I'm interested in increasing my dietary consumption of phosphatidylserine (PS) (for its well-documented cognitive and anti-stress effects) as well as other phospholipids like sphingomyelin. I am not, however, interested in increasing my consumption of prions, salmonella, or other pathogens. This eliminates beef brain from the menu, but there are some alternative food sources. Mackerel and herring might be good choices, because their high concentration of ω-3 fatty acids (in particular DHA) would mean the phospholipids were in the most useful form for the brain. The fact that I don't want to get any more pathogens than I absolutely have to in my diet means I would strongly prefer to cook these fish, as freezing doesn't adequately kill bacteria unless done so repeatedly (and freezing appears to degrade phospholipids [1, 2, 3], which I just now thought to look up, so I don't know how the hell I'm gonna get them anyway, but just for the sake of finishing this post, suppose I can get fresh Atlantic mackerel here on the Pacific coast).
However, according to this study, cooking even at 90° C rapidly destroys phospholipids, with PS being maximally susceptible to degradation.
So what can one do?
Sous-vide cooking utilizes lower heats for longer times. According to this internet guy who sounds like he knows what he's talking about, it's denaturation of proteins, not degradation of cell walls (ie phospholipids) that kills bacteria when you cook them. Therefore, it might be possible to preserve a greater fraction of phospholipids using the following cooking protocol:
- Add lemon juice, oregano, and rosemary to diced fish to inhibit oxidation while maximally exposing tissues to the antioxidant compounds.
- Use silicone sous-vide bag to reduce any small risk of BPA etc leakage (at low temperature, over the course of an hour or 2 of cooking, probably very little would be released).
- Cook at 58° C for around 75 minutes; hopefully this denatures proteins without oxidizing the fragile fatty acids in the PS.
Any feedback on this cooking method? My thoughts are that PS naturally complexed with ω-3 fatty acids would be more potent than soy-derived ones bound to predominantly ω-6's.
