Greenberg - The omega principle : seafood and the quest for a long life and a healthier planet

American Catch

Four Fish

On a recent July morning I stepped aboard a Jet Ski and set a course for a ship that was about to turn a million fish into medicine. The throttle on my craft was tetchy and tuned for the fine-motor skills of a younger man. Just a bit of juice and varoom! I shot over a wave crest and landed boom! in a trough. A zap of pain shot through my lower back and on up into my shoulders. I barely managed to regain my balance before another wave broke across the bow and threatened to dump me into the Chesapeake Bay.

Blazing out ahead was my guide, a man a few years older than I but perfectly in tune with his machine. Brian Lockwood was known in the fishing towns of coastal Virginia as Jet Ski Brian. My trip with him was to be one of a dozen sorties hed make in the days ahead. Blam blam blam hed go over the wave crests, all week long. He was absolutely loving his job. Actually, he didnt even really consider it a job. Technically, Brian had finished with real work, having mysteriously created and sold something for a retirement-size amount of money.

At a certain point, Jet Ski Brian realized his client had fallen too far behind. He waved, circled back, and rubbed his hand through his thick salt-and-pepper hair.

Takes a little getting used to, he said, and then made a surprisingly squeaky little laugh, like a mouse.

Yeah, I managed through gritted teeth. How much farther?

We-ell lets take a look-see, he said, just the slightest bit of the South in his mid-Atlantic accent. He fingered the cracked iPhone mounted to his transom and zoomed in on a pair of red dots. Im seeing one Omega boat pretty close over here, and another one up off the shoal over there. Im not sure how long this one here is going to be on the menhaden, but we should run into him in an hour or so.

An hour or so? I thought.

But what I said was, Cool.

Off again we tore across the waves, and eventually I dared to hold the throttle steady regardless of the next waves impact. What the hell? Brian had driven one of these things all the way to the Bahamas. Why was he weathering middle age so much better than I? And where was his great enthusiasm coming from? We were objectively similar people. We both had organized our lives around the sea. Id written two whole books about fish, for Christs sake. Yet while Brian seemed to be drawing more and more energy from the miraculous ocean, I felt as if I were slipping beneath its surface.

These kinds of ruminations were what had led me to Jet Ski Brian in the first place. I had sought him out because he promised he could help me witness the extraction of a substance that had lately come to occupy my thoughtsa substance upon which I had unwittingly built an entire career. This substance, this host of molecules, hadnt much concerned me when I was younger. In fact, I often bridled when my older readership mentioned it. They were fixated on it, obsessed, to the exclusion of all other matters relating to the sea. But now as I rounded the corner of my forty-seventh birthday and caught sight of fifty in the middle distance, that substance had started to come more clearly into focus.

It had all begun as a whisper, speaking to me most clearly late at nighta quiet murmur of dread over the nature of middle age and what lay beyond it. It felt as if an entirely new phase had begun, something which I had come to think of as the rind of lifea phase of insomnia and pointless internet browsing leading to dark speculation on the paucity of time remaining and the declining vitality that would accompany this last handful of decades. Late one evening, a search of one of my fish books led me to click on the geographical distribution of that books sales. There was an unnatural rise in the state of Utah. Why were so many people buying fish books in the mountains? A deep Google dive revealed a listing for a trade association in Salt Lake City called GOED: a Global Organization for eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic fatty acids, commonly abbreviated as EPA and DHAthe two most famous members of a family of molecules known collectively as the omega-3s.

More insomnia. Shortness of breath. Fast heartbeats. Slow thinking. Searches for homeopathic cures for depression. Dietary ways of addressing anxiety. Supplements that might shift things. Once more links pointed back to GOED.

I had written about omega-3s in an offhand kind of way. When I wanted to make a point that a particular fish was a good choice, I would often check that fishs omega-3 levels. The ones that had higher numbers I always put on a list of fish to use for what I came to think of as The Standard Article. The article titled Smart, Sustainable Choices from the Sea, subtitle: Our oceans are in trouble, but these five seafoods can help you improve your health and save the planet. Which fish should I eat? Why these, of course. Theyre sustainable. And they are very high in omega-3s.

But what was the omega-3? What did it actually do in the human body? Why was it always mentioned but never satisfactorily explained?

More rumination. A search for the phrase omega-3s may... produced a wide range of speculations. Omega-3s may help prevent coronary heart disease, increase brain volume, boost sperm competitiveness, build muscle in older adults, prevent some forms of depression, help lower risk of type 2 diabetes. Many hypotheses. Many academic papers. Taken collectively, they promised no less than a cure for middle age.