constipation. There’s tons of ads for all the laxatives on the market. Now what’s interesting about that is the smooth muscle in your intestine is very reliant on glycine for its function. If you replaced 1% of the glycine in the smooth muscle protein, you reduced the function of that protein by 99%. And that slows down your gut.
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How does this affect our children, grandchildren, or the next generation?
The effect it will have on our grandchildren is quite concerning. Our DNA actually gets damaged all the time by radiation and just normal everyday life. But our bodies are very efficient and repairing it. But based on the study published recently, it turns out the DNA repair enzymes that are needed to fix our damaged DNA is actually glycine dependent.
So if that DNA repair enzyme is damaged and can’t repair DNA, our kids will be passed down defective genes. But their children will actually start showing up with multiple birth defects. That’s already been shown in mouse studies.
And in another study that just came out showing that aggressive breast cancer can be triggered by glyphosate, which is there in Roundup, because of DNA damage to the DNA cells, and the cells cannot repair themselves. So this is not something you’re going to feel right away.
Change your oil to…
You would want to change your oil to a whole plant-based organic oil that has the proper ratios of LA and ALA, or linolenic acid and alpha linolenic acid, the Omega 6 and Omega3, which is a two and a half to one ratio.
Now when you start fixing your cell membranes, people will notice the difference. Everybody does. Energy levels go up, better sleep patterns, brain fog can be alleviated. There’s lots of really neat effects of changing your oil from a fish based product to something that actually your body needs on an everyday basis.
So what does it do? Well it changes your cell membranes. And what that means is it affects every cell of your body. We’re all made of cell membranes. So this is why it has so many different effects. And it’s one of the problems that we have in this world today that we believe that one pill should have one action when of course that’s not true at all.
And one pill in your body distributes to all cells of your body. So of course it has all sorts of actions, some of which are desirable and some aren’t. But if you’re going to take something that’s going to affect every cell membrane of your body, you’re going to make every cell healthier. So stop putting unhealthy oils in your body. Start putting healthy ones and you will feel a difference. Stop consuming processed oils. Stop consuming fish oil. It’s chemistry doesn’t make sense. Start consuming oils that your body is actually made of. And that’s what this is.
Type of Fish that contain more or less of EPA/DHA…
What’s really interesting is that if you were eating sardines or other surface fish, the actual amount of DHA and EPA in it is actually quite low because these fish live in warmer waters.
The cold water fish from deep down actually have higher amounts of DHA and EPA in them because they actually keep the fish from freezing. That’s their job.
So this is why deep sea fish have way more DHA and EPA in them and warm water fish actually have very little in them. But the actual consumption of fish is fine as long as it’s fresh and wild caught farmed fish, which unfortunately is getting rare and rare, harder to find and way more expensive.
As for sushi, you certainly get the high levels of DHA and EPA, but they cause bleeding problems and guess which country has the highest rate of hemorrhagic strokes in the world? Japan as consumers of sushi.
Perfection not required. Keep your bad fats under 20%, you’ll do pretty well…
If you keep your bad fats under 20%, you’ll do pretty well. The work that Dr. Otto Warburg showed is that, what happens is when you put bad fats in your cell membranes, what you’re really doing is decreasing the amount of oxygen that can get through that cell membrane.
And Otto Warburg showed that if you reduce the oxygen to a human cell by 30 to 35%, even intermittently, that cell will turn cancerous.
That’s called the Warburg effect. They named it after him. What was so great about his work is he never published anything unless he repeated it a hundred times and got the same answer every single time. So he’s very fastidious in his work, and we don’t come anywhere close to that amount of detail anymore.
Top actionable tips to avoid cancer and be more healthy…
1. Go as organic as possible. Stop the poisoning of your body. There’s no playing games anymore. There’s too many people sick out there, at too young an age. So stop the poisoning of the system. The body does want to get better, allow it to get better. The body has the capacity to recover from things.
2. Do some supplementation. Even organic food has a fraction of the nutritional value that it used to 40 – 50 years ago because of modern farming techniques and poor soil quality and that sort of stuff.
It’s going to require a movement unfortunately to get the society to change and protect our kids. ‘Cause this is getting scary. I mean, you walk down the street and you see unhealthy people everywhere. People in their forties probably know someone who’s died of cancer already and that was unheard of 40 years ago. These are big things.
Either wake up and look at your surroundings and protect yourself. Take good supplements and eat as organic as possible. I don’t know how much more simple to make it.
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Thanks to Dr. Jeff Matheson for this interview. He was a full-time Emergency Room physician for 15 years, Medical Director of Med-Emerg Inc. from 1998 to 2013, and Founder of CPM Medical Clinics (Pain Management) which became the largest Canadian provider of pain management in 2005 to present, setting standards to which all clinics must be certified by the College of Physicians and Surgeons Ontario.
