Hello and welcome to another episode of Sigma Nutrition Radio. This is episode 418 of the podcast. My name is Danny Lennon and with me is Alan Flanagan.

Alan, how are you, sir? I'm good. I'm trying to figure out how it's December 2021 already,

which freaks me out a little bit because the last time I blinked, it was April.

So yeah, here we are. I have my first mince pie. I waited until, I waited until December 1st.

No, there were no Christmas talk today. I refuse to participate in any talk of Christmas.

So we've got a lot to discuss in this particular episode.

I'm looking forward to this one. And it's a topic that often brings up quite interesting debate,

I think, and there's some really interesting points to dive through. We're essentially going to be

looking at this idea of whether we should be consuming a direct dietary source of DHA, the long chain omega-3 fatty acid.

And there's a number of reasons why I think this is a particularly interesting issue.

So, of course, with the omega-3 fatty acid, and we'll get into some of our definitions and so in a moment,

but we know that we can get that from marine sources of food, so things like fatty fish,

or then things like algae or seaweed, maybe to a lesser extent.

But one of the reasons why we tend to see benefits to consumption of those types of foods

centers around its content of

EPA and DHA, these two long chain omega-3 fatty acids. And then we have the relatively clear

data, I would say, both from nutritional epidemiology and then with randomized control trials

of a suggestive benefit for consumption of those. Now, today we're

going to be focusing on DHA, but given that we tend to see this data showing health benefit,

then the question arises, well, what about people who are not consuming these foods that

contain DHA, so i.e. someone who doesn't consume any fish or someone on a vegetarian or a

vegan diet is not going to consume these sources directly. And then that gets us to, well,

...