Hi, it's Mark Sisson from Marksdailyapple.com.

Enjoy this audio narration of a recent Marksdailyapple.com post by Tina Lehman.

Subscribe to this podcast channel so you don't miss anything from the blog

and read my daily posts on Living Awesome and much more at Marksdailyapple.com.

How ancestry might inform your fat choices.

One of the more exciting developments over the past few years has been the explosion in population

genetics research.

People are a diverse lot, and even though we're all people who essentially

want the same things out of life, and we're working with the same basic machinery, there's a lot

of wiggle room. It's not just information for curiosity's sake. The information researchers are

uncovering about human ancestry can have real ramifications for how said humans should eat.

A couple years ago, I wrote a post laying out a few guidelines for using your personal ancestry to inform your diet.

Today I'm going to talk about another one, polyunsaturated fat metabolism.

For years, it's been common knowledge in alternative health circles that most people just aren't very good at converting

the omega-3s, ALA, in plant foods into the long-chained omega-3s found in seafood, DHA and EPA,

and that everyone should just eat fish for their omega-3s.

This remains solid advice, but the reasoning needs a little tweaking.

It turns out that the genes that encode the proteins responsible for conversion of ALA into

DHA and EPA, as well as linoleic acid into arachidonic acid, known as fads, have

a couple variants.

Some variants make conversion less effective, and some make conversion more effective.

Furthermore, the distribution of these variants vary across populations.

...