Bill Harris, Ph.D.: Omega-3 fatty acids

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about professionally are how to live longer and how to live better.
I have a complete fascination and obsession with this topic. I practice it professionally, and I've seen firsthand how access to information is basically all people need to make better decisions and improve the quality of their lives.
Curating and sharing this knowledge is not easy, and even before starting the podcast, that became clear to me. The sheer volume of material published in this space is overwhelming. I'm fortunate to have a great team that helps me continue learning and sharing this information with you. To take one example, our show notes are in a league of their own. In fact, we now have a full-time person that is dedicated to producing those, and the feedback has mirrored this. So all of this raises a natural question. How will we continue to fund the work necessary to support this?
As you probably know, the tried and true way to do this is to sell ads, but after a lot of contemplation, that model just doesn't feel right to me for a few reasons. Now, the first and most important of these is trust. I'm not sure how you could trust me if I'm telling you about something when you know I'm being paid by the company that makes it to tell you about it.
Another reason selling ads doesn't feel right to me is because I just know myself. I have a really hard time advocating for something that I'm not absolutely nuts for. So if I don't feel that way about something, I don't know how I can talk about it enthusiastically. So instead of selling ads, I've chosen to do what a handful of others have proved can work over time, and that is to create a subscriber model for my audience.
This keeps my relationship with you both simple and honest.
If you value what I'm doing, you can become a member. In exchange, you'll get the benefits above and beyond what's available for free. It's that simple. It's my goal to ensure that no matter what level you choose to support us at, you will get back more than you give.
So for example, members will receive full access to the exclusive show notes, including other things that we plan to build upon. These are useful beyond just the podcast, especially given the technical nature of many of our shows. Members also get exclusive access to listen to and participate in the regular Ask Me Anything episodes. That means asking questions directly into the AMA portal and also getting to hear these podcasts when they come out. Lastly, and this is something I'm really excited about, I want my supporters to get the best deals possible on the products that I love. And as I said, we're not taking ad dollars from anyone, but instead what I'd like to do is work with companies who make the products that I already love and would already talk about for free and have them pass savings on to you.
Again, the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in, one, the podcast itself, and two, the additional content exclusive for members. I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is Dr. Bill Harris. Bill is an internationally recognized expert on omega-3 fatty acids and how they can benefit patients across a broad range of medical conditions, and particularly with attention to heart disease. He's a professor in the Department of Medicine at the Sanford School of Medicine in the University of South Dakota. He's also the president and CEO of OmegaQuant, which is a company he started about 10 years ago that we spent a little bit of time at the very end talking about. And again, the caveat being, of course, he does have a vested interest in there for a conflict with respect to involvement of his company. But I can say I've known Bill for 10 years, and I know people who have known Bill for much longer than that. And his reputation amongst his peers is really someone who is a very honest broker of the science. He's been the recipient of five NIH grants for the study of the effect of omega-3 fatty acids, particularly EPA DHA on human health. He's published over 300 papers on the topic, and we discussed just a couple of those here, some of the really interesting ones. And he was also the author on two of the American Heart Association scientific statements on fatty acids. He earned his PhD in human nutrition from the University of Minnesota, and did a post-doc in clinical nutrition and lipid metabolism with Bill O'Connor at Oregon Health Sciences. I was introduced to Bill, like I said, probably nine years ago from Tom Dayspring. And this was around the time that I was really searching for insight around the polyunsaturated fats, and in particular EPA and DHA. And since that time, Bill has been a very generous, generous mentor to me with respect to just one of those guys. You send him an email with a simple question, and he responds with a very thoughtful, 600 word response that contains more insight than anything I could have drummed up. We talk about mostly the landscape of polyunsaturated fats here, but this is a great episode. You don't have to know anything going into this episode when it comes to fats. We're gonna explain what saturated fats are, monounsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats, omega-3s, omega-6s. You're gonna come out of this and have a better understanding of this topic than if you went to med school and took a course in this subject matter. I think I'm just gonna leave it at that. The show notes will be very helpful for this episode because some of this stuff, it really makes sense to be able to look at a diagram as we go through it. And of course, as usual for subject matter like this, we're gonna go heavily into studies, so you'll wanna be able to reference those studies and see that. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Bill Harris.