Weight Maven

Boy, I guess it’s a bit like Vitamin D supplementation, but could ranges for omega 3 be further apart? I’ve seen estimates from about 1g a day to this from Robb Wolf:

My rough recommendation on fish oil supplementation is 0.5-1.0 g/10lbs Body Weight/day of EPA/DHA. The top end is for sick/fat people, the lower end is for most other folks.

That’s a lot of fish oil! Works out to be about 7g for a health 150lb person to 25g for someone at 250.

Should someone in Biggest Loser shape be taking 30 or more g of fish oil, especially since there may be some side effects from taking so much?

I had been thinking that as long as I kept my omega 3s and 6s balanced in my diet I was doing okay (and as a primal gal, my omega 6s were pretty low).

But then I read this from Paleo Clinic, who suggests that in weight loss mode, about 14% of the fat burned from storage is omega 6:

Let us have a look at the fat being burnt while losing weight: the human suet (or lard). Is it good fat or bad fat? Well, on average it is mostly monounsaturated (57.5%) and saturated (26%). It is, however, high on PUFA (14.4%) with omega-6 13.6% and omega-3 only 0.78%:

He notes that the composition of stored fat depends in part on the type of fat in the diet, but your average person who needs to lose weight probably got that way from a standard Western diet high in omega 6.

So by his math, losing about 2lbs/week is ~100g burned fat/day, with 10-14g of that being omega 6.

Now, connect the dots to Stephen’s post over at Whole Health Source:

The ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 matters, but so does the total amount of each.

So if I understand this graph (and Stephen’s explanation), with low dietary omega 3, once your omega 6 is above about 2% of your intake, it really doesn’t matter if it’s 2% or it’s 12% or more in terms of risk.

This does tell me that pushing omega 3 intake to stay at a 2 to 1 ratio of 6:3 makes sense. So I guess I could see 5-10g of omega 3/day in the weight loss scenario that Paleo Clinic describes. But I’m at a bit of a loss why it would be helpful for someone very overweight to be getting a lot more than 4% of their diet from omega 3.

Anyone have a pointer or a guess? At this point, mine is that such a high intake of omega 3 is meant to offset high omega 6. And if you are taking in the veggie oils and seeds and nuts (an oz of walnuts has ~10g of omega 6), then balancing the two requires a lot more omega 3.

Me? For now, I think I’m going to stick with keeping omega 6 low.

Update, 10/5/11: Robb Wolf no longer recommends high dosing fish oil:

The idea of front loading more EPA/DHA to change the fatty acid profile of our cells is great until you run into the brick-wall of our metabolic machinery. Cell fatty acid turnover cannot be “goosed” from behind like shoving a bungee jumper off a bridge. Fatty acid turnover has a rate limiting step that is not “substrate limited.” Or, in non-geek-speak more fish oil will not make the process go faster. Instead we need to limit the intake of linoleic acid, keep a decent intake of EPA/DHA, but we need not, and in fact should not hammer that dosage, as we will see when we look at oxidative stress and free-radical chemistry.