67. Critical Role of Seafood in Brain Evolution & Human Intelligence | Prof. Michael Crawford

DHA is an omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid essential for human brain development. This interview with Professor Michael Crawford covers the evolution of the human brain, the role of DHA & marine food web, the consequences of inadequate DHA for human health,  how to ensure ongoing abundant access to seafood through marine agriculture to preserve the cognitive function of humanity, and much more.

Prof. Crawford is a UK researcher and undisputed world expert on DHA. He lives in London and personally consumes seafood 5x per week.

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TIMESTAMPS

00:12:13 Evolution of DHA in Vision
00:27:28 Evolution of Human Brain and DHA
00:43:37 Evolutionary Importance of Marine Food
00:53:13 Possible Reason for Evolution of Upright Stance
01:01:55 Importance of DHA in Cognitive Health
01:10:58 Sea-Based Agriculture for Improved Mental Health
01:22:25 Marine Food Web Importance for Humanity

Follow PROF. CRAWFORD
Book: The Shrinking Brain https://bitly.ws/3ghyx 
Research Profile: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/michael.crawford
Scientific Papers
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=michael+a+crawford
-  Docosahexaenoic Acid Explains the Unexplained in Visual Transduction: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/25/11/1520 

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DISCLAIMER: The content in this podcast is purely for informational purposes and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast or YouTube channel. Do not make medication changes without first consulting your treating clinician.

#DHA #omega3  #docosohexanoicacid #brain #humanevolution #seafood #lowcarb #ketogenicdiet

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 4:13

Professor Michael Crawford is a UK researcher and undisputed world expert on the omega-3 fatty acid, docosahexaenoic acid, commonly known as DHA.

Speaker 1: 4:23

He has dedicated his entire professional career and more than 60 years of work to this topic and has proven the irreplaceable role of the marine food web containing DHA and other essential trace minerals in the cognitive evolution of our species. In this interview, we discuss the ancestral formation of the nervous system more than 600 billion years ago in the oceans, the difference in brain sizes between land-based and sea-based mammals, the role that DHA is playing in this process, what happens when humans are DHA deficient, and much, much more. We end on the exciting and optimistic idea of marine agriculture, which aims to foster growth of fish and seafood populations by cultivating reefs, seagrasses and other marine habitats. This is possibly the most important podcast I've released on nutrition because of the profound consequences of DHA on the cognitive development of unborn babies. I hope this podcast provides an understanding of how critical this dietary factor and seafood is for your health. Professor Michael Corbyn, thank you for talking to me on the Regenerative Health Podcast.

Speaker 2: 5:41

Okay, my pleasure.

Speaker 1: 5:43

So you are what I've called in the past the Pope of DHA.

Speaker 2: 5:51

Oh, I don't know about that.

Speaker 1: 5:52

Your pedigree, your research pedigree, your experience about the fundamentals of this highly important compound for human health is unparalleled. So quickly, give us your professional background and your credentials so people can understand how deep your depth of knowledge is on this subject and how long you've been thinking about the problem.

Speaker 2: 6:17

depth of knowledge is on this subject and how long you've been thinking about the problem. Well, I did my doctorate at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School and then pushed off to Africa to help with the establishment of the new hospital at Malaga, the McCarrery College Medical School, and that opened my eyes to the importance of nutrition, which I hadn't really thought about before. And when I came back to the United Kingdom in 1965, all the rage was dietary fats and heart disease and things like that. That was a big thing. Was dietary fats and heart disease and things like that? That was a big thing.

Speaker 2: 7:03

So when I was in Africa, I spent my time really looking at the non-communicable diseases and possibility of nutritional involvements in them and published quite a lot about that. So when I got back to London, the question was I was given a brand new laboratory it's the Nuffield Institute of Comparative Medicine then and the question was what do we do? Well, it was clear that fats were important, but everybody was working on cardiovascular disease and suddenly a sort of a spark came up where the brain's made of fat. So what about studying the brain? So that's how it all started.

Speaker 1: 7:37

And were you a practicing clinician, were you seeing patients as a medical doctor as well as research?

Speaker 2: 7:42

No, no, no, I'm a pure scientist. I'm a chemical pathologist. I'm a fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists.

Speaker 1: 7:52

And so give us a background of what was happening at that time. So people had been focusing on heart disease, but someone had noticed that the brain is obviously very rich in fats. So what was the state of the art in terms of the scientific knowledge when you started in this field?

Speaker 2: 8:09

Well, pretty well none. Sven Holm in Stockholm had published some data on the fatty acid composition of the brain, which was quite unusual, and so really what occurred to me was the fact that the brain is made of fat 60% fat and the rest is water, protein and minerals and things like that. So fat was really the important thing as far as the brain was concerned, and what Sven at home had identified was that there were essential fatty acids important in the brain. So, having sort of seen in Africa nature's wonderful and great last experiment in mammalian evolution in all the different animals, the question that occurs to me was why is all these big animals and small animals? Why is brain size so very variable from one species to the next? And so what we did was to conduct a study on the brains of some 36 mammalian species, and we looked at the liver as well, looked at the liver fats as well, to establish a relationship between the animal and its sort of background diet, so to speak. That's what the liver more or less represented and the brains, and the interesting thing was that the liver fatty acids were just all over the place, all over the place and ranging from 0.5% of the phospholipids right up to even 40% in one case. So that was strange and was consistent with the sort of way that the animals behaved from carnivores to herbivores, and big and small animals, and so on. However, the interesting thing was that whenever we looked at the brain, the composition was the same behave from carnivores to herbivores and big and small animals, and so on. However, the interesting thing was that whenever we looked at the brain, the composition was the same. It was pretty identical. I mean, it was given to a few percent, but essentially the profile was consistent across 36 mammalian species. What was different in the species was, of course, the extent to which the brain had evolved, the size of the brain in relation to the body, and it suddenly struck me that we had high proportions of tricotorhexanoic acids in all 36, and it was.

Speaker 2: 10:58

The question was where did this come from and could it be synthesized? And when you looked at the herbivorous animals that ate a lot of of the precursors, the parent fatty acids, of both the omega-6 and the omega-3, two families of the essential fatty acids when you looked at the precursors, the precursors were all over the place and what was interesting was that in the big, fast-growing animal, the amount of DHA in the liver was very tiny. Instead, the immediate precursor, which has only five double bonds, the cosahexaenoic acid, as its name implies, has six double bonds. Eight double bonds is interrupted by a methylene group. So the question was were these animals? Why weren't these animals able to make DHA?

Speaker 2: 11:59

And when you looked at small mammals like rabbits, rats, hyraxes and so on, they had lots of DHA. A squirrel has actually a bigger brain relative to its brain's body size. Compared to us, it has about 2.5%, and we're sort of knocking it to about 1.9%. But when you get up to these big animals like rhinoceros or something, it's smaller than 0.1%. And so it occurred to us that actually what was going on was that the velocity of body growth was outstripping the ability of the animals to make DHA from the parent precursors. So what we did to test this was to look at the.

Speaker 2: 12:51

Let me backtrack.

Speaker 2: 12:51

What it really meant was that the ability to synthesize DHA was pretty well rate-limiting.

Speaker 2: 12:59

And so what Andrew Sinclair and I did was to use a double-labeled experiment in which we took tritium-labeled and carbon-14-labeled alpha-linolenic acids a precursor and DHA separately labeled, and fed them both together to rat pups, popping it into their mouth. So it went into their stomachs. And then we looked at the brains and what we saw was that the preformed isotope for DHA, the preformed isotope, was incorporated into the growing brain of the rat pup at an order of magnitude greater efficiency than it was for the synthesis from the precursor of an aniline acid. So that effectively showed why these big, large mammals with fast-growing bodies, they got all the rhinoceros achieves a one-ton body weight after four years of growth and it gets all the protein needs for that huge velocity of body growth from the simplest food on the planet, namely grass. So protein was not the problem, but the fats obviously were. The effects were very clearly that these essential fats, and gicose hexanoic acid in particular, was a limiting factor so far as brain growth and health was concerned. So that's how it all started.

Speaker 1: 14:46

Let's keep pulling on that very fascinating thread, because I think this is the crux of your work and the clinical of the brain is going to be a function of how much preformed DHA, this really important omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid the organism can accumulate from its environment, which obviously means from its food web, from the food environment that exists. So talk a bit more about these different animals and perhaps their locations or their dietary habits as related to their brain growth.

Speaker 2: 15:22

Right, right, right. We studied all of these sort of land-based mammals like giraffes, zebras, heartbeasters, buffalos, things like that, monkeys, hyraxes, baboons. We studied all those sorts of animals and the point really was, when you compared them with a marine mammal, let's take a body size for body size. Let's take the dolphin and compare it with a lion they're both carnivores. And compare it with a lion they're both carnivores. The lion has about 350-360 grams of brain or cranial capacity. The dolphin has 1.7, compared to 340.

Speaker 2: 16:16

That was a complete giveaway demonstrating the absolute importance of the marine food web in developing the brain. You have to understand, of course. It's so logical because the brain evolved in the sea in the first place 500, 600 million years ago, when it all started, and the only thing that it could use was marine nutrients. There's nothing else. There's no land or very little, to speak of. A lot more water than we have today and the formation of the brain all down from the. We studied all of this. Other people like Nicholas Bazan, gene Anderson and so on and so forth contributed to this and if you take, for example, the Kefla Pots, their beginning, their brains, eyes, looked very much like our eyes and they date back to about 450 million years ago. The fish, the amphibia, the reptiles, the mammals, the birds and ourselves. We all basically have the same chemistry. It's absolutely astonishing it's been conserved. Dha has been conserved in the signaling systems of the brain for over 500 million years.

Speaker 1: 17:48

The implications of that seem to be pretty profound, because it really implies that Mother Nature found something that worked and ran with that design specification from that 600, 500 million year point onwards. It also implies that no matter what animal you are, you need this key fatty acid to develop these higher-order cognitions. So maybe for really to get down into the nitty-gritty, what were the conditions of the development of DHA, maybe in these dinoflagellate organisms all that time ago?

Speaker 2: 18:34

Well, what do you mean? How did it all you mean? How did it all start? How did it all start? Well, basically, we have a theory about this, of course. Um, a lot of it is speculation, because you can't go back 600 million years and and study what's going on at the time. But we have a pretty good idea about what went on, because the dinoflagellate is a little tiny single cell system which has been used, actually in fermentation batch to extract the DHA from it. It's rich in DHA and, interestingly enough Interestingly enough it has in its phospholipids a di-DHA. The phospholipids have two links to fatty acids in them and usually the one in the middle the SN2 position is so-called has a DHA in it, and the other one has a saturated fat. But there are molecules in the dinoflatllate which have two DHAs in them. This is most unusual and you find it in your retina and my retina today.

Speaker 2: 19:48

Now we're talking about something similar to the dinoflagellate that lived right at the beginning of the Vendian, when we had the transition from the prokaryotes to eukaryotes, to the air-breathing animal systems, and what really is most likely to have happened is that something the dinoflagellate or something like the dinoflagellate was converting solar radiation to electricity, and that's really how it all started, because that's what's going on in your eyeball. The whole photoreceptor system is converting, effectively, photons into electricity, but it's not using DHA to do that. I'll come back to that in a minute. So, going back to 600, 500 million years ago in the Bendian, what would have happened is that DHA would have absorbed in the ultraviolet and there was no ozone layer and there was no ozone layer. So something like retinol, which we used for our photoreceptor, would have not worked at that. It would have been simply blown away by the strong outer.

Speaker 2: 21:22

So what happened then was that we had excuse me, I've got a rabbit in my throat the ultraviolet radiation would be absorbed by an electron in GHA which would be activated into the escape mode. So you then have these electrons and they would run down the body of the animal and cause all the hairs to wiggle. You know, if you put your finger in an electric plug and switch it on, yeah, you jump. And so what we'd effectively have done would make the thing move. And where would it move? It moved towards the surface, where the light was, and that's where the food was. So that's the vision of what was happening right at the very early stage, with powerful ultraviolet radiation zapping the planet.

Speaker 2: 22:21

Now the next thing that would happen is that you started getting multicellular systems evolving as multicellular systems evolved with this electrical force. Almost certainly that led to the evolution of a nervous system, which would lead ultimately to the evolution of the brain. So that's how we think it all started, and the chemistry, the conservation of DHA in this old signaling system, as we have mentioned, is just going right down to 600 million years, of course, when the ozone layer closed. Then nature would have to find different method for trapping photons, and it obviously did with the system we have today, with retinol, the 11-cis. Retinol is attracting an electron, but DHA is still in there, as it's a major component of the photoreceptor. It's still in there. We believe it is transducing the energy from that reception into an electron that then takes the message to the brain.

Speaker 1: 23:42

And this is really a quantum biological effect and that is something that you've talked about in your recent papers. Yeah, so maybe just explain that facet of this picture that facet of this picture.

Speaker 2: 23:59

Well, it's interesting. George Wald described all this retinal rhodopsin behavior in response to photoreception. He won the Nobel Prize for it. But in his speech he says that anything that happened, all the things that he described in terms of proteins and GMPs, activation and iron movements and so on and so forth what he said in his acceptance speech was that any of those events after the initial reception of a photon by 11-cis-retinol that's all far too slow to explain visual transduction. So we need an explanation of what happened next and we've actually published a plausible explanation as to how this works involving DHA, because the astonishing thing is that DHA is at a very high concentration in the photoreceptors in all eyeballs that have ever been studied. So what's it doing there? Nobody really has got an answer, but we've published an answer, and the answer is this that when 11-cis-retinol receives an electron sorry, receives a photon one of the electrons is activated with the energy it absorbs the energy of the photon. One of the electrons is activated with the energy it absorbs the energy of the photon. So the energy of the photon is, if you like, inside this electron, and the electron is now energized into the escape mode. So we've got 11 cis-cretinols, a double bond. An electron escapes, so that leaves a single bond. Now that's a problem. For some extraordinary reason, the system recaptures the electron and reforms the double bond, the electron and reforms the double bond. But as nature is sort of lazy, it likes to go into the lowest energy state, it goes into the trans situation. So you now have all trans-retinal, and the point about this is that the trans number one plus the energy of the cis-trans conversion. So where's that going to go? It's going to go somewhere, otherwise the retina will just heat up and so on. So the idea is that there's quite a lot of new evidence showing that the energy transfer by vibrations, by heat and so on is involved in photosynthesis. So it's quite plausible that what in fact happens is that the energy from the Cis-trans conversion is actually absorbed by DHA.

Speaker 2: 27:42

Dha surrounds rhodopsin during the reformation of the photoreceptor, the photoreceptor disc, during the reformation of the photoreceptor disc. Nicholas Bazan has shown this. He said that rhodopsin and DHA migrate together to form the new photoreceptor disc. So cis-retinol is buried in rhodopsin and DHE is surrounding rhodopsin, so it's in an ideal position to just absorb that energy. It's got to go somewhere, and so what we propose is that the absorption of that energy. Actually, what that means is that one of the pi electrons of DHA is energized.

Speaker 2: 28:33

Now in photoreception you get hyperpolarization of the membrane. With hyperpolarization of the membrane, that electron is going to be extracted and then it's going to be sent through the brain. Explaining George Wald's question, explaining the question that everything after activation of rhodopsin is too slow, because an electron moving at electric speeds is plenty fast enough to send the communication to the brain. Now, the interesting point about this is it not only sends the information to the brain, but the information is being carried by an electron wave function.

Speaker 2: 29:22

And electrons are funny things. They can be both particles and waves, and this is a well-established thing in quantum mechanics. And as a wave function, it has embedded in it the energy of the cis-trans in the first place and the photon. Now, the cis-trans energy is common to all photoreceptions. The difference is going to be the photon Energy and wavelength are interconvertible, they're mathematically related. So what that means is that this not only explaining the speed that's required for transmission of the information, but also the energy is the wavelength. So it also explains how we see in color. So that's what we've written.

Speaker 1: 30:24

That's absolutely fascinating and quite incredible. The question I guess I want to expand a bit more about unless you wanted to add a bit more on the quantum on that topic is the specific ways in which life evolved once we got to the mammalian family and we've already delineated between the land-based and the ocean-based animals and their brain sizes being a function of their access to DHA, and the more DHA they had access to in the ocean, the larger their brains got. Can you talk a little bit about these land-based mammals and the fact that their brains? What was limiting their brain size? Was it simply just the abundance of DHA and the fact that they couldn't get it in as much abundance on the land compared to the ocean?

Speaker 2: 31:24

Well, yeah, it's an interesting question because the example of the dolphin is sort of repeated by the whole bunch of other marine mammals, the land-based mammals. On the other hand, the little ones and the birds, they can make plenty of DHA, as I said, but as the body size, the velocity of protein deposition, the body size goes, this rate limitation, which I told about the fact that DHA is much more readily incorporated means that in fact, the conversion from alpha-linolenic acids is a very slow process and many people have shown this. So, whereas they can make a little bit of DHA, they only can make a tiny little bit. And in fact, when we look at the chemistry of these animals and the liver lipids and so on, what you see is that the immediate precursor for DHA, which is a zircosapentaenoic acid, only got five double bonds is pulled up. You get quite a bit of that, but you only get a tiny bit of DHA. So this last step in the conversion of the, putting the last double bond into the, this conversion process, is obviously again a very rate limiting business.

Speaker 2: 32:56

So, all the way you look at it, this is this slow business of making, trying to make DHA against the velocity of protein deposition, demanding liquids to make membranes, but not getting enough time to make enough DHA. That's happening in all the land mammals, which means that, as far as Homo sapiens is concerned, that we have to have access to the marine food web. That doesn't exclude us having access to a land-based food web as well, and we've argued that actually we needed the best of both worlds, but the fact of the matter is that we certainly would have needed access to the marine food web during encephalization.

Speaker 1: 33:44

That's a fascinating way of framing it, because it almost sounds like an arms race. There's an arms race going on in the body to deposit protein and fat and build this structure of what the body would be, but there's also a race to deposit and accumulate enough DHA to encephalize or to develop a very complex cranium. So let's continue the story, and I think that's a great way of thinking about it. So say, our ancestors were these land-based primates? Perhaps they were consuming fruits. Perhaps they were consuming these seeds and nuts, perhaps fruits? Perhaps they were consuming these seeds and nuts. Perhaps At what point do you see, from a timeline point of view, that things really shifted in terms of the formation of our brains and Homo sapiens?

Speaker 2: 34:40

I have no idea and I think that not many people have got any clear ideas about this because the evidence from the fossils is so sparse and bits of it here, there and everywhere throughout the time. What we know is that a chimpanzee has got a cranial capacity of about 340 cc and we would have started off at that sort of size around about some five to seven million years ago, which is when the geneticists say we separated from the great apes, we're only one and a half percent our genome's, only one and a half percent different from the chimpanzee. Still yet we have this huge brain and they have still have only this very small brain. So something happened between separation and and uh, and today and it's it's difficult to say exactly when anything happened, because it's quite clear that there were probably many different types of, if you like, precursors to Homo sapiens, some in the land and some of the sea and some of the rivers and some of the grounds of lakes, you name it some maybe in the mountains. However, there is one overriding factor and that is that we could not have achieved the brain science we have without access to the marine food web, and that applies to the freshwater food web as well, because, although not as plentiful and as rich as the marine foot web, nonetheless it does contribute, or would have contributed, to the needs of the brain.

Speaker 2: 36:33

And when it all happens, it's very difficult because, as I say, the fossil evidence is so sparse and so much time between different things. Sparse and so much time between different things. However, when we get to Ertug, about 1600 to 200,000 years ago, the brain capacity had reached 1.45 cc. That's pretty big and for a long time that's about all I knew about it, but it was enough to really raise concerns about what's going on today. But then there's data from Cro-Magnon and there's data from 28,000 to 32,000 years ago, and this data ranges from 28,000 to 32,000 years ago, and this data ranges from 1,500 to 1,700. That's the size of the dolphin's brain, and so that was the peak. We've got nothing bigger than that, and that was 28,000 to 32,000 years ago. So the modern brain capacity is only 1,336 cc. So something has happened between that fairly recent time scale and geological time scales, and today that has started to shrink our brains, which is a considerable concern, and it's almost certainly to do with our failure to maintain this link with the marine food web.

Speaker 1: 38:12

The Cro-Magnons. To be specific, they were a neanderthal, homoneanderthal population. Is that correct?

Speaker 2: 38:20

No, I think Cro-Magnons were the. It's not so long ago that Cro-Magnon's were the. It's not so long ago that Cro-Magnon walked out of North Africa into Europe with his ladies, with necklaces made from seashells and things like that. It's a direct precursor of Homo sapiens.

Speaker 1: 38:38

Okay, sorry my mistake. So how does the Neanderthal fit into this picture? Because I believe they did have a larger cranial brain size than we did as Homo sapiens. So does that mean they were equally active on the lakeshores and seashores in terms of harvesting seafood to get to this cranial capacity?

Speaker 2: 39:02

No, this is an interesting question because in fact it's become apparent recently that the Neanderthals were actually in one place there's evidence of them eating mussels and all sorts of stuff like that and where they had access to the marine food and to the rivers and lakes and things like that, we certainly used it.

Speaker 2: 39:25

However, there's something different about the Neanderthals and I'm not terribly sure that there's any kind of consensus about this.

Speaker 2: 39:33

But if you look at the skulls of Cro-Magnon, if you look at the skull of Hydroborgesis, for example, it doesn't have a high forehead, it has almost a lion's head, it's got a flat forehead. So that suggests to me that they didn't have much frontal cortex, and I don't know the reason for that, whether it was a genetic reason or whether it was the food web that they had chosen Heidelbergensis I'm not quite sure where the name comes from, but Heidelberg is not close to the sea, that's for sure. And it may be that they had solved a certain sense of getting the nutrients for the brain, but not so enough for the frontal cortex, which is of course one of the areas of the brain, but not enough for the frontal cortex, which is of course one of the areas of the brain, which is extremely rich in DHA. So maybe they had a limit to what they were getting from whatever food web that they enjoyed. That wasn't sufficient to completely get the DHA-rich parts of the brain sufficiently grown the way that homo sapiens did.

Speaker 1: 40:50

Yeah, very interesting. And the frontal cortexes obviously are where we're gave us our higher-order cognitive processing, our personality, executive functioning, all the things that make us human. So that's fascinating to know that those are uniquely enriched in DHA. So paint a picture for us in terms of what this could have looked like, because I know that in many of your papers you've described a setting which shows women, prior to their pregnancy and during their gestation, essentially harvesting perhaps mussels or seashells, and you contrast this against the meagre access or the meagre source of DHA that they might have gotten from a harvested ruminant animal that's been hunted.

Speaker 2: 41:41

Well, I think there's been a huge antagonism towards this idea that we. I don't understand the antagonism towards the idea that we actually were associated with the marine food web. I just don't understand it. It's the sort of macho image of the killer ape kind of stuff you know. Image of the killer ape kind of stuff you know. So what? We're running around the savannas of Africa with spears and killing big mammoths and so on and so forth. This seems to have captivated the imagination of certain people and they go on about the savanna hypothesis which Philip Tobias, probably the greatest paleoanthropologist that ever lived, said at a conference we went to. He said you know, we throw the savannah hypothesis out of the window. He'd come after years and years of writing about the savannah hypothesis. He said we throw it out the window. And he wrote in a paper in South Africa. Out there he said about this idea of the savannah origins that we were profoundly and unutterably wrong. Those were his words. So I don't understand the antagonism.

Speaker 2: 43:03

It cropped up with David Attenborough when he had a two-part session on the BBC sound with Elaine Morgan who had written about the importance of the link between the marine food, marine environments and early history. The antagonism was just palpable when you listen to people talking about how terrible Blaine Hawkins was. Of course she and other people who wrote about this were, I'm sure, correct that there was a time when we were involved very closely with the marine environment. Of course, if the men went about, you know, macho killing big animals and so on, that's fine. They're going to do it if they're successful. But the important person is the woman. And while they're away doing all these things, the women could be wandering around the coastline harvesting, as you say, the mussels, the oysters and fish caught in pools, rocky pools, and so on and so forth, and with their children as well, and they wouldn't have to bother whether the men caught a buffalo or whatever. It wouldn't make any difference as far as they were concerned. There was so much food. It's almost unbelievable how rich the coastal resources would have been at that time when they had been unexploited by modern humans. Even in modern times, new York was once the capital city for oysters. It's hardly that nowadays.

Speaker 2: 44:53

So I think it's during pregnancy that the brain is formed. Seventy percent of the brain cells survive during fetal development. Then you have perhaps one or two years of breastfeeding, and breast milk contains unparalleled battery of nutrients that are important for the development, postnatally, of the immune system, of the vascular system and particularly of the brain. Finishing the brain is going from 340 grams to about a kilogram in a couple of years or less, and a lot of that is to do with connectivity. And breastfeeding is so terribly important under these circumstances and would, of course, have been practiced for perhaps two or three years after the birth, but the mothers themselves would have been having availability of the most phenomenal rich food resource obtainable with very little energy.

Speaker 2: 46:01

Now, another point about this is that it's not just gicosahexaenoic acid, not just omega-3 DHA, it's also the trace elements which you get in this marine food web, because iodine deficiency, for a start, is the commonest cause of mental retardation and cretinism, and that is iodine deficiency, and iodine goes along with copper, zinc, manganese, selenium and iron, which are all in the, particularly the shellfish. They're particularly rich in these trace elements and they actually are very interesting because they form the prosthetic group of the enzyme that are responsible for maintaining sensitive parts of the brain. They strongly act to soak up any bits of oxygen that are flying about, trying to peroxidize the brain, and remember that DHA is highly susceptible to peroxidation. Number one. Number two, that the brain uses more oxygen than any other tissue.

Speaker 2: 47:24

In the adult, 20% of your energy is going into the brain, but it only occupies 2% of the body weight. But newborn child it's as much as 60% of the energy is going into brain growth. So there's a phenomenal amount of oxygen being thrown around inside the brain and the brain has to be protected about this. And the trace elements, the selenoproteins and all the rest of these enzymes are dedicated to surfacing the plasma membrane the cytosol, the mitochondria and so on. The mitochondria and so on, they're all specific enzymes set there by nature, by herself, to protect against peroxidation. And this is a powerfully important aspect of the marine food web, because in modern times with intensive land use, the trace elements content of food has been slipping.

Speaker 1: 48:29

Yes, and we'll talk about this later in the discussion. But the thought that women these days are eating much, much, much less seafood than these ancestral dictates prescribe for our species, combined with perhaps more intake of omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are very prone to oxidation and lacking any intake of compounds that might quench that lipid peroxidation, you can just imagine that this is a real recipe for a cognitive de-evolution. But I definitely want to get to that topic in a roundabout way To make it clear to the listener. The savannah hypothesis was this idea that we evolved this higher cognitive function hunting animals on the savannah and perhaps harvesting bone marrow and harvesting brain. But as you've just pointed out, michael, it just doesn't make sense. The sums don't add up.

Speaker 2: 49:30

No, not really. You can listen to Sir David Attenborough's two-part program called the Scars of Evolution. It's still on the BBC website and it's a radio program. It's absolutely wonderful to hear the caustic remarks about Elaine Morgan and about Sir Alistair Hardwick, who started this all off about 1960 when he wrote Did Homo Sapiens have an, an aquatic past or something like that. I can't remember the title, but there were things like saying what do these people mean? Does it mean putting a toe in the water? Kind of thing. That's the sort of criticism they were throwing at Elaine Morgan. Nothing scientific, there's no scientific criticism, and we've kept on asking people to give a science critique that actually had some evidence behind it and there isn't any. But the evidence of evidence behind it and there isn't any but the evidence of significance with regard to the brain is overwhelming and it's indisputable.

Speaker 1: 50:40

Yes, and the macho aspect is definitely something that I think is probably part of it. The macho culture would like to think that we developed as homo sapiens based on our physical prowess and hunting down large mammals with spears and brute strength, but, as you so eloquently put, the reality is much more likely that pregnant women harvesting seafood by the seashore or cracking open a muscle for their maybe three-year-old son that is probably how we developed our amazing cognitive function. I think you've really presented that quite clearly. The reason why I really want to hammer this point is because in the modern health space and the health narrative, there's a group, the carnivore diet group, which are promoting an exclusive animal based diet of ruminant meat and ruminant fat and sometimes ruminant organs. They're really lacking in this understanding of the key role of the marine food web and they're simply missing all this information that you've just presented to us, and I think the the nothing illustrates that more than the the lion versus the dolphin analogy that you presented. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 52:00

That's right.

Speaker 1: 52:03

The um. So so pregnancy we've talked about that and um, we talked about breastfeeding and the fact that breast milk is is uniquely enriched in DHA. I know in your recent podcast with Cameron Borg, you described, or it was mentioned, that women have a slightly higher ability to convert precursors to DHA. Can you talk about any other female-specific adaptions? Do women carry DHA in a specific location? Talk to me about that as much as you can thanks.

Speaker 2: 52:37

Well, it's difficult actually because, um, uh, we, so far as women are concerned, we have to start thinking about arachidonic acid as well as dhaHA, and the AHA is prominent in the brain and there's a lot of evidence that the marine food web is important. Let me give you just one example. There's a paper by Joe Hebron and Gene Golding and others in 2007. And in it they described a study that would be done in the Bristol region, in the Avon region of the UK, on over 14,000 pregnancies, and what they did was to follow up the, to examine what happened during the pregnancy and then follow up the children to eight years later, and what they found was that at eight years of age, the cognitive ability, verbal reasoning, motor function, fine motor function and several behavioral scores all were superior the more the fish and seafood the mother had eaten during the pregnancy the mother had eaten during the pregnancy. Now, this is profoundly important because it was more or less a straight line with regards to the amount of fish and seafood eaten during the pregnancy, and this is the largest and longest cohort study that's pretty well ever been done in this kind of area, and it just absolutely nails it that there is this relationship today in our women between the amount of fish and seafood and the mental health of the child eight years later.

Speaker 2: 54:50

So there are many other studies that have been done in pregnancy to show the importance of individual items. I'm not altogether happy with some of it because, as I mentioned, the marine food web is not just about THA. There's a whole lot of other micronutrients that are involved in it and, in particular, these trace elements, which are so terribly important for the maintenance and health of the brain. So I think that we don't need to go much further than the studies that have been done now, absolutely cementing the significance of DHA and the marine food web in brain growth. And don't forget, we're an island nation. It was actually built on the fishing boats which became rural Britannia.

Speaker 1: 55:47

Yes, and can you speak to the migration of Homo sapiens, because I know in an earlier podcast you made the comment that it was likely that the expansion of humans out of Africa was along the coast and along waterways. Is that something that you want to comment on?

Speaker 2: 56:06

Not especially because I think it's pretty well certain that that's what happened, certain that that's what happened. Chris Stringer of the British Museum has published a paper to show that Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa and populated the planet by migrating around the coastlines all the way out to the Far East. This was his evidence, was supported by very clever stuff and it's pretty solid that that's what happened. In fact, if you look today where people live, 60% of the global population is very close to water. The major cities of the world are close to water and you know the origin of the five languages were all beside rivers and cotton and what else. So there was a whole history that connects us with water.

Speaker 1: 57:09

That's a very veryial, almost anthropological or sociological reason to favor this DHA and marine food web hypothesis over the savannah hypothesis, the fact that we've got so much developed civilization around waterways and the ocean. And what about the evolution of upright stance? And I want to quickly go back to that because I know that's something you've talked about and maybe this wading was the reason, perhaps, that we developed an upright stance.

Speaker 2: 57:40

Say that again.

Speaker 1: 57:42

The hypothesis of the need to wade in terms of… oh yeah, oh yeah, oh well.

Speaker 2: 57:50

So David Attenborough gave another wonderful man, I mean absolutely splendid. He has a lovely clip of his from one of his TV shows where he's, as his usual way, with his waders on, standing at the edge of a river, hidden behind bushes and trees and things like that, and he's watching chimpanzees, a family of chimpanzees, wandering from knuckle walking into the river. And as they get into the river and start walking down the river, they're walking upright, perfectly upright, one of them holding a baby, and he whispers to the camera in his wonderful way saying you know, and this is the way that our ancestors started to become Homo sapiens, took the first steps to become Homo sapiens. So of course, this is all disputed by the transfer from knuckle walking to wading and upright stances, disputed by all the antagonists. There are lots of animals that walk on two legs, there's no doubt about it, but it's a plausible reason to think that we actually were wading and swimming to get food and the Mokans.

Speaker 2: 59:15

Today there's a group of people way out in the coast of Thailand, in the Far East, who live more or less in the water. They're more or less fossilized, living fossils of that origin, and their babies are born in the water and they learn to. They are weaned by diving down and collecting food from the sea floor, and they learn to walk on the land at about four years of age. So it's a kind of fossilized living remains of how we used to be at one time in our prehistory. So it's extraordinary. We know for a fact that healthy babies are born able to swim and learn to walk on the land later.

Speaker 1: 1:00:08

Fascinating. There is some evidence that the role of melanin in our skin and in our hair could have been an adaption to, or a function of, excreting heavy metals that could have been accumulating from consuming seafood, and there was suggestion that that was particularly one reason why sea-dwelling or coastal-dwelling peoples in Asia developed quite dark hair. Do you have any comments on that or specifically about the occurrence of heavy metals in perhaps uncontaminated wild-caught seafood?

Speaker 2: 1:00:47

No, I don't, except that I suspect the story of the heavy metals is culpable of some peculiar background of modern days, because there's no evidence that seafood in its normal wild state poses any neurotoxic effect from heavy metals. If you take, for example, japanese ladies, they eat fish and seafood practically every day of the week, sometimes more than twice, and they gave birth to the children that have grown up today to have the least major depression, they have the least cardiovascular disease, the least common cancers and they have the best longevity of industrialized nations. And where's the evidence of any kind of neurotoxicity? This story, put about by the Food and Drug Administration by the United States, is Is wrong, but fundamentally flawed.

Speaker 1: 1:02:10

Yes, you may get Extreme situations where you get industrial pollution causing problems, but that's not to say that the basic truth of fish and seafood is positive an episode with Lily Nichols, who's a prenatal and a dietitian and pregnancy dietitian, and she brought up a recent study and they looked at cognitive outcomes, iq outcomes, in children who were born of mothers stratified by seafood consumption and there was no level and they actually measured mercury and other, I believe, mercury and maybe lead, and there was no effect on cognitive outcomes of the kid. There was no upper limit. So even though there was some heavy metals detected, it had no effect on the cognitive outcome of the children and there was only benefits for the women eating more seafood.

Speaker 2: 1:03:12

Well, there's an interesting point here. The story of mercury toxicity of course comes from those. I think it was a famine one time and they flew in sacks of grains for restoring the harvest and people were starving. So they ate some of the stuff, despite the fact that it had skull and washbones, because it had, I think it was mercury on the stuff to keep the fungus off, and there's a huge amount of mercury toxicity as a consequence of that. And there's a similar kind of problem in Japan where heavy metals were pushed into the ocean from some breakdown in a factory. But these are hugely excessive circumstances. They're not anywhere remotely relevant to what goes on normally with efficiency.

Speaker 1: 1:04:18

Yes, and that is a very important point to make, because we can't chop our noses off to spite our face. We can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We need to recognize the immense value this is. Look, we've talked about encephalization. I think we've made a really strong point of how critical this was to human brain development. We've talked about IQ and cognitive outcomes in children and babies and children. What are the other health benefits? And maybe you touched a bit about psychiatric illness and mental health. What are the other benefits of increasing DHA and these marine-based foods?

Speaker 2: 1:04:56

Well, I think there's a lot of evidence to suggest that it's important so far as the cardiovascular system is concerned, and I think you'll find this at the American Heart Association recommending that a certain amount of fish and seafood is beneficial so far as the heart is concerned. People like Philip Carter will remind us that the immune system also benefits from this. So there's a wide-ranging health contribution from fish and seafood, not just the brain, because the heart and the immune system will also benefit.

Speaker 1: 1:05:35

Yes, and I think that evidence is very, very strong and the effect of these omega-3, marine-derived omega-3s on clotting and coagulation. And really that's what ischemic heart disease is and atherosclerosis it's a disease of blood clotting and a thrombogenic process. So it makes sense that if we're reducing our clotting ability through consuming seafood, then we're going to have benefits on cardiovascular outcomes. The one study I actually want to briefly go back to the pregnancy discussion that I really want you to describe was the effect of DHA deficiency on the neuronal migration in rats. I remember that you've talked about that and how timing was so important for adequate and proper migration of those neurons.

Speaker 2: 1:06:30

Well, this was a study done by Ephraim Yavin and Annette Brandt, and we contributed to it later by doing some analysis of what was going on with the lipids, colonies of ants with or without fish oils and things like that within or without the omega-3 fatty acids, and what they saw was very significant was a very delayed neuronal migration in the progeny of those that were being fed by mothers who were deficient, and so this is a very strong experimental evidence which I think is quite telling. But there are many other experiments that have been done on this kind of thing. There's stuff on developmental vision and so on and so forth, the stuff on development of vision and so on and so forth.

Speaker 2: 1:07:36

The Resonant Foundation in Dallas, susan Carson, bob Gibson and many others have studied. It goes back to Gene Anderson in the first instance, which is interesting because he in 1973, about the time that we were looking at the brain size he did a beautifully elegant experiment of omega-3 deficiency in rats and he showed that not just thein fact there was a very significant reduction in the electrical function of the visual system in those early years. Both experimental and population and comparative studies. And how it's taken so long for anybody to do anything about it. It's extraordinary. It's just been stymied time after time after time.

Speaker 1: 1:08:53

Yes, well, hopefully we're changing that with discussions like this. Do you again just really tying up that? Maybe the last thing I'll say about pregnancy is what you described, michael, is that how critical the timing is, and maybe giving your child the DHA age six and realizing well, hang on, we didn't give them enough. It's just not going to be the same as having an adequate DHA stores, a favorable omega-3 to 6 ratio, prior to conception, during gestation and during breastfeeding. I think that point needs to be really hammered home because you know, women, you've got a very small window to irreversibly affect the trajectory of your child's cognitive and visual function, and you can affect it either positively by eating regular amounts of seafood mussels, oysters, fish and squid, octopus, etc. Or you can consume industrially refined seed oils no seafood, but it's going to have an incredibly important effect and that child will not reach its genetic potential if it goes that industrial seed oil route.

Speaker 2: 1:10:05

Yes, well, I think the problem with the modern food web is that we've gone down the route of intensified land food production, and that does not help with regard to what we need for the brain in terms of both trace elements and ticosahexaenoic acid.

Speaker 2: 1:10:30

We're apparently seeing signs of iodine deficiency in school children already coming back in the UK, which is very worrying because that's a canary in the foot web warning of what's going on. And we've lost the interest in the marine food where we when when I was, uh, um, bringing up my children, we would, on occasions and sundays, take them out for a very special meal to a posh hotel, just just for the hell of it and in those days I was talking about 1960s if you went out for a posh lunch or something like that, there was a four-course meal. There was a starter, which was never to be prawns or something like that, and then there was a fish course, and then there was a meat course and then there was a pudding. So, in effect, that's recent time in which the fish and meat course went together and that's all gone, of course.

Speaker 1: 1:11:55

It's gone in the mainstream, but, michael, it's really being brought back, and that's something that I advocate for strongly is eating for nutrient density, and both from the marine and the land-based food webs, and my idea of a great meal is wild-caught oysters one dozen, and followed by a ribeye steak which is fully grass-fed and regeneratively organically raised. That makes me ask you or you've piqued my curiosity about what is your dietary consumption habits? What do you like to eat? Because you're obviously incredibly up to speed and sharp, even in advanced years.

Speaker 2: 1:12:37

Well, I don't know about that. I mean, I think I've only spent years with them. We eat a lot of fish and seafood. There's no question about that. We probably have fish and seafood about five times a week.

Speaker 1: 1:12:50

Wow, and how do you like it?

Speaker 2: 1:12:55

Yes, of course we like it.

Speaker 1: 1:12:57

How do you prepare it? Do you prepare it raw or cooked?

Speaker 2: 1:13:01

Well, we try every week to have one meal of shishimi tuna, which is raw tuna. In fact we had that last night. We love that. I was introduced to it, funny enough, by Japanese in the 1960s. I never turned back from that. We love shishimi tuna and never turn back from that. I mean, we love shishimi tuna and we always buy enough tuna to have it as shishimi, and then what's left over is put in the deep freeze for another meal later in the week, but not shishimi, but cooked tuna. So we just buy, buy.

Speaker 2: 1:13:50

You can get it on Amazon delivered to your doorstep. You know, fresh mackerel and fresh sea bass and so on. There's a whole range of it and the beautiful thing about it is there's such variety that you can buy to have food from the sea and unfortunately it's become rather more expensive now than it used to be. If you go back to the 1900s, the barmen in the East End of London used to go down to the Thames every morning and fill the buckets with oysters. They put the oysters in the bar free for people to have who bought the beer. In the the Museum of London they've got a notice capturing, you know, oysters free with your beer and that's all changed. That's all changed.

Speaker 1: 1:14:41

Yeah, in this modern day and age, I see it as an investment. It's something that just needs to be a health investment that needs to be made. And yes, it's expensive. Yes, it costs more, but it's so indispensable for general cognitive health that it really needs to be happened. So interesting to hear that you're still enjoying five dishes of seafood a week. I think that's a great prescription for everyone to age from a cognitive point of view as well as you have. So maybe we can end this discussion on the very exciting water-based or sea-based agriculture and I don't want to use the word aquaculture because it isn't intensively farmed Describe to me this idea of seeding or perhaps raising a situation or a kelp or other kind of sea-based crops that could facilitate greater growth of seafoods.

Speaker 2: 1:15:40

Well, there's nothing new about it, and I was invited in 1992 by the government of japan to advise them on the forthcoming disaster as they saw it with regards to westernization of their traditional food, and they were worried that it would um affect, worried that it would affect the brain health of the children. So I gave lectures to practically every university in Japan. We had a meeting at the Ministry. At the end of it and there was a long table full of doctors and professors and all this kind of thing and the minister sitting in the far end. And after I'd finished talking I thought the minister should fall asleep while I speak, but not a bit of it. When I finished he said thank you, professor crawford, for um telling us how important it is for the brains of our children to agriculturalize the oceans. And that's what we're going to do.

Speaker 1: 1:17:01

And they've they have done it they have done it.

Speaker 2: 1:17:04

Dr takahiro tanaka of yukohama is in in the of Japan, east of Japan, rather. He has developed between two islands, a marine farming project where he has, you know, we have grass pastures for cows and sheep, so he has grass pastures for fish, cows and sheep, so he has grass pastures for fish. The seafloor had been destroyed by trawlers and he restored it with marine grasses and he developed the idea. I don't think it was he who had just developed it, other people had had the idea before but he developed a very specific idea of tailoring ecologically marine reefs, artificial reefs that he planted on the seabed, which were designed to be consistent with the breeding and behavior patterns of each of the seven different target species that he had for the development. And, for example, I can't remember which species it was, but one of them liked being in holes and things like that. So one of the reefs was just full of holes for the fish to sort of pop in, was just full of holes for the fish to pop in and pop out of, as they like to do. It's incredible how fast these artificial reefs get closed. I made a similar suggestion to the government of Oman when I was an advisor to the research council and they have now got 340 hectares under artificial reefs and they sent me a video of these artificial reefs two years after they were planted and they're absolutely clothed in a wealth of marine flora and with fish wanting about all of them. And this has just happened in two years. So you can do it In Japan, dr Tanaka's efforts there.

Speaker 2: 1:19:26

He's tripled the fish production in that area. It doesn't involve putting any artificial stuff into the fish, apart from they have a breeding program, as we do with land-based animals, of course, and they breed lots of little fish and put them in the water. And of course, they have to use artificial feed for the breeding program. But apart from that, there's nothing. They're just relying on the ultraviolet and the sunshine and they're relying on the natural wealth, natural mineral wealth of the marine system, which is the richest on the planet. And there you go, it's elementary. We're an island nation, don't forget, it's in the UK, and we should be using our coastal resources. Instead, what we're doing is seeing all our fishing ports becoming denuded, dying, and fishing communities dying and islands being depopulated, whereas they could all become the source of a new industrial revolution, of developing farming in the sea, and it could make us completely independent of external sources of food if we wanted. It would reverse the decline in mental health. It would help reverse the decline in mental health, and not only that.

Speaker 2: 1:21:03

You've got to think about things like kelp, which you have to grow, because kelp helps clean the water and deacidify it, and that makes the water good for oysters and mussels, crabs, scallops and all the rest of it. And not only that the kelp can be used for food, and it's mineral rich, iodine rich in particular. And not only that, it can be used as land-based fertilizer. And not only that the kelp soaks up carbon dioxide in the same way that the Amazon forest does. It fixes oxygen. It helps counteract climate change. So we've got nothing to lose. It's a win-win situation all the way, and what we've got to do in the UK is start thinking on the same terms all the way, and what we've got to do in the uk is start thinking on same terms as japanese and start doing this in the wonderful, huge, uh, uh seacoast areas that we have unexploited it's incredibly exciting, um michael, I think, that not only you in the UK, but us in Australia and and strip grazing that promotes a polyculture of different organisms and natural that work in concert with nature.

Speaker 1: 1:22:38

It just creates such abundance, and it's so amazing to think about how we could restore cheap and plentiful access to marine foods with these type of initiatives. And it doesn't need to cost a lot. It isn't chemically intensive, because you're simply, as you've described, placing in frameworks or structures that simply facilitate the natural growth of all these kelps and seagrasses and habitat for these fish that could then be sustainably harvested into the future.

Speaker 2: 1:23:14

Yeah, absolutely. It has so many benefits and it will restore the dying fishing communities as well into the bargain, which is very sad to see.

Speaker 1: 1:23:31

Well, it's really for anyone intelligent, listening and industrious and wanting to have a vision for a project to make the world a better place. I think this is one of those things. I mean the acuity of the problem and the pressing nature of this collective cognitive de-evolution that's occurring because we're all not eating the amount of seafoods that we need to to maintain our species' brain size. I mean that's as pressing a public health problem as any as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 2: 1:24:05

Absolutely. I mean, I think one's got to look at growth and obesity, which is phenomenal, and it has to have something to do with the excess energy that's going into the modern intensification of land and food production. And you think about the increase in mental ill health? The Children's Society here in the UK. The Children's Society here in the UK. They reported just recently that the referrals for mental health in children had increased threefold in the last three years. Threefold increase in three years. This is just staggering. The increase in mental health and decline in IQ since 1950 is, I think, the most serious issue of this, far more serious than climate change. It has the potential to wipe out humanity.

Speaker 1: 1:25:06

Well, the irony and yes, I agree completely the irony is that the various measures that are being taken to avoid climate change, which are being, dare I say, pushed or encouraged, involve the reduction in consumption of animal-based foods and the increased consumption of vegetarian and vegan diets, in this misguided attempt at improving climate change. Well, there's much more proximate and pressing implications of that that are more immediate that I believe.

Speaker 2: 1:25:43

Yeah, but it's so elementary and it's so simple and, as I say, it would create a new industrial revolution with solving the most serious problems that we have today this increase in mental health. The Federation of European Neuroscientists last March, in the Brain Awareness Week, said that brain health had now become a quote global emergency. Brain health had become a global emergency. We've got to do something about it. It's our children, their children's risk, and we are responsible. We're responsible for the world that our children are going to grow up in and we're responsible for their mental health, and it's about time governments began to realize the significance of this.

Speaker 1: 1:26:37

Yes, well, I couldn't agree more, michael, and thank you so much for bringing these ideas to my understanding and to everyone else's understanding, and I really give you credit for pretty fundamentally changing my mind about the importance of the marine food web, and I really pivoted from thinking that we could be subsisted exclusively on ruminant animals to really understanding that we need to include the marine food web if we're going to thrive from a cognitive and psychiatric and neural brain point of view. So thank you for your time. Is there any final thoughts or points that you'd like to make to the audience before we wrap?

Speaker 2: 1:27:25

up. Well, only one thing, and that is how much I've enjoyed my many visits to Australia, and of course Australia is mostly all coastal living and you have a lot of people who are interested in this sort of idea of doing things in Australia, and I really was sort of warmed to the idea of Australia being a country that's innovative and could well begin to help lead in this direction to the saviour of humanity.

Speaker 1: 1:28:00

Well, I know you've talked to Cameron Borg. Cameron and I are in touch. He's a great guy doing similarly good work, so we'll put our heads together and we'll see what we can come up with.

Speaker 2: 1:28:12

Great, great, absolutely wonderful.

Speaker 1: 1:28:15

Have a great day, michael, thank you, thank you, bye-bye, bye-bye, thank you.