DeVita Vite - Neural Revive (Harp Seal Oil)

Product Notes:

Seals are of course mammals who eat a lot of fish, and like us, their metabolic and digestive systems can filter out many of the impurities in what they eat. That "bio-filtering" produces a lesser-known Omega-3 essential fatty acid called DPA (which has two main variants or isomers; the one found in seal oil [n-3 DPA] is also known as clupanodonic acid).

DPA is not found in significant amounts in most fish oils (which mostly contain only DHA and EPA as Omega-3s), although it also can be found in lesser amounts in human breast milk and in grass-fed beef.

Previous studies have indicated that DPA enhances the health benefits of DHA and EPA for cardiovascular protection in various ways, such as by reducing the risk of blood clots and plaque build-up in arteries, lowering plasma triglycerides and blood pressure in those with too many fats in their blood; and reducing inflammation. And newer research has shown that it can not only able to help improve the fluidity / flow of blood within blood vessels but can also help protect and even regenerate nerves, and thus slow or even reverse the progress of peripheral neuropathy.

Peripheral neuropathy (which usually manifests in stages as numbness, tingling, pain, and then an almost total loss of sensation (including for hot and cold) in the hands and feet, for the damaged sensory nerves; or as twitches, cramps, and muscle weakness and loss when it's the motor nerves that are damaged) can be caused not only by high blood sugar levels (both diabetics and pre-diabetics are at risk), but also by chemotherapy, alcohol, and certain heavy metals (which this seal oil has been purified to be free of). Left unchecked, it can result in sores and injuries that lead to infections and even amputations.

Apart from the sensible lifestyle guidance (to curtail sugar and alcohol intake and increase exercise, to at least slow its progression), the usual medical treatment for neuropathy is to prescribe medications to dampen the painful or distracting symptoms such as stabbing or electric shock-style pains, or itching or "pins and needles" or burning or coldness sensations. However, that only masks the symptoms of the problem; as outlined by the developer of this product, "Neuropathy can only be stopped by rebuilding damaged nerves".

Neural Revive was developed by Dr. Evan Lewis, who has a PhD from the Department of Nutritional Sciences in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto, and has received funding from the Canadian Institute for Health Research, the Banting & Best Diabetes Centre, and the Canadian Diabetes Association to pursue his research in this area.

To demonstrate that DPA-rich harp seal oil can in fact rebuild damaged nerves in people with diabetes, Dr. Lewis and his colleagues conducted a year-long clinical study using a minimally invasive imaging method. Rather than extracting a series of skin punch biopsies to detect the density of small nerve fibres there in order to compare treatment groups (which is problematic for people already prone to slow-healing skin wounds), they used a body part where the nerves can actually be visualized without removing any tissue: the eyeball!

In brief, they simply pressed a microscope right up to a subject's (locally anesthetized) cornea, and added up the total length of all the corneal nerve fibres that could be seen in a given area on a given date (they look like little streams as seen from a satellite), and recorded how much that changed (either every four months, for the 1-year seal oil treatment group, or every year, for a baseline group they were compared to).

To establish the baseline of what to expect in that area from the regular course of progression for diabetics, they drew on previous research by Ahmed et al. which compiled six years of data on non-diabetic 'controls' and diabetics at various stages of neuropathy who were not using any seal oil treatment, and found pretty much no change in the corneal nerve fibre length (CNFL) from year to year for the control group, and decreases of about 1% a year for diabetics with a stable condition and a 6% annual decrease among those with unstable (also called labile or brittle diabetes, where the blood glucose levels often swing from very low [hypoglycemic] to very high [hyperglycemic]).

Then, for the 1-year clinical trial of 40 subjects with Type 1 diabetes (simply because their institution already had good access to a pool of Type 1 diabetics; they are confident from previous studies on the normal course of neuropathy that the results would apply equally to those with Type 2) and various degrees of neuropathy, Lewis et al. measured their corneal nerve fibre lengths at the start of the study and every four months after beginning to take 10 ml of this harp seal oil daily. And for the 32 who stuck it out for the whole year, they found an average 29% INCREASE, rather than the expected 1 to 6% decrease in CNFL (with the greatest changes in those who were the worst off to begin with).

Of course, this proof-of-concept experimental trial doesn't mean diabetics should expect seal can only help regenerate nerves within the eyeball: that was just the place where it was most convenient to look. As Lewis outlines, there are a number of reasons this complete source of Omega 3's should help reverse neuropathy in the extremities especially when that's due to diabetes, including the facts that nerves themselves are partly composed of Omega 3's; diabetics do not metabolize them as well as other people, and so tend to have lower levels of them and excessive levels of inflammation-inducing Omega 6's (which are more prevalent in our diets) circulating in the blood; and consuming seal oil can greatly improve that circulating Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio, and improve vascular function (specifically, its membrane fluidity or biodynamics), especially when taken sublingually (held in the mouth for a while before swallowing, since there's an enzyme in our mouth called lingual lipase which enables us to break down certain fats and absorb them into our bloodstream very quickly and efficiently.