Fatty Acids Stay in Your Body a Long Time After Ingestion

#38 2024 The Rowen Report

Dear Subscriber,

Hope those of you in the path of the eclipse had clear skies and used visual protection.

My fatty acid mentor, Brian Peskin, M.S., recently forwarded me an interesting article from the 1990s I had not before seen. This article details the time it takes for the correction of and incorporation of fatty acids into cell membranes. Oils you ate will remain in your cell membranes at least 18 weeks.

I’ve covered fatty acids a lot in this column, in the past. There are several forms of fatty acids. Short chain (usually saturated), medium chain (usually saturated), and long chain. The long chain fatty acids come in three varieties: saturated, mono-unsaturated, and poly unsaturated. It is the poly unsaturated fatty acids that our bodies cannot make and must get from diet.

Of the poly unsaturated, there are two key varieties. The first is the omega 6 series and the second is the omega 3 series. The true essential fatty acids are: 18 carbon chain linoleic acid (LA) omega 6 series and 18 carbon chain alpha linolenic acid (ALA) omega 3 series. The omega 3 series is generally more unsaturated than the omega 6 series. Each has vital functions and both support and oppose each other. Both of these true essential fatty acids, which Peskin calls “parent essential oils” (PEO) are 18 carbon chain.

I know you’ve all heard of fish or other forms of marine oil. There are the highly unsaturated and LONG chain (20 or more carbon chain) omega 3 series. As I’ve written here in the past, many scientists and doctors believe that God made a mistake in giving humans a “rather slow” mechanism for taking 18 carbon chain PEOs and elongating the further desaturating them to the long chain fatty acids. Worse, in my opinion, they push you to take pharmacological doses of marine oils to make up for God’s “mistake”.

Here's the rub. I don’t think that God makes mistakes. That “slow” conversion must be for a reason. I’ve presented here that if your diet is too rich in the LONG chain omega 3, these oils will be taken up in your cell membranes, including your critical mitochondrial membranes, where they will be highly subject to oxidative damage. Indeed, unsaturated fatty acids are magnets for oxygen. You cannot live without PEOs. In particular the omega 6 series is critical for permitting oxygen transport across your cell and mitochondrial membranes. You can literally be starved to death of oxygen if your cells are devoid of PEOs. In proper configuration, the omega 6 PEOs will absorb oxygen, given up by your red cells, and then release it and pass it to the inside of the cell for combustion into energy for the cell. LA is largely responsible for this.

LA is also the parent fatty acid molecule for eicosanoids. These are longer omega 6 fatty acids which includes PGE1 and arachidonic acid (AA). AA is considered the “bad guy” by the fatty acid ignorant doctors. In truth, it spits out highly inflammatory prostaglandins of the omega 6 series under certain circumstances. But, largely ignored, it is also the parent molecule for prostacyclin. PGE1 and prostacyclin, both of the omega 6 series, are two of the most anti-inflammatory and vascular protecting molecules in your body. So, omega 6 is crucially needed and should NOT be ignored. Our favorite source of PEOs is from the YES company. Even with my now pristine diet, I do take this supplement to (hopefully) displace chronic incorporation of the toxic oils over time. You can get a discount using the code SUSAVE10 here: https://www.yes-supplements.com/products/yes-ultimate-efas.html.

The problem with unsaturated fatty acids is the love of oxygen for them. Oxygen attacks these electron rich molecules, and as they get more unsaturated and longer, the attack goes up by magnitudes. For example, oleic acid from olive oil, monounsaturated, does oxidize, but only at 1/200^th the rate of DHA from marine oil. Marine oil is quite rancid even before it hits your stomach. Rancid oil is a key cause of vascular injury. It is rancid cholesterol, and not undamaged cholesterol, that incites coronary disease. So, goal is to avoid oxidized (rancid) oils so that they are not taken up into your cell membranes where they can and will incite carnage. These toxic oils will damage and age your mitochondria.

I believe that God gave us a “rather slow” conversion to the more vulnerable fatty acids in order to reduce their oxidation in our very oxygen rich and warm temperature bodies, in contrast to fish in cold water and far less oxygen content environments. I don’t agree with random high dose supplementation with highly vulnerable marine oils unless you are one of the few who can be shown to have significant impairment of normal conversion. Indeed, the marine omega oils can compete with and reduce some of the inflammation generated by the AA inflammatory descendants. But this may come at a price of aging your cells and mitochondria. Skin in particular does not want highly vulnerable omega 3. It is exposed to sun, which energy can and will damage the more unsaturated fatty acids. Skin wants almost entirely omega 6.

I’ve reported here how in vivo studies have shown that toxic fatty acids in mitochondria can be replaced over time with the desired PEOs when so provided, and which process will restore and de-age the damaged mitochondria. The article Peskin just provided me shows research from the 1990s detailing an 16 week time course for this replacement to be functional. That is to be expected. Results will not come overnight and the use of PEOs is to replace the toxic moieties in your membranes and mitochondria will take some expected time.

We recommend a lot of PEOs in our office. I believe that the most destructive elements in the Western diet include our ingestion of damaged oils from toxic extraction processes added to processed foods, and exposure to heat and oxygen even in unprocessed foods. As you know, I have macular degeneration despite a few decades of a pristine diet. I do attribute it, in my case, to my ignorance of these matters and ingestion of toxic oils in my youth well into my 40s and even into my 50s. The presence of these toxic oils likely permitted damage to my retinal pigment cells. And, as you will see below, the oils you previously ate remain for at least months in your cell membranes, so it will take time to see correction, flushing out the toxic stuff, and that also means it takes time for disease to manifest due to consumption of adulterated oils.

Yes, the Western diet has a lot of issues. Lack of minerals, perhaps low levels of vitamins and phytochemicals, toxic chemicals, processed foods, etc. But the most consistent issue, in my opinion, for chronic and degenerative disease, is the intake of adulterated oils and their slow but long-term toxicity to cell and mitochondrial function and their membranes. Aging is largely a mitochondrial “disease”. We need to protect these vital intracellular structures from the toxic effects of the Western SAD diet.

To Your Excellent Health!

Robert Jay Rowen, MD

“Fish-oil supplementation reduces stimulation of plasma glucose fluxes during exercise in untrained males,” British Medical Journal of Nutrition (2003), 90, 777–786:

“Fish-oil supplementation reduces stimulation of plasma glucose fluxes during exercise in untrained males,” British Medical Journal of Nutrition (2003), 90, 777–786.

“[N]-3 long-chain fatty acids are incorporated into membranes whose composition remains altered at least 18 weeks after interruption of fish-oil supplementation....”

. 1990 Sep;25(9):505-16.

 doi: 10.1007/BF02537156.

Quantitative effects of dietary polyunsaturated fats on the composition of fatty acids in rat tissues

W E Lands ¹, A Morris, B Libelt

a)  Percentage into cell is based on proportion of what is eaten

• DOI: 10.1007/BF02537156

Abstract

A method combining data on fatty acid composition into subsets is used to illustrate general relative competitive selectivities in the metabolic and transport events that maintain fatty acid compositions in tissue lipids and to minimize differences among tissues or species in the amount of individual fatty acids. Fatty acid compositions of triglycerides and phospholipids in several tissues of the rat were maintained with simple relationships between the exogenous n-3 and n-6 dietary polyunsaturated fatty acids and the endogenous n-7 and n-9 types of fatty acid. The general pattern of fatty acids in triglycerides was similar for liver, plasma and adipose tissue, averaging about 30% as saturated acids, 67% as 16- and 18-carbon unsaturated acids and only about 2% as 20- and 22-carbon highly unsaturated acids. The tissues maintained a linear relationship between the amount of 18-carbon polyunsaturated fatty acids in the diet and in the tissue triglycerides, with the proportionality constant for 18:3n-3 being 60% of that for 18:2n-6. The total phospholipids of liver, plasma and red blood cells maintained about 45% of the fatty acids in the form of saturated fatty acids and 20-30% as 20- and 22-carbon highly unsaturated fatty acids irrespective of very different proportions of n-3, n-6 and n-9 types of fatty acids. In all three tissues, the 20-carbon highly unsaturated fatty acids of the n-3, n-6 and n-9 type were maintained in a competitive hyperbolic relationship with apparent EC50 values for dietary 18:2n-6 and 18:3n-3 near 0.1% of dietary calories. The consistent quantitative relationships described in this study illustrate an underlying principle of competition among fatty acids for a limited number of esterification sites. This approach may be useful in predicting the influence of diet upon tissue levels of the substrates and antagonists of eicosanoid biosynthesis.

https://healmindbody.com/marine-oil-meltdown-and-fish-oil-fallacies-debunking-the-fish-oil-myth/