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Smoking was like as bad for you in terms of mortality as having a low omega-3 index.
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This Harvard study identified not eating enough seafood as one of the top six preventable causes of death. Up there
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with not having hypertension, not smoking. It's one of those things where people just don't think about what
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they're not eating, what they're not getting. People with what's called a high omega-3 index,
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which is a lot of omega-3, a lot of omega-3, their omega-3 index would be 8% or higher, that's considered
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high. Compared to a low omega-3 index, that would be 4% or lower. People that had the high omega-3 index, they had a
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five-year increased life expectancy compared to people with a low omega-3 index. All you have to do is essentially
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either eat enough seafood and or supplement with a fish oil supplement. But what was so fascinating about this
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study was that they looked at people that also smoked. They said, "Okay, we know smoking is terrible for your heart.
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We know it's causes early mortality, cancer, and all that, right? What about people that smoke and their omega-3
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index?" There was four groups that were looked at. smokers that have either a high omega-3 index. So, these smokers
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were either supplementing or they were eating a lot of seafood. And then there were smokers with a low omega-3 index
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and they compared them to non-smokers. Everybody knows to avoid smoking. Smoking, if you want to take years off
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your life, if you want to decrease the quality of your life, start smoking right now.
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But the same mortality risk was found in non-smokers who did not have a high omega-3 index. And smokers will say,
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"Oh, great. Now all I have to do is take fish oil and I'll have the same life expectancy as a non-smoker with, you
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know, a low omega-3 index." But of course, the the take-home here is that for those of us that are not smoking,
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but we're not getting enough omega-3 from our diet, that's like smoking in terms of mortality risk. And it's easy
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to fix. You can take a fish oil supplement. You can increase the amount of salmon that you're eating. People
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that supplement with between 1 to two grams of fish oil per day can go from a low omega-3 index to a high omega-3
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index, which is not hard to