BI is proud to announce that its newest product, Muscle Synergy powdered drink mix, will soon be released. After much trial and error, our lab's product development team managed to formulate a fast-acting, drinkable version of this proven muscle-building formula that actually doesn't taste bad! Look for the new Muscle Synergy to be released this week.

(1) The term "EFA" can be misleading. It stands for "Essential Fatty Acid" and it refers to fatty acids that need to be included in your diet in order for your body to function properly. However, as we'll discuss below, not all of the fatty acids you've seen referred to as "EFAs" are actually essential. Though they may still provide very important health benefits.

(2) EFAs are polyunsaturated. We'll try to keep the chemistry to a minimum here. A fatty acid is essentially a chain of carbon atoms. Some of the carbons in the chain are connected to one another by double bonds. (Imagine 2 people holding on to one another with both hands.) Carbon atoms participating in double bonds are said to be "unsaturated." The omega-3 fatty acids we hear so many great things about are classified as "polyunsaturated" fatty acids (PUFAs) because they contain multiple points of unsaturation in their carbon chains.

(3) Some PUFAs are EFAs. Compared to plants, animals including humans have a limited ability to make PUFAs from scratch. For instance, your body can't make alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) at all. That's why it must be included in your diet and is referred to as an EFA. ALA is an omega-3 PUFA found abundantly in flaxseed oil.

(4) The most important "EFAs" may be EPA and DHA. Your body is believed to be able to convert ALA into the longer-chain PUFAs eicosapentanoic acid (EPA) and possibly docosahexanoic acid (DHA). Technically, therefore, EPA is not an EFA so long as you get enough ALA in your diet. EPA and DHA are abundant in "oily" fish like salmon and mackerel. They're also thought to be responsible for the remarkably positive effects of omega-3 fatty acids on cardiovascular health.

(5) Few of us eat enough ALA, bodybuilders included. This is probably because most of us don't eat enough fresh plant foods. An estimated 7% of calories in the typical American diet come from PUFAs. Of this, only about 10% (i.e. 0.7% of overall calories), is ALA.

(6) Our conversion rates suck. Even if your body can convert ALA into EPA, the conversion rate may be as little as 0.2%. And the conversion of ALA into DHA may be zero, making DHA essential in the diet. According to leading omega-3 fatty acid researchers like William Harris, Ph.D. at the University of South Dakota, even if you drink copious amounts of flax seed oil, you may never achieve the combined levels of EPA and DHA thought to reduce your risk of early death from heart disease (discussed below).

(7) Therefore, most of us need to increase our intake of EPA and DHA. This essentially means eating more oily fish. However, while this may be the most economical way to increase your EPA + DHA intake, researchers like Michael Lucas, Ph.D., R.D. at the University of Laval admit that many people are unable or unwilling to consume enough of these fatty acids from fish alone. What if you don't like fish or have an allergy, for instance?

(8) The health benefits of EPA + DHA are outstanding: As explained by Harris et al.¹, studies using dietary intake questionnaires suggest that death from heart disease can be reduced by a whopping 35% by consuming a modest amount of EPA + DHA, in the range of 250 to 500 mg/day. This reduction, they say, is at least as great as that found in patients taking statin drugs. More recently, de Goede et al.² found that the risk of dying from coronary heart disease (CHD) in individuals with the highest intake of EPA+DHA (~250 mg/day) was reduced by about half compared to those with the lowest intake (~40 mg/day).

"In both retrospective and prospective biomarker studies among generally healthy individuals without known CHD, compared with individuals in the highest quartile of EPA+DHA tissue levels, individuals in the lowest quartile had 10-fold higher risk of SCD [sudden coronary death] independent of other known risk factors. This suggests that findings based on dietary questionnaires alone substantially underestimate the true benefits of [omega-3 long-chain PUFA] on SCD. Furthermore, the magnitudes of risk reduction seen with biomarkers of EPA+DHA are rarely seen in epidemiology -comparable to associations of smoking or asbestos with incidence of lung cancer- and are nearly impossible to explain solely by residual confounding by other factors."¹

(9) Supplementing with EFA Gold is an easy way to get enough EPA + DHA. In fact, each serving of BI's EFA Gold contains 360-396 mg (30-33%) EPA and 240-264 mg (20-22%) DHA. That's a total of 600-660 mg EPA + DHA, well over the level believed to provide cardiovascular benefits.

(10) Don't believe the hype. It's not hard to find advertisements touting krill oil supplements as "superior" to fish oil as a source of EPA and DHA. We spoke to some of the leading researchers on this topic, including some who have compared krill oil and fish oil head to head in clinical studies. One of them, Tia Rains, Ph.D., of Provident Clinical Research, states "Our results suggest that there may be some slight advantage to krill, but the dose-response characteristics of EPA and DHA as they relate to various health benefits are not well understood. My personal view is that krill oil is a good dietary supplement source of EPA/DHA, but has no unequivocal advantage compared to other dietary supplements." Also, krill oil products can be much more expensive per milligram of EPA + DHA.