 Welcome to Ancestral Health Today. Evolutionary insights into modern health. Welcome to Ancestral Health Today. I'm Todd Becker. Today we're going to discuss the essential role of seafood nutrition in the evolution and health of the human brain. Our guest today is Dr. Michael Crawford. In 1971, Dr. Crawford published the first evidence of the role of two essential fatty acids, DHA and ARA, which is arachidonic acid, in the evolution of the brain. This was followed by studies documenting the important role of these essential fatty acids in preventing behavioral disorders, and particularly their presence in breast milk for preventing preterm birth and neurodevelopment disorders in human infants. Dr. Crawford is visiting professor at Imperial College in London and has been director of the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition since 1990. Among his numerous honors and prizes, Michael was elected by his peers to the Hall of Fame at the Royal Society of Medicine in 2010. He's published more than 300 peer-reviewed scientific papers and four books, most recently The Shrinking Brain, which documents the evolutionary evidence for the role of marine food web in human nutrition and the societal threats posed to brain nutrition and intelligence by recent changes in the food supply and the human diet. Welcome to the podcast, Michael. Thank you. Let's start by talking about two molecules, DHA, that's Dukasa hexanoic acid, and ARA, which is arachidonic acid. And can you start by describing the chemical structure of those two molecules and how that plays into their electrical and signaling functions in the cell and in the brain? That's a long story. Let's start with arachidonic acid because it's very simple. It's a 20-carbon fatty acid with some four meselin-interrupted double bonds, and it's responsible for a heck of a lot of stuff. The Nobel Prize in 1982 from Bergstrom, Samuelson and Bay was given for the discovery of the role of arachidonic acid in cell regulation involved in many different aspects. For example, 99% of the time, which is being converted to prostocyclism by your endothelial cells, the circulation of your blood, and that maintains the blood flow, blood pressure, and it stops, irritated their piglets from sticking to the wall of the endothelium and causing them as rhombus. But it does all sorts of other things, and in terms of the immune system, it stimulates the immune response, which is important if you have an injury, of course. It was very much involved in the response to injury and so on. It is the parent of this whole range of cell-regulating molecules that operate at very tiny concentrations, surgically acting at the specific site of the requirement. Now, the cause of hexanoic acid on the other hand is a molecule which we think was the original chromophore in that when the oxidant change had reached the point at which everything life became thermodynamically possible. This was about 600 million years ago in the Venji. There was this explosion of not just air-breathing life, but all 32 final that we know today, the different shapes and sizes of horns, different animals. It's called the Cambrian explosion, and this happened in a very short geological time span. So everything happened at a very great speed at that time, and then got a bit quieter after that. One of the key issues as to why this may have happened, of course, is because prior to the advent of oxygen, there was no ozone layer. So the planet was bathed in intense solar radiation and the ultraviolet rays. Now, the cause of hexanoic acid, which is a 22-carbon class gas, it has six double bonds, 12-pi electrons, and each double bond is separated by a metal and we call it metal in interruption. So electrons can't move up and down the molecule as with a conjugated double, a sequence of double bonds. They're stuck in their respective wells. This turns it into a resistor, but it's only a resistor up to a certain point because if you increase the potential difference across the membranes where it lies, you could suck out the electron. Once you suck out the electron, it can then, through a system we call tunneling electron, tunneling, it can then act as a conductor. So it's a semiconductor in a sense. Now, it absorbs in the ultraviolet. It doesn't absorb light in the visual spectrum. It absorbs in the mid-UV range. And John Sargent at Sterling University, late John, analysed dinoflactylate. The dinoflactylate is a sort of little single cell system very similar to what one would expect to have been the first air-breathing cell. It has an eye spot, both C and photosynthesis. And this is stuffful of the cossax nooc acid, stuffful of DHA. And not only stuffful of DHA, but it has dye DHA. He described dye the cossax nooc acid possible if it's in this dinoflactylate. Now, the extraordinary thing is that you and I have dye DHA in our own photoreceptor. So what this really tells us is that the earliest living systems were using to cossax nooc acid. In vision, what effectively was happening was DHA was absorbing in the ultraviolet light and that would take out electrons. And these electrons would start sort of running around the system causing hairs to shape and do all sorts of things. So if you do your phasor in an electric problem, you start, you get a chop. And so this would have initiated as the system became multi-cellular, this would have initiated beginning of the nervous system. So as you say, this DHA was present in this very early single cellular organism, right? It was in the dinoflactylate. This was what, 600 million years ago? And this is the same molecule that's dominant in our brain. It's unchanged, right? Yes, absolutely. And it's been, we have DHA in our own eyeballs today. We have it in our own synapses. We have it in our neurons. This is where it's really concentrated and gave the idea that it was a signal transducer. And so it is really fundamental. If you look at the Keffler parts, right at the very beginning, 450 million years ago, we have four dyes in the Keffler parts. And the Keffler part, the eyes are very similar to human eyes. And they're stuffed full of DHA. And the fish, both in the eyes, the synapses and the neurons, the brains, the fish, the amphibia, the reptiles, the mammals, the birds, and ourselves, all, without exception, used to cause a hexen or a gaseous in the signaling systems in vision and in the brain. This is such a remarkable fact that it's been so conserved from these hundreds of millions of years, and that it's the common denominator, as you say, in vision and the eye, in nerve transduction and in the brain. And it's essential to the functioning of our brain. And then you mentioned the other molecule, arachidonic acid, which is present in all mammalian brains, right? So in similar ratio. And it's conserved. So can you say a little bit more about how is it that these two molecules, DHA and ARA, are in similar ratios in all mammalian brains? How did that come about? Well, I mean, the brain is made up of all sorts of different cells. Cell types have different compositions. But the broad scope of things, the neurons and sinuses are rich in DHA and have got arachidonic acid as well. Whereas the Michel Lagarde from Lyon shows that the astrocytes are rich in arachidonic acid. And these have two different functions. The neurons obviously are involved in thinking and thought processes and doing things. Whereas the astrocytes are involved in maintaining the myelin and maintaining the neurons and synapses in good health. They have a foot against the blood circulation in the brain. And so they're taking the nutrients from the blood and making sure that the rest of the brain is healthy. So although there's this, in my mind, distinction between the two, the astrocytes and the neurons, it's far more complex than that. But let's just leave it to that sort of little distinction. Yeah. So I guess this is quite interesting that if you look at all mammalian brains, you've got these two molecules, DHA, ARA, in similar ratio. So one of the big differences, though, is the size of the brain across the species. So how did what started out as a small brain, what factors lead it across the animal kingdom to get larger? What was the driving force there? And then how does that culminate in the large human or hominid brains? Let's start with how did it shrink? Okay. And when you look at the brain size relative to the body size, with virtually all small mammals like rats, guinea pigs, hyraxis and things like that. Squirrel, for example, a very priceless animal, quite insensitive to neurological function. The squirrel actually, in relation to brain size and in relation to its body, it's got a bigger brain than we have. It's about 2.5% of the body size. We're 1.9 thereabouts. So the interesting thing is these small mammals can make DHA from the parent which occurs in all photosynthetic systems. That's why the marine system is rich in it because it starts with photosynthetic stuff. But it's a land-based system because the food web has got two sides to it. It's got the seeds and it's got the our bread, if you like. And it's also got the leaves. The leaves are rich in Dekosa hexanoacacic, but the seeds are rich in arachidonic acid. Not arachidonic acid, but it's the parent linoleic acid. Now, these little animals, like rats or hyraxis and squirrels, can make DHA quite effectively from the green stuff. Even chickens can make it from the green stuff. But the process of making DHA is rate limited. It's a slow process. And interestingly, I showed in the early days that if you provided radioisotopically labeled DHA and its precursor from the green food alpha linoleic acid with a different label and fed the two labels through developing ratpox, the DHA was used for brain growth and construction, assuming it functioned. The order of magnitude more efficiently than trying to synthesize it from alpha linoleic acid because it's a slow process. So the problem is that as you get bigger and bigger bodies, you outstrip the ability of the animal to make DHA. It's accumulating protein, you see. And you could check the rhinoceros, for example, compared to the squirrel. And the rhinoceros has all the protein it needs from the simplest food, namely grass. And it builds a huge body of one ton in four years. But the brain size is only 350 grams. So what in fact happened is universally throughout the animal kingdom, the brain size has shrunk in relation to body size as the animals got bigger and bigger and bigger. And that's certainly true across the herbivores. But then as you pointed out in your book, carnivores have an advantage, right? And they can get a source of the DHA from the animal that they eat, right? You know, that's right. They get the lifetime's effort of an animal at one meal kind of thing. But they still can't make a big brain. I mean, the lion's brain size is quite small, actually. It's only about, again, it saves about 350. But they clearly, in evidence, they have a much more sophisticated visual system, you can word, and then they have a much more sophisticated peripheral nervous system, because the legs and arms edit in articulated claws, which is quite different from the herbivores, which edit in hooves, you know, with no fingers, no claws. The whole thing is shrunk. Even the peripheral nervous system is shrunk as these animals got bigger and bigger. So that is the shrinking brain on the land-based footwear. As the herbivores get bigger, their brain size is limited. Carnivores can get some more access to it. Can't they get sufficient DHA from the livers and the brains of the animals that they eat? No, no, because especially the herbivores, if you look at the chemistry, we published a lot of this in 19... starting in 1969 in the Briar Chemical Zone. The herbivores have got just a tiny amount of DHA in their tissues. It's mainly jacuzza pentanoic acid, which is the step before DHA. It's only got five double bonds. So in effect, there's not a lot of DHA in these herbivores for the incorporation by the carnivores. They have... universally, the carnivores have got this neurological advantage with vision and articulated claws and all that kind of stuff. So they have a pretty good extensive peripheral nervous system and a pretty good visual system, as you well know. So it's a different story, but on the whole, what has happened is that the bigger they get, the smaller the brain is in relation to body size, whether you're a carnivore or herbivore. Carnivores always have an increase in brain body weight ratio compared with the herbivores. And of course, much greater, which is interesting than the reptiles. So it's... Okay, so then I think where your innovative thinking has come in is in trying to explain this massive expansion in hominids going from our early primate ancestors to this massive growth of the human brain. And so how did that happen? How is it that humans were able to grow their brain? Well, let's start with the great extinction. In the period before the great extinction, the reptiles and laid eggs, the reproductive system was a leg length system. When they... Whatever happened, and they became extinct, and the great peeled trees, the cycads, encores and all the rest shrank and became bodyscipes, we had the evolution of the flowering plants. And the flowering plants had these protective seeds, which contained literally a acid. So this introduced what we call the over-the-six family of acetylpathy acid, for the first time in absolute abundance. And that allowed the new animal systems, which will be very small, actually, to make a racononic acid. And so the key issue here was that the racononic acid, with all its self-regulating systems and its adhesion molecules and so on and so forth, would make the egg stick to the mother. And this was quite different from the egg-laying system. The egg-laying system, the new life only got one square of good stuff, whereas the percentile system, as it involved, got this profusion for nine months in the private, as they called it. So what we now have is a racononic acid playing a key role in the evolution of the mammal specifically. Right, and that allowed a much longer gestation, right? Yeah, and this, in effect, allowed also the huge increase in brain size, because, as you rightly pointed out, all brains are composed of both the racononic acid and DAT. So we have this huge increase in brain size compared to the reptilian egg-laying stuff for a star. Then that set that against the evidence that all, without exception, land-based mammals, brain shrank the grew bigger and bigger bodies. So how did early over sapiens escape that trap? And the reason for the escape from the trap can only have been access to the marine or the aquatic food web, where there was an abundance of DHA. So we now, for the first time in evolution's history, we had both the racononic acid and the land-based food web, and we had DHA from the Boree, and the two together, boom! And you have this great expansion. So let's then go to this, because there is this dominant view, that humans evolved in the Rift Valley in Africa, in the savannas, and that what really drove human evolution and the increase in the brain size was hunting, hunting of large megafauna to supply the fat and the calories that allowed the brain to grow, right? And that this was the driver, and you're saying something quite different, which is, no. It didn't happen in the savannas, it happened at the shoreline. So what's the evidence for that view? Well, the evidence for that, as I've already discussed, is based on the savanna food web. And, you know, the point really being is that the savanna food web provided the racononic acid, which it has to be pretty bright anyway to go out and take out spears and bows and arrows and things like that. You're already bright. The point I would like to make is very simple. The men would go off and hunt for such a cat something. If they caught something, fine, that would be great. It wouldn't matter, because the people that really count are the women, and in particular the pregnant women. And in fact, the diet of the food web throughout the growth of the female should reproduce. Now, when she's pregnant, and perhaps have a couple of children or something like that, the men go off hunting, and she can just wander around the coaxed and pick up the richest food resource on the planet, or heavily pregnant, without expending much energy. Then it didn't matter whether the men caught anything or not. She would be very happy with that, and it's the muttlers that matter really. The nutrition of the mother was at all important, and she would undoubtedly be enjoying the fruitier del barre whilst the men were off trying to do something. That's the case. And so, what's really driving then the growth of the brain is this access to marine food, which is rich in DHA, and the mother's eating that DHA, and that's supplying the brain through the whole gestation period. Is that the idea? Yeah, the missing factor on the land-based food web is DHA. Both are important. Don't get me wrong. But without the marine food web, it's not going to happen. And without the land food web base, it may, but I don't think it would happen. I mean, if you look at the dolphin, the dolphin's very interesting because it's the closest relative brain size to almost exactly. Compare a dolphin's brain, for example, with a similar body size land-based animal, which would be a horse or a zebra. A zebra or a horse has got about 300 grams of brain. The dolphin's got 1.7 kilograms of brain. I mean, this is... Oh, well, that's patriotism. But the interesting thing is, if you look at the chemistry of the dolphin, it's both rich in arachidonic acid and huge. In its food web, it's deliberately seeking food from the marine food web that have got arachidonic acid in it. So the important arachidonic acid is there. Even in the marine food web. And again, with all the marine mammals, they're all very much the same food web. So it's the combination of the two that was really critically important. You can't have it one without the other. Okay, so I think you made a fairly strong case in terms of the biochemistry of the brain, in terms of its lipid composition and the long gestation period. But I still want to come back because you are really shooting down what's been a dominant theory of this savanna theory. And one of the arguments that human evolution took place in the savannas and required hunting is the extinction of the megafauna. There used to be very large mammoths and large herbivores that were essentially hunted to extinction at the very time that the human brain size from erectus was growing. By the time they were doing that sort of stuff, they were pretty bright. The brain was already how it would have been. But you can't make fossil narrows without being pretty bright. Your point would be that this hunting happened after the growth of the human brain. Yes, you had to be capable of quite a lot of skillful stuff to make fossil narrows that were effective and certainly to make spears. I don't think it mattered because, as I said, that's what the men were doing. The women, on the other hand, were on the coastline. The men were running in and these were locally defined regions anyway. I don't think this is a contravene that we're talking about in any manner whatsoever. Let's talk about the increase and then the decrease in human brain size. You've pointed out that if you go back to early homo sapiens, we had a brain of about 1600 cubic centimeters and that in recent modern humans, it's 200 or 300 cubic centimeters and there's smaller than that. So are we less intelligent than our ancestors? And if so, and if the brain size is decreased, what drove that? Was it the advent of agriculture? What changed? The footwear, basically. There are a lot of people who blame the start of agriculture that becomes a dependent on the language footwear, which at that time there would have been no problem with the marine and river footwear sources. They would have been extremely rich and in fact were extremely rich until very recent time. So I don't really see a problem there at all. Okay, so it's really since, what was that like 10,000 years ago when agriculture was really peaking? Was that the beginning of the decline of the brain size? I'm not the only person to believe that that was the case. The interesting thing is that if you consider the evidence, that whatever you believe, and it's just a question of a lot, and some people might believe this, but I don't think it's just a piece. I think the evidence of the absolute requirement for the cause of hexanoic acid. And not just the cause of hexanoic acid, also the trace elements like zinc, potassium, and zinc, copper, manganese, and selenium especially, are again richest in the marine footwear. And they're all very much dependent, very much important in brain development, in the protection of brain, against proxidative damage. So iodine, again, is not a good example of a trace element that is important for the brain. You know, iodine deficiency, the colonists' cause of mental retardation. And there's still 2 billion people at risk of iodine deficiency, and they're all inland populations. The widgets have worked in Indonesia with the government in the beginning of 1900. And 60% of the school children have population going down. 60%. And they had over a thousand, what was it, about a million mentally, severely mentally recharging children, 800,000 persons. But they were all inland. None of this was in the fishing villages. And so what we recommended was that they started developing kelp farming to get the iodine into the footwear. And they now have one of the best and biggest kelp farms on the planet, kelp farmers, making more money than the online farms. So iodine, we're absolutely essential to it. And the present day evidences of the iodine processing is confined to inland people. So there you have it. It's not just DHAs, also the trace elements that were critically important. The vitamins, the minerals, iodine, it's really the whole complex. So for that reason, I guess, would you say that just taking fish oil supplements is not going to do the job? You need that full complex nutrition from seafood. Yeah, I think that's right. But I mean, it's better than nothing. But the actual real stuff is where you want to go. But to get back to this business of when did all this start? I think one of the questions you have to ask is, how did the brain fall from 340 cranial capacity, c-seed cranial capacity of a chimpanzee-sized brain to the 1,700, as has been reported, for Cro-Magnon in the period of 28,000 to 32,000 years ago, 1,700, the same size as the dog. How did that happen? And the answer, one, has to be wild food. Has to be wild food. Whatever you think, it has to be food that was wild. Nobody was producing anything. It was wild food that powered this expansion from 340 cranial capacity to 1,700 c-seed. We're now at 1,336 c-seed cranial capacity, and it's a matter of difference. And if you think about the modern food that we eat from intensively produced stuff, land-based food, if you think about that and try to think of that in comparison with what, just to take a lot of imagination, what wild food would provide is chalk and cheese. And that's almost certainly the reason for the shrinking of the brain. Right. So, Michael, one of the central themes of our podcast of Ancestral Health Society is this idea of evolutionary mismatch. And by that, what I mean is that our modern diet has deviated from the optimal diet that our ancestral homo sapiens evolved to eat for optimal health, which is this wild diet. We have now shifted to an agricultural diet and even more recently to a processed food diet, which is quite different than that of our ancestors. And yet we have very similar genes. So, would you say that this food, this change in the diet has driven sort of an epidemic, I mean, sorry, an epigenetic set of switches that have resulted in the smaller brain? Is it really mainly an epigenetic shift? Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. If you look back at the 1900s, the British army had to lower the height of entry into the army from five foot three to five feet. That's enough people to fight the war wall. After that was the increase in agriculture and so on and so forth that happened. What one effect of that happened was the average height, the sort of increase in protein is attributed to the average height increased by .4 of an inch every decade. And we now have people of six foot six and this kind of stuff. These are all epigenetic changes and it illustrates just how fast that we change in height, size, and disease. And that's a fact. Just look at history and it's a fact. So the epigenetics has driven body size up but it's driven brain size down. Is that right? That's right. As with the Rhinocephalus, as with all land-based mammals without exception. This is what's happening. Strengthening brain. You actually looking at brain size, can you see a change even over the last 50 years? I think you've referenced even since 1950 you're seeing some changes. Is this the case? You can ask, does it matter? Brain size matters. A lot of people say, ooh, small brains are very good because they're concentrated. Well, the fact of the matter is that the University of Hertford has presented data showing that IQ has been shrinking since 1950. And there's no doubt about it. Mental health has been escalating, which is deeply worrying. In 2005, the European Union published an audit of health costs for Europe in which brain disorder came top of the list of 386 billion euros. Everybody said, well, this is just clever. New psychiatrists, clever psychiatrists coming up with new diagnostics. Well, even so, if you get brain disorders at the top of the list, they've never been sort of before. You'd have thought somewhere would have paid attention. Anyway, you did it again in 2010 and it was 789 that had gone up from 386. Now, we got asked Morris, Lord Morris time to ask questions in the House of Collins and the Lord Warner time and I said, well, we don't know the cost of mental health, but give them credit. They're just the numbers. And Joe Norris, who reported them, again, brain disorders, mental health, top of the list, that's 77 billion. So mental illness is on the rise, IQ, there may be declines, but what's the evidence that this is not just correlated with changes in diet, but the reduction in DHA and arachidonic acid are implicated. Is there any evidence that directly indicates those two molecules? I find the evidence about this in the science of literature. The role of the DHA plays in brain growth, genritic formation, slactic formation, deficiency causing, loss of memory causing, brain dysfunction and so on and so forth. The laboratory shelves are just rolling to the evidence. I agree and you've published a lot on this and I'd like to highlight your role in looking at the role of maternal health and maternal nutrition at prenatal and infant nutrition. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of the DHA and arachidonic acid content of breast milk and in the mother in getting the infant brain off to a good start? The best evidence, which is the aspect study, studied longitudinal study done by Bristol University, Gene Golden and others, Joe Hepburn from the United States National Institute of Health joins them in analyzing the data. There were over 14,000 pregnancy and they followed the children up on eight years of age. At eight years of age, vocal reasoning plan, a whole bunch of behavioral and social scores correlated directly, including both of them, correlated directly with the amount of efficiency that the mother had eaten during pregnancy. That's at eight years in the time of eight years. And people who were below the recommendation and followed the advice given by the FDA in the United States of limiting efficiency with consumption during pregnancy, they have the worst outcomes. And in fact, the papers in the Lancet in 2007, first of many papers, and in the paper, they say, it's recommendations to limit efficiency because of false suggestions of mercury toxicity would do harm. And there's actually a straight line function. Unless this is our absolutely superb effort on other questions. Yeah, and you've pointed out that the growth of the brain during pregnancy is really driven by, all the energetics are driven by the formation of the brain from the maternal sources and the DHA and arachidonic acid are critical, especially in that period of pregnancy. But what about after birth? What about early childhood? Does this nutrition continue to lead to be important in brain development? And then past childhood, is there a continued need for DHA and AHA as we get into adulthood and even into our senior years? Well, obviously, breast milk is going to be superior to anything else, there's no question about that. But it's important, I don't understand why the companies have just focused on making substitutes for breast milk instead of saying, we need to feed the mother to feed the child. Because breast milk is full of so many different hormones and all sorts of things like this and the trace elements and stuff. Even fatty acids that are not present in those compounds. So I just don't understand the whole concept of... I guess it's original because it liberates the mother to be able to do work with breast milk. I don't know, I'm not a woman, so I'm not quite the case. But there's no doubt about it. The brain continues to particularly make connections from one place to another during infancy and into childhood. And it's still going to require support from the food web for both its growth and its maintenance. The brain is very unique in the sense that it doesn't like being interfered with. And it recycles everything. But no recycling process is 100% efficient, if you will, now. So in effect, you need a constant supply, drip, drip, if you like, to maintain this recycling process goes on. Okay, so we need to continuously replenish the lipids in our brain, even through adulthood. There's this idea that the brain is somehow fully formed by adulthood, but that's not the case. It's constantly being rejuvenated. Is that right? Well, that's right. I mean, the point about the early developmental process is that during pre-national development, anything that goes wrong there is permanent. It's lifelong. And I believe there's no best way to pre-term versus maternal malnutrition during this period. Sentence is the type of lifetime of disability. So it's terribly important to get it right at the beginning. And that includes maternal nutrition prior to conception, because when a woman comes to hospital for pregnancy care, for example, it's usually about 12 weeks after conception, by which time the cells that are forming the cortex of the brain are already doing so. So that period between conception, when they come to the hospital, through the expert for pregnancy care, is a huge amount of neurogenesis and behavioral base already. So the importance of maternal nutrition and health prior to conception is fundamentally important. And it's more important than what happens during the pregnancy. That's very interesting, yeah. So let's go now into the nutritional requirements that humans should have to maintain good mental health into adulthood. How much DHA and arachnonic acid should we have in our diet on a daily basis? What's kind of the requirement that you think we need? I mean, no idea. WHO and SEO, when I was on the expert commission side, reckons that you'll need just 250 milligrams of DHA or an EPA during pregnancy per day, which is, that's what they recommend. But I hate the high recommendations. I like people to think about the importance of natural food. It was an importance of those wild foods, which powered the evolution of our brain from 340 grams right up to 1,000 shipments. And people suddenly start thinking about that and then make their own decisions about what should be used. Okay, so then let's talk about which fish and shellfish you think are particularly rich in these, not just the essential fatty acids, but the iodine and the important minerals. Is it all fish? Is it all seafood? Well, shellfish are especially rich in trace elements. Mussels are quite cheap. Oysters are very rich as well. I mean, they're all banged shooting bags, the lot of them. They're all rich and there's no question about that. And the mussels are quite cheap. Oysters nowadays are expensive. But you go back to 1900, as we were talking about earlier, the barman in the east end of London used to go down to the tents and sell buckets and fill them with oysters on the bar free from people who bought beer. But change has changed. Great. And just a personal question, which shellfish and fish do you personally like to eat each week? I suspect what people said in the past is to just eat variety, variety is a spice of life. You've talked a lot about wild fish and wild seafood. You see a lot of debates about the farmed fish versus wild caught fish. There's a lot of arguments saying that we shouldn't eat farmed fish and yet there's a big economic difference for the average person. So what is your view? What's your view on that? Is it bad to eat farmed fish? No, it's not bad. They're buying lots. They're pretty good by some. They've been losing out on, say, the presence of DNA, having to feed them on chickens and vegetable oils from the land, which is not a good idea. But they're better than nothing. They keep you away from a lot of other nasty stuff. Anyway, I mean, we really need to think a little bit about what happened 10,000 years ago. 10,000 years ago, people said this hunting and gathering stuff is for the birds. We're not really doing very well. We've got to do something new. So 10,000 years ago, they were brushing up. It was a big agriculture, animal husband. We're going to show you this scene now. The foresight came out very quickly. The report to government, 400 scientists, that there is no more land available for commissioning to arable use, in fact, arable land use, shrinking because of urbanization. And we've got to do something new. They never thought about the oceans. However, 70% to 1% of the planet is covered in water. And we've now got to start thinking about the same thing they thought 10,000 years ago with regard to coastal resources and start farming sea. Japanese are doing it. Koreans are doing it. A bunch of other people are doing it. And in Ireland, like you pay, I mean, we've got rich waters, still rich waters. But sadly, the fishing fleets have been declining. And I think it's time we started husbanding the marine resources. Japanese have been doing it now since 1991 or thereabouts. You're talking in your book, Michael, about the work that has happened in Okuyama, Japan with Dr. Takahiro Tanaka to actually create an artificial reef. And can you say a little bit about that? How does that work and how successful has that been? Well, it's extremely successful. First of all, on land, we've developed pastures for our cows and sheep. And Dr. Takahiro Tanaka had developed pastures in the sea where the seed base had been ruined by trawlers, plants and seagrass. This is wonderful because it not only provides food for the herbivorous species, it also provides a haven for the fry to hide from the carnivores. That's the one thing. And so planting marine pastures was the first thing they did. The second thing was to plant artificial reefs because what the marine food web does is to grow on things. And if it doesn't have surfaces to grow, there's nothing to grow on. But artificial reefs provide surfaces from marine flora to flourish. And they designed... They had seven target species and they studied the ecology, the behavior, the behavior and the reproductive cycles and so on of these seven individual seven target species. And so they designed the artificial reefs consistent with the ecological behavior of these different species. There's one of them that, for example, like to disappear into holes and things like that. So where this was breeding, they planted artificial reefs full of holes. They were immensely successful. I suggested this to the government so far a few years ago when I was a member of their research advisory council. And they planted 360 hectares of artificial reefs and they sent me a video of how far they've been clothed. This was two years after planting. They were always fully clothed in marine flora and you can see all the little fish running around these artificial reefs. Has this caught on in the UK and in the United States as well, too? Some of this... There are various people doing things like this. There are various people, but they're all in a small way. We really need this stuff being done on a large scale to regenerate the fishing communities, which is what Tanaka has done, because he's employed all the people who were previously involved in fishing community to create this. And of course, he's still capturing, he's still capturing the fish. We need the expertise of people that were involved. And the Indonesian thing I refer to is planting of kelp, to say kelp. Forest provides food. It provides fertilizer to replace all the trash elements and various things in land-based agriculture. And they capture CO2, then save us the rainforest. They're like rainforests, but in the sea. And they will contribute to help with containing global warming and ocean acidification. And not only that, they make the environment healthier for the production of things like oysters and mussels and so on and so forth and all that. Just for its marine... Yeah, this is a great theme of your book, which I highly recommend to everybody, and that is that developing marine agriculture solves the mental health crisis by regenerative seafoods, but it also fixes a lot of carbon, right? And the oceans are... There's much more space to grow food there than there is on the surface of the land, too, right? So it's a huge, untapped possibility, and I'm so excited that you've been promoting this, Michael. Michael, thank you. Yeah, great. So in sort of remaining minutes, I'm impressed that you're continuing to be active, both in your research and advocacy. What is your sort of present activity in this area? Where can people follow your work? Well, I've made it in my life. We've published in a peer-reviewed literature, and we've got a recent paper in the journal called Entry, which explains some of what I've been talking about, and the role of the cossacks and the acid in visual transduction. So this is where we're publishing stuff, apart from the shrinking break, which was the book, which in a sense was all censored by the public and governments about the crisis that we're facing. It is really serious. This diminishing mental health is can only end in dehumanization and can only end in disaster. And that is logical, and we've got to address the issue. The children's society, just recently, the first and the fact, referrals for mental health amongst children had risen threefold in the last three years. This is scary. This is really frightening. And I'm worried about the future of our children and their children in particular. And I now have two grandchildren. So I'm really concerned about the whole thing. It's this fate of our children, this aspect. And we've really got to get to grips with this. As I said in the 2005, 2007, 2010, 2013, five orders of health costs put brain disorders at the top of this. It's unacceptable that people have not been paying attention to this. It's totally unacceptable. And it's irresponsible because it is the fate of our children and their children. Well, thank you so much, Michael, for all of the work that you've done, first on the basic science to identify the roles of DHA and arachidonic acid and all of the associated marine-based nutrients in human evolution and human brain health and for your role as an activist, both in helping with women's maternal health and the health of infants and also looking at solutions, global solutions to this. Greatly appreciate it and have enjoyed speaking with you today about this and hope our listeners will check out your book and if interested, get into the research behind it. Thank you, Tom. That was very kind. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Ancestral Health Today. We hope you enjoyed our discussion on how evolutionary insights can inform modern health practices. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast to catch future episodes.