Hi Jordan,
I’m sorry to bring this topic up, but I just want a clarification since you have seemed to change your stance on this in the past 5 years. How close am I with the following statement?
We take in EPA and DHA from pretty much all food sources in a standard western diet, and this accumulation, even in the absense of consuming fish, is enough to meet the minimum threshold of 0.2g [1] to prevent cardiac, cardiovascular, or all-cause mortality stemmed from EPA and DHA deficiencies.*
*Pregnant women, asthmatics, rheumatoid arthritis, and those with high triglycerides are individuals who seem to have a higher minimum threshold than the rest of the population [2]
You said that we hit this threshold from regular food, so I wanted to verify that.
Since I do not consume fish, I wanted to calculate if I average 0.2g per day, I wanted to find the EPA and DHA contents of the food I commonly eat (given that fish consumption seems to easily achieve this).
For pork, I found this paper [3] which investigated how we could feed flaxseed to swine to increase their EPA and DHA levels, and their control group suggests that we roughly achieve a combined 0.138 mg/g of tissue from pork.
For whole milk, this paper [4] summarizes [5], which claimed “per 500mL (daily intake): total fat: 16g, of which SFA: 10.7g, MUFA: 4.8g, PUFAs: 0.48g.”
Now I needed to find the distribution of EPA and DHA over the fatty acid content of milk, which I found here [6]. I was looking at their control group (no supplementation, which is what I assume I am consuming) for the 20:5 (n-3) and 22:5 (n-3) fatty acids for EPA and DHA, respecitvely, and their table shows 0.04 and 0.10 g/100g of fatty acids for each lipid. So per 500mL of whole milk, you consume 16g of fatty acids, which is 6.4mg EPA and 16.0mg DHA for a total of 22.4mg of the 200mg you need to hit on a daily average.
Turns out a fish oil supplement might not be all that useful for me.
If you have any other papers you think are relevant, or see any glaring errors in my approach, please correct me. My research area is not in this field, so I may be completely wrong in some of my assumptions.
Also, if someone else wants to calculate some other food groups, that would be awesome too!
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK91413/
[2] fish and fish oil - Nutrition Q/A with Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum - Barbell Medicine Forum
[3] http://www.prairieswine.com/pdf/39837.pdf
[4] Health effects of oleic acid and long chain omega-3 fatty acids (EPA and DHA) enriched milks. A review of intervention studies - ScienceDirect
[5] Reduction of serum cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels in a juvenile population after isocaloric substitution of whole milk with a milk preparation (skimmed milk enriched with oleic acid) - PubMed
[6] Differential effects of oilseed supplements on methane production and milk fatty acid concentrations in dairy cows - PubMed