Less Stressed Life: Helping You Heal Yourself

#097 All About Omega 3s & Testing + Is Taking Omega 3s in Pregnancy a Big Deal Part 1 with Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson, PhD, RD

February 05, 2020 Christa Biegler Episode 101
Less Stressed Life: Helping You Heal Yourself
#097 All About Omega 3s & Testing + Is Taking Omega 3s in Pregnancy a Big Deal Part 1 with Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson, PhD, RD
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Dry skin, joint pains every now and then, irritating dry eyes on top of feeling fatigued everyday?

Sounds about right?

Welp, you might just need to boost your Omega 3 intake.  

In part one of this two-part episode of the Less Stressed life podcast, Dr. Kristina Harris, a registered dietician and research associate at Omega Quant, talks about Omega 3s and touches on some interesting research on DHA and EPA. 


Her Key Takeaways:

[05:08] The Omega 3 family

[08:06] Why Omega 3 from animal proteins are better for the human body

[09:29] Symptoms of having Omega-3 deficiency

[22:36] Why you should get an Omega-3 Index Test


Other topics she touched on in this episode:

  • Benefits of Omega 3 to avoid heart disease
  • Essentials of DHA for baby's eye and brain development
  • DHA benefit in terms of baby's IQ
  • The role of Omega 3 in carrying a baby to full term
  • Why research is more focused on DHA than EPA?
  • Effect of having high Omega-3 on pregnant women


But wait, before you head on to to have a listen, we will be giving away a $50 at-home Omega 3 Index Testing Kit:

Here's how you can join: 

  1. Comment and tag a friend on the Facebook and Instagram posts about this episode (there will be a post for parts 1 and 2!)  OR share this episode or the podcast show of The Less Stressed Life via a text message.
  2. Take a screenshot of how you shared this episode or the podcast show.
  3.  Send the screenshot to us at hello@lessstressedlife.com 

Got it? Great!

Now go on and listen to this episode!

Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson received her Ph.D. in Nutritional Sciences from Pennsylvania State University in 2013 and completed her training to become a Registered Dietitian in 2014. As a graduate student, she studied under Dr. Penny Kris-Etherton, an internationally-recognized expert in fats and nutrition. She worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado-Denver under Dr. John Peters in the area of worksite wellness before returning to the omega-3 field. Kristina joined the family business OmegaQuant Analytics in 2014, with a particular focus on omega-3s in maternal health, helping create the Prenatal DHA test and the Mother’s Milk DHA test.

---

Assess your Adrenals, Detox or Get my Guide

christabiegler.com/links

Join us on Instagram

instagram.com/anti.inflammatory.nutritionist/

Shop our Favorites

christabiegler.com/shop

Loving the podcast? Leave us a review!

reviewthispodcast.com/lessstressed

spk_0:   0:00
no matter what your gene makeup is, most people are still not going to be converting more than what I've seen is 5% of the L A could be converted to EPA, and only 1% would be converted to D a chase.

spk_1:   0:13
Welcome to the less stressed Life podcast, where our only priority is providing those ah ha moments toe up level your life, health and happiness. Your host Integrative dietitian nutritionist Krista Bigler helps health conscious women reduce the stress and confusion around food, fatigue, digestive and skin issues at less stress nutrition dot com now onto the show. So this week we split the episode into two parts this week and next week for not really a great reason, except that it seemed like a great option when I wrote the calendar. But it'll be great because we are going to be giving away a couple of omega three testing kits that Kristina will eventually talk about in her podcast. So the first part of this weeks episode has to do with kind of omega three background and kind of what to expect, and next week goes dives Maur into the prenatal or the pregnancy aspect. of Omega's. Now there's a little bit. We cross back and forth a little bit, but generally that's kind of how it is. However, if you're not pregnant, you can still listen to the second half, and I think you'll still take away some things. So here's how you can enter to win. Ah $50 Value Omega three at Home Testing Kit Omega three Index kit. So there will be two INSTAGRAM posts that come out about this episode, this week's episode and next week's You can comment and tag someone on that episode. Social Media posts on instagram or on Facebook, or all you have to do is share this episode or share the podcast with a friend and screenshot how you shared it in your text message and email it to hello at less stress like dot com so you can get as many entries as you want. There's going to be to Instagram or Facebook posts and even comment. And Tex, I'm on either one. The goal here is you're just sharing the podcast, and if you don't use Instagram or Facebook, no big deal. Just send someone a text of the link to the podcast you can actually just send them to a less stress life dot com. Or there's a little like share arrow in your podcasts app somewhere, and you can kind of hit that arrow and it will take you into the text message usually and then just take a screenshot of you sharing it and email it to us at hello. Less dressed like that will make sure we can contact you one of those three ways. That makes it the easiest for us to get a hold of you to let you know that you've won one of the free Omega Test. So good luck. Okay, Today, on the less stress life, we have someone that I am met very recently. Her name is Christina Harris Jackson, and she is a guru on Omega threes and specifically during pregnancy. So we're gonna get into that. But then also the bigger Oh, my guess three picture today. So Kristina received her PhD in nutritional sciences from Penn State University and 2013 and completed her training to become a registered dietitian in 2014. As a grad student, she studied A with an internationally recognized experts in facts and nutrition. Dr Penny Kris Etherton. And she worked as a postdoc fellow at the University of Colorado, Dember under Dr Jon Peters in the area of work site wellness before returning to the Omega three fields. And I think we should talk about why she returned to the Omega three. She joined the family business. There it is Omega Analytics in 2014 with a particular focus on omega threes and maternal health, helping to create a prenatal GH es and Mother's milk th a test. So this is actually pretty awesome, like there's nothing else quite like that on the market. And the reason I'm excited to have Kristina on is a long time ago, when I was looking at all my options for Omega testing. I found that this Omega company was just right down the street, not like right down the street, but in the same state, isn't it? There's not that much. We don't have that much, so I was really excited about that. So Christina came and spoke at our local dietician conference last month. I saw her dad at the National Conference this last month, and so anyway, we're really excited to talk about all the stuff. In fact, now I'm gonna stop talking here in a moment. But Kristina was actually one of my favorite speakers at our own locally assembled conference. And I think we had a really great slate. So we're excited to have her here. Thanks for dreariness. Thank you so

spk_0:   3:57
much for having me. This is great.

spk_1:   3:59
Yes. So let's get into the I'd love to talk about the family biz later because I think it's actually a good part of the story. Is that talks about the curd, the origin story in, like different types of quality Omega three testing. But let's get into omega threes in general because this is a misunderstood field, I think, because we always like it's a popular thing Omega threes or one of the top recommended supplements. You couldn't see them everywhere. So let's talk about what is an Omega three and what goes into that.

spk_0:   4:25
Oh, yeah, This is a very simple tow us, but it gets confused really quickly, so omega threes are type of fat, and there are different kinds of fats called, and we call him fatty acids, and they just have different structures, so it makes them do different things in your body and omega threes are a kind of set that have a double wand on the third carbon from the Omega End, hence the name Omega three. So that actually is just a long chain of carbons. And so when you get double bonds in there, then that's how we kind of name Fats. And so omega threes are found really almost exclusively in marine life in nature. So fish is really our only natural dietary source of omega threes. Unless we wanted to eat Fido Clinton. But that's not gonna work for humans. So this is really concentrated. It's this nutritional source that is really, really specific, and so that's made it kind of difficult, or the general population and kind of our modern times to be getting enough omega threes through their diet.

spk_1:   5:31
Well, let's dissect that just for a moment, because you talked about just mostly marine life and nature. But are we talking about D H A and E p A. Or can we talk about

spk_0:   5:40
money right into there

spk_1:   5:41
s So there's two because these people, this would be confusing if people are looking at their Chia seed bag and it says Omega threes, right? Like clarify,

spk_0:   5:48
Right? Yeah. Thank you so much. I'm so into the long chain that I just skipped right over it. So the whole family of omega threes Georges alpha linolenic acid And that's what you find in gs seeds and walnuts and plant based. So that's a shorter chain Omega three. But it's the essential one, and essentially we can take that omega three fatty acid L. A. And our bodies could metabolize it to add carbons and to take away hydrogen tze and to make them longer and more unsaturated as your body does, that those of the fatty acids that we study, the longer chain E p a and D H ey so our bodies can make e p and G h A. But those are the two that we also get from fish and marine life and our bodies air pretty inefficient at making a P and G h a from a l. A. And so it's much easier to eat it and fish to increase your levels or to boost the amount of long chain omega threes in your body.

spk_1:   6:44
I've thought about this all the time with people specifically because we're gonna love skin issues, right? So we think about consuming Omegas from plant sources like Shia or Fox. But you mentioned that that's inefficient for your body to convert it to an animal based EPA. Indeed, I always just call it Plan based Omega's Animal, based on US alien plans, E P. A. T H A animal based, you know, because you need a body to make that happen on. So that's why a fish body is a possibility that she would like to talk about Omegas and other animals and kind of what the differences are there because there's some chatter about. Okay, So if we're doing grass fed animals, are we going higher Omega's or whatnot? So let's talk about that, too. But first of all, why we're humans so inefficient at converting that, do you think? Is it genetics is, I have you know, the Fats Jean where I don't converse. That was not to talk to people about like, I'm always gonna need some Omegas like I'm gonna need to eat fish, period. Maybe that's the pretty generalized statement.

spk_0:   7:35
It's not. I think in general, the fads, jeans and the Lobell genes are they code for the proteins, the enzymes that convert the L A over all the way up TP and DOJ. And there are differences and people. Some are a little bit more efficient, depending on their specific gene for those jeans. But overall, no matter what your gene makeup is, most people are still not going to be converting. More than what I've seen is 5% of the L A could be converted to EPA, and only 1% would be converted to GH A. So you'd have to be eating a whole lot of ale A to get an impressionable change in e p a r G h A. And so the fads doesn't slightly affect it. But truly, the dose were eating EPA and D. H. A. In animal proteins is so much more effective than super dose ng a l A or super consuming Ayla and trying to ramp up that pathway that it's not even a competition. It just blows it out of the water. If you just eat fish essentially or take fish oil.

spk_1:   8:38
Yeah, what organs air involved in that conversion process?

spk_0:   8:41
It is primarily in the liver, I believe. Okay, that's what I kind of thought probably.

spk_1:   8:46
Okay, so you mentioned basically that we're not converting. Like if we were relying on plants for our omega three e pai d j. It would probably not be end well for us. So what does it look like in people when we don't have enough? E p A D A j? What are some symptoms that present?

spk_0:   9:03
Yes, And so these symptoms are like there relatively subtle, because the body does a lot of things to compensate when it doesn't get what it needs. But some of the symptoms that we've been noticing more over the years, as we've been setting this is dry eye, is one of the most common ones these days. Joint pain is also something that has at least omega threes have been shown to improve that. And then there's some evidence with anxiety and depression, which also could be for a number of other reasons that some of the issues with all of these is there multifactorial, so omega threes can play a role in all these where we've really done. Most of our research is in the world of heart disease and longevity, and those aren't really situations where you get symptoms. It's where we look. ATT studies and follow people over long periods of time and find people with high levels of omega three z, p and G H and their blood live longer, are less likely to have heart attacks, things like that. So that's a completely different kind of perspective versus the immediate symptoms of omega three deficiency.

spk_1:   10:07
Sure, although it is a commonly recommended supplement, I mean, really, it is. And so do you think that stems from the whole cardiovascular and longevity benefits? I don't know that. I think we're just starting to talk about longevity as a thing like now I'm guessing it was heart disease before s so I mean, is that really where it comes from? Like Oh, well, this is gonna improve your cholesterol. And so many people like half the people whose high cholesterol I know. I'm making up that number, but it's a yeah number. It's a big number, right? It definitely

spk_0:   10:36
came to be important because of the heart disease world. The first studies were really in the Greenland Eskimos or in you it populations. And they found that those people were eating exclusively blubber and high, high fat meals, diets, no vegetables. And they had very low levels of heart disease compared toe. I think they were comparing to Denmark or mainland Europe. And so at that time it was in the 19 seventies. That was very surprising because that's when the fat heart disease hypothesis was really getting ramped up. And so, looking at this population that was doing everything wrong and yet having less heart disease and was just confusing to people. So they dug and they found that they had very high omega three fatty acid intake and then just started to do more and more research on that. And so that is where it born. It was born. And then there's been so many studies since then that have been positive, and sometimes they don't find a finding. It's been confusing, and that's where we think. Actually, measuring blood levels instead of just giving people the same dose of omega threes in a supplement is where we can explain some of the confusion in the literature.

spk_1:   11:47
Yeah, and it sounds like there is quite a bit of confusion because even when we get in here in a moment, talking about this in maternal or prenatal and postnatal. You guys kind of had to do a lot of pioneer work because there wasn't really baselines are kind of, like, generally recognized consensus around how things should be. So let's get into that who specialize in really maternal. So why do we care about E P. A. D A or specifically D H A and pregnant women and beyond and before pregnancy tell us about that

spk_0:   12:12
whole time frame. Yeah, this has been so interesting to me because I've been studying this more intensively as I've been having the own kids. So it sze really hitting home deejay in pregnancy, I think, initially became important because in animal studies, not in human studies, they were kind of doing deficiencies studies and taking away all the D h A in the diets and finding malformed brains and eyes. And so the brain and the I R. Where D. H A. Is really concentrated. It's very, very high, and it's important part of the structure of both of those Koreans. And so when you completely took it away from the diet, there were problems there, and so that was like, Oh my gosh, we have to make sure we get enough th ey for everybody so these babies will have enough d a J to make their brains in their eyes healthy and develop properly. But the body does make some D h A. And I think that makes perfect sense that the body makes enough th ey so that the mom can provide D a change for the baby to make the eye in brain even when she doesn't necessarily think she's eating much th ey or may not be eating any GH a. So in these human studies we started to give people D. J and follow them through the pregnancy and then follow their kids and see if there were any effects on like you or how your brain works. How the kid's brains worked because that was the main hypothesis. And there were some studies that found that giving women who were pregnant fish oil had benefits to their kids mental capacities when they were toddlers and Children, and some that didn't show that. And I'm sure you can imagine it's very hard to actually measure how smart a child is. It's like it's a very difficult thing to measure. So I think those studies are hard to dio and difficult to interpret. However, in doing these studies where they're starting to give women fish oil or D H A during pregnancy, they started to see that the Jess Station all period was longer and women who are having higher amounts of omega threes during pregnancy and this phenomenon was pretty consistent across a lot of different studies, such that just in 2018 they produced. Or there was a meta analysis where they combined a bunch of different studies and looked at whether or not across a lot of studies, the scene the same pattern. And so they found, with a very high degree of certainty that women who had fish oil or DOJ during pregnancy were at lower risk of having preterm births and especially early preterm birth. So I'm defining preterm birth as before, 37 weeks and early preterm birth as before 34 weeks gestation.

spk_1:   14:53
And what's the problem of preterm birth

spk_0:   14:55
and preterm birth is, It's very common to us these days, but it's a huge problem. It's worldwide. It's the number one cause of neonatal death here in the U. S. We have amazing treatment for preterm kids, but it's very, very expensive. So if you have a kid, a preterm baby and they have to go into the neonatal intensive care unit, that can cost about the $2000 a day or if it can cost $50,000 more of the entire labor and delivery as compared to a normal labor and delivery. And those kids can have deficiencies throughout their life because they weren't in the womb long enough. But like I said, our treatments gotten so much better that it's less. We don't think about it as much, I think anymore. But it's more preferable. Thio keep baby in the womb until they are at full term versus having baby come out early, and then you have to do all this work to catch them up and make sure that they have to recreate the womb outside of the wind, which is very difficult to d'oh well,

spk_1:   15:53
and specifically even with our advances in our abilities to do this, preterm birth rates are on the rise,

spk_0:   16:01
granting him correct. It is we're

spk_1:   16:04
going to set, we're going backwards at the same time we're going forwards. But we're also going backwards and somewhere we're spending. This is like, you know, ruling beyond. We're spending a lot of care, something we could do. I mean, yeah, the studies are very consistent. Good Omega status. Good d A chase is specifically. Is it total Omega's? Or is it D h A. And in Which thing do we care about? I mean, I know D. J is a bigger deal in babies. So, like, at what point do we care about which one? Which one?

spk_0:   16:30
That's a good question. DOJ has been studied on its own as a supplement and shown to work along it. Just station fish oil hasn't studied, and that has both EPA and D H A. In there. And so the e p A does not seem. At least if we look at blood levels of EPA, it doesn't seem to be playing as big of a rule as D. H. A. And I think just the history of D. H. A. As a structural piece of the brain and the eye made Di a Jake linked to pregnancy more than e p. A. But having a high e p a level is good as well, but the research has just really been focused on th ey.

spk_1:   17:06
Okay, so you presented some interesting research when I heard you speak talking about, you know, when we give this much, I don't know if this was your study or other studies, but basically, when we give an X amount of D h ey, this happens. And if we get X amount like so few chest, if you do wanna go through that with us basically

spk_0:   17:23
sure. Yet what's beautiful about omega threes in the diet and omega threes in the blood is that there's a pretty direct correlation, unlike other fatty acids that we make in our body and we metabolize. So it's a lot harder to see. The connection between diet and blood levels of Omega three is because we're in a position at making our own. The level in their diet really is pretty strongly related to the level in your blood. So there have been lots and lots of studies where they've given women different doses of D. H A and found a dose response in their blood where the more detail you take, the more is in your blood and pregnant women also, the higher their cord blood levels are and the higher the baby's levels are when they're born. And there's also higher breast milk D H A levels, at least for the first about six weeks if you have higher D h A during pregnancy. So it all works together.

spk_1:   18:17
Okay. So specifically something that I said I'm gonna kind of read off some of the notes I have from your presentation. So if someone was, I'm hoping to get this right. Basically, if someone had adequate Omega three status in their blood and we gave them DOJ supplementation, it was like, fine, but there was not really a big difference. But they were inadequate and testing, and you gave him the J and improved. So if you already good, it didn't really make a difference. If you were deficient, it made a big difference. Is that correct? And then am I wrong? No,

spk_0:   18:46
no. I'm trying to think about which study you're talking about. I think the study you maybe referencing is a study we got run the fatty acids on that was conducted in pregnant women. They were looking at Colin and they did it controlled feeding studies. They offered. They prevented all the food for these women and then in that controlled feeding, they gave them 200 milligrams of th a day, which is kind of the standard pregnancy dose right now across the board. So this was just we knew exactly how much th ey they were getting. What happened in that was, for the most part, the pregnant women that they tested. If they took the there on this diet, they still saw an increase in their blood D h A levels from the beginning of the study to after 10 weeks of this diet, women who were of childbearing age but not pregnant had the same effect. If they were taking 200 milligrams of DEA today, they had an increase in blood level. The groups that didn't change was a lactating group, so they had women five weeks postpartum start this diet go on this 200 milligrams a day of D h A. And they found that women who were higher at the beginning it baseline. They had hired D h A levels. When they went on that 200 milligrams a day, it didn't appear to be enough, so they actually had a decrease in some cases in their blood levels. J J women who are very low. That too under milligrams was enough to help raise him up. So, essentially with the acting group, I think the demands of breastfeeding were so much that that 200 milligrams of G H A. A day was not enough to meet the needs to maintain Mom's D. H A status and provide enough DOJ for the breast milk in addition to healing from pregnancy and labor, which is a huge deal.

spk_1:   20:26
Huge deal. There's like, Ah, whole thing around postpartum that has not really unaddressed fully that needs. Like I hope it's coming, I hope. I hope we can create him right now because it's like a big deal. So essentially, Mama's giving all the DHD away, and so baby needs it to grow brain and eyes and all the things you know and to be super smart.

spk_0:   20:46
So, yeah, there's some really cool stuff about that where, like we have store fat stores, literally, our body will pull D H a out of our fat stores and put it in the placenta will pull D H. A. Specifically out of mom's blood, and the biology of it is that it just shows over and over again. How important Ta K is too, baby. The other cool thing is, estrogen levels also lightly improve that pathway. Going from a lay T p A and D h ey, it slightly increases the amount of a Lee that can be converted to D A. J. Not a huge amount, but enough. So there's all these little hints showing how the bodies changing to be able to provide more d J to the baby, which I think is very cool

spk_1:   21:29
way smarter than we can decipher at the moment s. So I think we've established this important that specifically d h ey, but Omega's in pregnancy, so fish oil is EPA and D. H. A G H of itself has been really studied in pregnancy, and it leads to longer gestations, which some people may not want to hear. But that's a positive things you needed baby in there, so they're growing bones, so everything is like, more awesome afterwards, and then there's really a big need for it in in lactation or in breast feeding. So let's talk about how do we know where we're at with this? Because when you started doing study work around this population. There wasn't a reference range early for pregnancy, of what appropriate D J or Omega. However, we want to call this omega three. And it was like if I would go get my Omega Three Index contested, which I did a week or two ago on low. I mean, Milo, that reference rain just different than pregnancy. Tell us about that.

spk_0:   22:24
Correct. So the Omega Three index is the first, like, really omega three blood tests that came out way before our prenatal D H. A test. So the Omega Three Index is the E P. A and D J content red blood cell membranes, the blood. It has plasma, and it has red blood cells and white blood cells and red blood cells just kind of carry oxygen around. And then no one else really cares that much about it, except for maybe measuring h b a onesie. Everything is going on in the plasma, but we look at a red blood cell and we look at the fatty acid membrane that makes up the red blood cell. And that is really interesting because it reflects tissue levels of fatty acids in your body instead of just what you ate yesterday. That's gonna be or eight this morning. That's gonna be in your plasma, the red blood cells, and really show kind of your months long intake of fat and what your body has to make those fatty acid membranes that the type of fats that are available to them.

spk_1:   23:22
And that's a wrap for today. Don't forget to go entered a win. The Omega three Index testing kits. We have more than one to give away. Your chances are good if you want to know how to enter, will give you as many entries as you comet like you can comment each week on both Facebook and Instagram on this post at Crystal Bigler Rd on both Instagram and Facebook, and you can send a screenshot of sharing both episodes, and we'll give you is pretty much as many entries like up to six centuries, so your odds are excellent. Go ahead and go get entered now because it's such a great, easy to do test at home. And there's zero cost to you because you'll get the results and they're really easy to interpret on your own. And it tells you what you need to do. One of the best gift you could give us at the less stress life is your feedback. We are paid in podcast reviews. If you enjoyed this or any other episode, please leave us a review in the iTunes store or from your podcast app. Just search for less dressed life as if you're not already subscribed. Click on the banana face image scroll to the bottom where it shows the text of other reviews and write a review while you're there. Hey, make sure you hit. Subscribe for Android or stitcher users. You gotta go to the desktop site and search for less dress life and then scroll down to leave a review. Stitcher doesn't load Apple reviews on their site, so if you want, you can leave a review in both places. Your feedback means a lot to the success of the show. Thanks so much for taking the time to do that. You rock

The Omega 3 family
Why Omega 3 from animal proteins are better for the human body
Symptoms of having Omega-3 deficiency
Why you should get an Omega-3 Index Test