Don’t swallow it

It has been a big week if you watch the science I watch. Three studies landed at once. A fish oil meta analysis claimed no cardiac benefit. Maria Blasco’s group linked short telomeres directly to mammalian aging. And a Brain, Behavior, and Immunity study reported that omega 3 supplementation appears to slow at least one biological marker of aging.

Those three areas, the omega 3 case, the telomere case, and the intersection between them, are most of what I work on. So let me walk through what these three studies actually say.

The fish oil “no benefit” headline

The negative paper was a meta analysis. The first rule of meta analyses is garbage in, garbage out. Some of the data sets used in this one go back to the 1980s. Methodology in many of those studies was already suspect by current standards. Every patient had established heart disease. Every patient was on escalating doses of statins, ACE inhibitors, or other prescription cardiology drugs. Not a single patient was on fish oil alone.

The fish oil dose was inadequate, around one capsule a day. Blood levels were not checked. Quality of the supplement used was not reported. A real fish oil trial in 2017 should use 3 to 4 grams per day of EPA and DHA, measure blood levels, and confirm everyone got there. None of that was done.

I do not understand why this paper got such attention while a real Dutch study two years earlier, with the same negative finding but on a more rigorous design, got almost none. The Dutch study was at least honest. This one is worse.

Blasco on short telomeres and aging

My favorite scientist in the telomere field validated again, with new data, the case that short telomeres drive aging and that short telomere measurement is clinically useful. By extension, this strengthens the case for the only published telomerase activator with human data, TA-65, which has been shown to lengthen the shortest telomeres preferentially.

Omega 3 slows telomere loss

The third paper is the interesting one for our purposes. In 2008, Undurti Das wrote a paper proposing that omega 3 fats might act as telomerase activators. In 2010 a study published in JAMA (Farzaneh-Far et al. 2010), the same journal that ran the meta analysis above, said this. “Increased dietary intake of marine omega-3 fatty acids is associated with prolonged survival in patients with coronary heart disease. However, the mechanisms underlying this protective effect are poorly understood. Among this cohort of patients with coronary artery disease, there was an inverse relationship between baseline blood levels of marine omega-3 fatty acids and the rate of telomere shortening, over 5 years.”

In English, higher blood levels of fish oil tracked with longer telomeres. The paper carries the names of Liz Blackburn, the Nobel Laureate in telomere biology, and other heavyweights in the field. So the same journal that ran the negative fish oil meta analysis previously published evidence that fish oil slows telomere shortening in heart patients. The contradiction is the headline that the press did not run.

About the new telomerase activator ads

People keep sending me ads for the latest telomerase activator. The marketing pitch usually claims more activators than I knew existed packed into one capsule. I will say this. I will not claim telomerase activation in humans for a supplement that has not been tested in humans. That has not stopped a parade of companies from doing exactly that.

It is not a lie, technically, to take a list of PubMed petri dish hits and call the resulting capsule a telomerase activator. It is a stretch and a misrepresentation. Spraying a compound over a Petri dish is not the same as a human being swallowing a pill and the molecule reaching the target tissue. Pharmacokinetics is a real thing, and it is mostly what separates lab work from clinical effect.

I call my Telomere Edge Packs a “telomere support” supplement. They were built around my reading and my clinical experience, not around a claim I have not earned. They are not TA-65. Nothing is, because nothing else has the long, thorough human testing record TA-65 has.

What to do tomorrow morning

• Take your fish oil. Real dose. Check your omega 3 index.
• If you are looking at any telomerase activator, ask whether it has been studied in humans, at what dose, for how long, and with what outcome measure.
• Do not confuse a petri dish result with a clinical effect.

Dr Dave