Dr. Rhonda Patrick

There's been some animal studies in piglets and rodents as well, showing that consuming phospholipid DHA during fetal brain development gets like 10 times more DHA in the brain.

If you're supplementing with your two to four grams of fish oil, I mean that you're going to get phospholipid form anyway, because your body's going to make it.

I mean, I think the most obvious would be vitamin D.

70% of the US population has inadequate vitamin D levels, 70 of the whole US.

So this is everyone.

And so I think that insufficient levels defined as less than 30 nanograms per milliliter

And that's sort of defined by the Endocrine Society.

There's been a lot of different meta-analyses of all-cause mortality studies where vitamin D levels really seem to be ideal between 40 to 60 nanograms per milliliter.

So basically the point is that vitamin D is a steroid hormone, meaning it actually binds to a receptor and another receptor dimerizes with it, the retinoid receptor.

And that complex goes into the nucleus of a cell where your DNA is.

And it recognizes little sequences of DNA called vitamin D response elements.

They're called VDREs.

They're specific sequences of DNA that this complex vitamin D bound, the vitamin D receptor goes inside and recognizes

and turns on a whole host of genes, turns off a whole host of genes.

I mean, this is important stuff.

Okay, so first of all, it's regulating more than 5% of the protein-encoded human genome.

One of the important things that you'll find interesting that I published on back in 2014 was that the VDREs in tryptophan hydroxylase 2, so for people listening, tryptophan hydroxylase

is an enzyme that converts tryptophan into serotonin.

So tryptophan is an amino acid that we get from our food.

You convert tryptophan into serotonin in the gut, but you also do it in the brain.