Healthy Living Blog: Stop Taking Fish Oil: What Your Cells Actually Need Instead with Jessica Kane Berman

https://ift.tt/W9F6Q3f

What if the supplement you’ve been taking for your brain, your heart, and your inflammation for years has actually been working against you?

I know how that sounds. Fish oil is one of the most recommended supplements out there, and I’ve told my own community to take it more times than I can count. So when my guest on this episode told me to stop, I did not expect to agree with her by the end of the conversation. But the science she walked me through completely changed how I think about it.

This episode is about more than fish oil, though. It’s about a bigger question I couldn’t stop thinking about afterward: what if your hormones are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do, and the real problem is somewhere else entirely?

I brought on Jessica Kane Berman, co-owner and chief brand officer of BodyBio, a third generation family owned company that has been researching cellular health since the 1980s, decades before “cellular” became a wellness buzzword. I want to be upfront that I’ve been a customer of BodyBio for a long time and use several of their products myself. I actually reached out to Jessica directly because I wanted to understand the science behind what I’d been taking, and this conversation went so much deeper than I expected.

Why I’m Telling You to Stop Taking Fish Oil

I’ll get into the full explanation shortly, but I don’t want to bury the headline. Jessica’s position is that most fish oil on the market is processed in ways that leave it rancid and oxidized by the time it reaches the bottle, and that even a fresh, high quality fish oil is only giving your body the lower level fatty acids, EPA and DHA, rather than the parent essential fatty acids your cells are actually built from. Her recommendation instead is to get EPA and DHA from real, high quality fish, and to support your cells with the fats they’re actually starving for. I’ll walk through exactly what those are further down, but understanding why this shift matters starts with understanding what your hormones actually need to work in the first place.

It’s Not Just About More Hormones

Here’s the reframe that changed how I think about all of this. Hormones are messengers. But a messenger only matters if the message actually lands somewhere. In the body, that landing spot is the cell membrane, the protective bubble surrounding every single one of your roughly 32 trillion cells.

When that membrane breaks down, which happens naturally with age and accelerates in the toxic, processed environment most of us live in today, hormones can’t dock properly. That means the hormones your body makes, plus anything you add through HRT, testosterone, or estrogen, simply cannot do their job efficiently.

This is why so many women start hormone replacement therapy and still don’t feel right. They’re still foggy. Still bloated. Still waking up at strange hours and not recovering. It’s not that the hormones failed. It’s that the systems responsible for delivering, processing, and clearing those hormones were already compromised.

The Three Systems Doing the Real Work

According to Jessica, there are three foundational systems that determine whether hormones actually function once they’re in your body:

• Your cell membranes, where hormones are received (think brain function)
• Your liver, where hormones are processed
• Your gut, where the waste products get cleared out

Picture each cell as a tiny house. The walls are the membrane, and as we age those walls get thinner, more permeable, and less able to keep the good stuff in and the bad stuff out. This is happening across every system in your body, including your skin, your liver, and your gut, but it shows up loudest in brain function because so many midlife symptoms get filed under brain fog.

Your Brain Needs Fat, and Not the Fat You Think

About 60 percent of your brain is fat. Specifically, it relies on healthy fats to build and protect those cell membranes, along with the mitochondria living inside each cell. For most of our lives we get a reasonable amount of these fats from food. Then perimenopause hits, and according to Jessica, the numbers involved in producing these fats drop off a cliff. By the time a woman reaches menopause, that supply has often bottomed out entirely, which helps explain why brain fog and memory issues intensify so sharply during this transition.

This isn’t a disease state. It’s a nutrient deficiency happening at the cellular level, at a moment when your body’s own ability to compensate has declined.

Your Liver Is a Trash Truck Stuck in Traffic

This might be my favorite analogy from the entire conversation. Bile is your body’s trash truck. Your liver makes it, your gallbladder stores it, and its job is to haul used hormones, old cholesterol, and toxins out of the body.

When the gallbladder gets full and the liver can’t produce enough fresh bile, that trash truck gets stuck in a traffic jam. Nothing moves. This is what’s really behind the phrase “stagnant liver,” and it’s far more common than most of us realize. Struggling to digest eggs or fats, dealing with floating stools, or having a family history of gallbladder issues can all be signs this system is backed up. So can elevated liver enzymes on a routine blood panel, worsening brain fog, poor gut motility, fatigue, and disrupted sleep, even when nothing else on paper looks wrong.

The encouraging part is that this system responds well to targeted nutritional support rather than an overhaul. Two nutrients came up repeatedly in this conversation for supporting bile flow: a bile acid used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries, and a specific phospholipid that can increase bile production significantly. More on that phospholipid in a moment, because it turns out to be one of the most important nutrients most of us have never heard of.

Your Gut Is the Clearance System, Not Just a Probiotic Problem

We’ve been taught that gut health means popping a probiotic, eating more fermented food, or doing an occasional cleanse. Jessica’s take is more nuanced. Adding probiotics without knowing what your specific gut ecosystem needs is a bit like planting a tree in a rainforest and hoping it’s the right one for that environment.

What’s actually happening as we age is that the gut lining thins, dysbiosis becomes more common, and the whole clearance pathway backs up right alongside the liver. Overuse of antibiotics, herbicides, pesticides, and general environmental exposure only compound the problem. The result is a gut that struggles to clear out what the liver has processed, which sends everything back into circulation instead of out of the body.

The Phospholipid Most Women Have Never Heard Of

The nutrient tying all three of these systems together is a phospholipid called phosphatidylcholine, often shortened to PC. It makes up roughly half of the protective membrane surrounding every cell in your body and a significant portion of the fat structure of your brain. It’s also used medically as an IV therapy for heart conditions, alcohol toxicity, and certain overdose situations because of how effectively it supports cellular repair.

Traditionally we got PC from foods like egg yolks, red meat, and soy. If you’ve cut back on any of those, whether for health, ethical, or dietary reasons, you may be getting far less of this nutrient than your body actually needs, especially as environmental toxins and microplastics work to break down the very cell membranes PC is meant to protect.

What to Take Instead of Fish Oil

This is the part of the interview that genuinely surprised me, and I’ve done hundreds of these conversations. The prevailing wisdom is that everyone should be taking fish oil for brain health, heart health, and inflammation. Jessica’s perspective challenges that directly.

EPA and DHA, the two fatty acids found in fish oil, matter, but they sit lower on the chain of essential fatty acids. The fats your cells and brain are actually built from are linoleic acid and alpha-linolenic acid, the true parent essential fatty acids. Most commercial fish oil, according to Jessica, is also processed in ways that leave these extremely delicate, easily oxidized oils rancid by the time they reach the bottle, which can do more harm than good rather than deliver the anti-inflammatory benefits people are expecting.

Her recommendation isn’t to fear fish. Eating whole fish, and specifically high quality options like caviar, remains one of the best ways to get EPA and DHA. The distinction is between eating the actual food versus relying on a supplement that may already be degraded before you take it. For the parent essential fatty acids your cells actually need, she points to a balanced blend of those fats directly, paired with the phospholipid PC covered above. Together, those two are what she takes daily in place of a standard fish oil supplement.

What This Means for Perimenopause and Menopause Symptoms

One of the more validating points in this conversation is the idea that perimenopause and menopause are not malfunctions. They are natural transitions that become significantly harder to move through when the body is dealing with what Jessica calls toxic overload, a backed up liver, a leaky gut, and cell membranes that can no longer support the hormones passing through them.

That reframe matters. It shifts the conversation from “something is wrong with me” to “these three systems need the right raw materials to keep up with what my body is asking of them.” That is an entirely different, and far more empowering, starting point.

The Takeaway

If you’ve been doing everything “right,” staying on HRT, eating clean, exercising, and still not feeling like yourself, this conversation offers a different lens to look through. It’s not necessarily about adding more hormones. It’s about making sure the systems responsible for receiving, processing, and clearing those hormones are actually working.

Supporting your cell membranes, keeping bile flowing through the liver, and helping your gut clear out what it needs to clear are the foundational pieces that let hormones, whatever form they come in, finally do their job.

I go deep on the exact nutrients Jessica and I discussed, including exactly what she recommends taking instead of fish oil and the specific products I personally use, in the full episode and show notes. If you’ve been taking fish oil for years without questioning it, or chasing symptom relief without addressing what’s happening underneath the surface, this is worth a listen.

 

Products mentioned in interview: 

• TUDCA: Liver Health Supplement
• BodyBio PC (Phospholipid Complex)
• Butyrate: Gut Health Supplement

For all, go to https://bodybio.com/NATALIEJILL and use code NATALIEJILL to save 

 

The contents of the Midlife Conversations podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult with a qualified healthcare provider. Some episodes of Midlife Conversations may be sponsored by products or services discussed during the show. The host may receive compensation for such advertisements or if you purchase products through affiliate links mentioned on this podcast.

 

from Natalie Jill Fitness https://ift.tt/GCcNUIr
by Natalie Jill