Patrick Holford: How Vit B and Omega 3 impact the brain

[Music] the brain is 60 fat but if you actually go close up onto brain cells um you're looking at the structural fat uh you know is really what's what your brain is made out of and most of it is omega-3 and very specifically a type of Omega-3 called DHA don't cause the hexanoic acid it's part of Omega-3 part of fish pot of fish oils so first of all if you imagine you know a brain cell it's got a very very important layer or membrane or skin if you like which is which is through which all the signals you know all the communication is happening and uh it has to be sort of water resistant in other words it has to be waterproof and that waterproofness is made by attaching these stringy things which is the omega-3 DHA to Blobby things called phospholipids phospholipids come from fish and eggs mainly and the stringy things come you know mainly from marine food there's none there's no DHA in any plant food now the thing is to put those bits together uh you it's done if you like buy a glue which kind of involves B vitamins I mean I'm paraphrasing here because there is a process called methylation and when you're not able to do methylation you can't build brain cells and if you can't do methylation your blood level of homocysteine there's a blood test goes up and particularly B12 B6 and folate folate think foliage think greens and so on but B12 again is not in any plant Foods it's how many animal Foods so you've got to have the combo and I I'd kind of like to explain a little I mean B12 is very rich in Marine Foods too but just to kind of explain the magic of this in David Smith's first study just giving the B vitamins uh he got 52 percent less brain shrinkage he then went back to the participants in the trial these are all people with pre-dementia and he looked at their omega-3 status he didn't give them fish oils he just looked at the blood level of Omega-3 and those were the third lowest omega-3 had no benefit from the B vitamins right and those were the third highest omega-3 had 73 percent less brain shrinkage and much better effect so if you imagine you've got to have b vitamins and omegas to build your brain you could have all the omegas in the world but if you don't have enough B vitamins they won't work you could have all the B vitamins in the world if you don't have enough omegas they wouldn't work so you know to catch the chase a big study in Holland um which are given B vitamins got a modest effect went back to their results and sure enough they found the people with a high omega-3 in their blood had a much bigger effect than another very good study in Sweden which had found minimal effect from the Omega-3s went back and looked at the participants level of homocysteine in the blood low means good B vitamin status and they found yes those with low homocysteine massive effect from the Omega-3 foreign

Channel: Zena le Roux

Views: 1,390

Keywords:

Id: 6ux4arkwOn8

Length: 3min 18sec (198 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 13 2023