The Most Important Daily Habits For Health & Longevity - Dr Rhonda Patrick - #750

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Rhonda Patrick. She's a biomedical scientist, researcher and a podcaster. Determining the best actions to take for enhancing our health and extending our lives has grown more challenging. There are an unlimited number of wellness approaches at our disposal. Thankfully, Dr. Patrick has dedicated her entire professional life to identifying the most evidence-based strategies for improving our health and longevity. Expect to learn if low omega-3s are worse for you than smoking cigarettes, what Rhonda's thoughts are on vaping and nicotine, the best foods to boost your metabolism, the once-a-week workout that can de-age your heart by 20 years, how to get the benefits of heat exposure if you don't have a sauna, the terrifying health risks of being too sedentary and much more. This was a lot of fun. I've been a massive fan of Rhonda's for a long time and it's nice to see someone who's focusing on the exercise side as well as the diet side. There seems to be this obsession with diet as the only thing that you can manipulate. Meanwhile, all of the exercise protocols kind of get forgotten about. And Rhonda is definitely in both camps. So I think there is tons and tons to take away from this. Plus I've actually started incorporating some of the training protocols into my weekly routine, which is both painful, savage and hopefully going to make me die later. So I'll report back in 80 years. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr Rhonda Patrick.
Low omega-3s, worse than smoking cigarettes.

**Rhonda Patrick** (1:52)
I don't know that they're worse. So omega-3 fatty acids are essential for many things. And I think you're referring to one specific study that came out of Dr. Bill Harris' group. He's the head of the Fatty Acid Research Institute, and he's actually the pioneer of the omega-3 index test, which is how you should measure your omega-3 levels. They're measured in our red blood cells, rather than what you'll 99% of the time find if you get an omega-3 test, it's plasma levels. So red blood cells take about 120 days to turn over, so it's a long-term marker of your omega-3. Whereas if you go and get an omega-3 plasma test, it's kind of like, well, what did I eat for dinner in the last week, right? So you may have had a bunch of salmon, but maybe you don't usually eat salmon. So anyways, the omega-3 index is a way to measure omega-3 levels. And he had done a study looking at omega-3 levels and what's called all-cause mortality. So people dying from all sorts of non-accidental causes. Cardiovascular disease is always at the top of the list because that's pretty much what everyone's dying of. That's like the number one cause of death in most developed countries. And so he was looking at all-cause mortality and correlating that with the omega-3 index, which essentially is measuring omega-3 fatty acid levels. And what he found was that people that have a low omega-3 index, so that would be 4% or less, and then comparing it to people that had a high omega-3 index, so that would be 8% or higher. So people that had the high omega-3 index had a five-year increased life expectancy compared to people with the low. Now, people in the United States on average have about a 4-5% omega-3 index. So it's pretty standard, I would say, in terms of like what people in the US have in terms of their omega-3 versus Japan, where they eat a lot of seafood. Their omega-3 index is like 10%.
And they have a five-year increased life expectancy, by the way, compared to people in the United States. So what he also did, him and his colleagues, looked at, they stratified the data and looked at other factors. Physical activity, you know, BMI, smoking. And this is where it got super interesting because, and I just, the graph of this data does it like more justice, you know, because you can visually see it. But he looked at all-cause mortality. And people that like lived the longest were, of course, the high omega-3 index with no smoking, right? So like non-smokers, they had the longest life expectancy. And then people with the lowest life expectancy were smokers with a low omega-3 index. But then when he looked at people that smoked, but had a high omega-3 index, either they were getting a lot of fish or supplementing, they had the same life expectancy as people with low omega-3 but didn't smoke. So in other words, having a low omega-3 index was like smoking with respect to all-cause mortality. And that's, you know, and of course, I get all the smokers out there going, oh, so all I have to do is supplement with omega-3. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, that's the wrong way to think about it. You know, I think most people now know smoking is terrible for your health. And it goes back to this idea, this framework that I like to think about nutrition, which is what do we need, right? Instead of like always focusing on what to avoid. Because if you focus on what to avoid, you still may not be getting what you need to run your metabolism, to run, you know, neurotransmitter synthesis and all of that. So omega-3 fatty acids are hugely important for many things, and we could talk hours for that. But with respect to smoking, it's really quite, you know, it's kind of astounding when you just look at that graph, and they're like overlaid, where you're like, oh wow, nonsmokers with omega-3 are living as long as smokers with high omega-3.