| Morning, everyone. You know how they release those studies showing links between certain foods and heart disease, cancer, and early mortality? And everyone freaks out, and your coworker tags you on a Facebook post linking to some news report about it? Then you go read the study and realize that it's based on Food Frequency Questionnaires, or FFQs, which ask people to remember what they ate weeks, months, even years ago. There's a better version of those studies: red blood cell fatty acid analyses. Rather than ask people what they ate and force them to try to remember their weekly menu from months back, in RBC-FA studies they measure red blood cell fatty acid concentrations and plot them against health outcomes. The cool thing about RBC fatty acid measurements is that they are objective. You can't lie about them. You can't forget them. They simply are, and then you measure them and get the answer. Another cool thing about RBC fatty acids is that they reflect what people eat. Not always directly—some fatty acids make it into red blood cells in a roundabout manner—but often the fatty acids you eat show up directly in the RBCs. And even when it's indirect, when the fatty acid in your RBC doesn't come from the fatty acid you eat, you can still estimate what people did to achieve that FA concentration.
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So let's look at the latest study to come out using RBC fatty acids. This time, they looked at how these fatty acids were related to a person's risk of mortality. Which fatty acids in the red blood cells did they look at? They looked at omega-3 index, which measures the percentage of RBC fatty acids that are omega-3. The more fatty fish and other sources of omega-3s you eat, the higher your omega-3 index. They looked at myristic acid, a marker of dairy fat consumption. It's also found in red meat and coconut fat. They looked at behenic acid, the best source of which is peanuts or macadamia nuts. But little is directly consumed. Most RBC behenic acid comes from the elongation of stearic acid that we've eaten (a saturated fat found in meat and cocoa fat). They looked at palmitoleic acid, which is actually a marker of de novo lipogenesis (the creation of fat from excess carbohydrate intake and an over-burdened liver). What happened? Higher omega-3 index (higher omega-3 intake, more fish consumption) meant a longer life. More myristic acid (more dairy, meat, coconut consumption) meant a longer life. More behenic acid (either more peanuts and mac nuts, but probably more stearic acid from meat and chocolate) meant a longer life. More palmitoleic acid (from too many carbs and an overwhelmed liver creating fat from said carbs) meant a shorter life. That still doesn't prove causation, but it's way more interesting than one of those studies using Food Frequency Questionnaire data. Do you still get worried when you read those FFQ studies? Does a study like this one make you feel any better? Let me know in the comment section of New and Noteworthy. | 
