Fish Oil is Anabolic

Most people think fish oil is just about heart health. Long chained omega-3s thin the blood a bit, balance out the inflammation caused by a lopsided omega-6 intake, and appear to improve lipids in people with heart disease. And people with a higher omega-3 index in their red blood cells do have better outcomes. That’s what gets all the attention.

But because so many people treat fish oil like an unalloyed good treatment for heart disease, you get people recommending massive amounts that have never really been shown to be safe which provokes an understandable counter-response. And so you have a lot of people in the dissident health world over the last half decade, particularly those aligned with the late Ray Peat who totally rejected fish fats. Not only do they avoid fish oil, which I can understand, but they also avoid any dense dietary source of whole-food omega-3s like wild-caught salmon, mackerel, sardines or other fatty fish.

This is a huge mistake. We’ve gone way too far in the other direction. If you don’t get any long-chained omega-3s in your diet, you’re inhibiting a potent anabolic agent for increasing muscle hypertrophy and performance.

One of the biggest problems with aging is that your muscle cells stop responding to dietary protein as well as they used to. It’s a kind of “protein resistance.” You can partially overcome it by loading up on animal protein like whey isolate, meat, or eggs to really saturate the pathways, but it also helps to reduce the protein resistance. That’s where long chain omega-3s come in.

In an older trial, older adults receiving 1.86 g EPA and 1.5 g DHA each day saw increases in muscle protein synthesis in response to protein feeding. Their “protein resistance” was reversing.

Another study using the same protocol only in younger adults saw similar results. Their muscle protein synthesis in response to amino acid feeding increased by 50%. Pair that with actual strength training and you’ll likely see even bigger results.

A recent study even put obese adults on either diet with 4 capsules of krill oil (for a total of 764 mg of EPA and 376 mg of DHA, plus choline and astaxanthin) or a diet enriched in some other seed oil as a control. They then restricted their calories—eating normally one day and then consuming 500 calories the next—over an eight-week period, while also consuming either the krill oil or the seed oil.

Those receiving krill oil lost almost all fat mass and almost no lean mass. On average, they lost 0.2 kg of lean mass and about 5 pounds of fat mass. The other group lost the same amount of weight, but a good portion was lean mass. To show that it was actual muscle mass being retained or lost, the krill oil eaters also retained their grip strength while the control group lost grip strength.

Some might say, “Well, that wasn’t controlled. The diets were all over the place.” To that I say, absolutely, and that’s what makes it so useful. Across a broad range of random diets that obese people like to eat, just adding krill oil helped everyone.

That’s powerful, because that’s a real-life result that applies to the way diets work in the real world: uncontrolled.

And it didn’t take much. Just about a gram total of long chained omega-3s was enough to make all the difference. There’s where I think even the people who fear all PUFA, even the kind and amount found in seafood, should pay extra attention. The amount of EPA/DHA found to be effective across most fish oil and anabolic marker studies ranges between one and three grams a day.

You can get a gram of long-chain omega-3s from eating a fillet of sockeye salmon. You can get a gram from eating a dozen Pacific oysters on the half shell. You can get over a gram of omega-3s in the most concentrated, bioavailable form from eating 8 ounces of green-lipped mussels. It really doesn’t take much.

Okay, so what about the anti-fish fat studies people cite?

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