A San Diego researcher who studied dolphins in the U.S. Navy’s Marine Mammal Program for more than a decade is now harnessing her findings to try to help humans live longer and healthier lives.
Dr. Stephanie Venn-Watson’s extensive research led to new findings about the importance of a fatty acid known as C15:0, which she has dubbed the longevity nutrient. It all started when the veterinary epidemiologist was recruited by the Navy more than a decade ago to sort through a treasure trove of military data on the dolphins’ health.
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WATCH HERE“They had amassed a half-century's worth of health data on the dolphins and all these samples, thousands of archived samples on the dolphins,” Dr. Venn-Watson said.
The Navy has cared for a sustained population of about a hundred bottlenose dolphins for more than 60 years. They live in San Diego Bay and work with Navy service members in a variety of ways. The dolphins are deployed around the globe to help find old explosives on the ocean floor. And they can help the Navy locate and arrest enemy forces underwater.
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In the wild, dolphins live to about 20 years old, but the Navy started seeing some of its dolphins make it into their 40s or even 50s. And those geriatric dolphins were showing signs of aging diseases seen in people.
“As we were looking into the data, the tissues, the pathology reports, about one in three older dolphins were developing aging-associated changes with which we're familiar, like high cholesterol, chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, fatty liver disease, and even the full suite of changes consistent with Alzheimer's in the brain," Dr. Venn-Watson said.
The finding surprised Dr. Venn-Watson because, unlike many humans, dolphins do not have a diet filled with ultra-processed foods or a sedentary lifestyle that are often blamed for such diseases.
Because the Navy was feeding all of its dolphins a consistent diet of specific but varied fish and meticulously logging each meal, Dr. Venn-Watson was able to crunch that data using advanced technology to try to find out why some of the dolphins were healthier than others. It turned out, the healthier dolphins had higher levels of a nutrient known as C15:0.
“This odd chain saturated fatty acid, that was the top predictor of the healthiest aging dolphins. So, a huge surprise,” she said, “We then gave the dolphins fish that had more C15:0 in it. And we saw those aging-associated conditions get better.”
The nutrient is known as C15:0 because it has 15 carbons, which are connected by solid bonds. Dr. Venn-Watson says that’s really important because it protects cells against attack by oxygen, called lipid peroxidation. As a sturdy fatty acid, C15:0 serves as armor for cells and protects them from premature breakdown. On the other hand, other fatty acids, like unsaturated fatty polyunsaturated fatty acids, have multiple double bonds, which means they are susceptible to attack by oxygen.
Once Dr. Venn-Watson made these discoveries about C15:0 in dolphins, she started reaching out to other San Diego researchers who were experts on aging in people about the possibility that C15:0 levels could be associated with health and longevity in humans.
“We've had our blinders up on the fact that it was a saturated fat, and it didn't fit the pattern, right? It didn't fit what we wanted to see, which is saturated fats are bad,” she said, “So, when a saturated fat showed up as good, even though that's what they found, it got dismissed.”
Dr. Venn-Watson began to think C15:0 might be the key to why we're seeing increased chronic diseases in as many as one in three people, especially among younger people. She believes people have become deficient in C15:0 ever since the 1980s when the U.S. government started advising us to steer clear of fats. Full-fat dairy is one of the greatest sources of C15:0 in the human diet.
Her hunch about C15:0 being essential to the human body has borne out in further research in people around the globe.
“Fast-forward 10 years from that initial discovery in the dolphins. And now there are over 100 peer-reviewed papers on C15:0 benefits throughout the world,” she said.
After a decade of researching the dolphins, Dr. Venn-Watson decided to take all she had learned in the lab into the business world. She and her Navy physician husband, Eric Venn-Watson, started Seraphina Therapeutics in order to license their discoveries and commercialize C15:0. With the help of a small business grant from the Navy, they have developed a vegan-friendly C15:0 supplement called “Fatty 15.”
Dr. Venn-Watson says they’re already working to develop a version of the supplement that can be used to fortify food, hopefully making it easily available and affordable for anyone.
“So that's the end goal, is to truly improve global health. We need to be able to ensure that there's access to all,” she said.
Dr. Venn Watson has just released a book about her dolphin findings called “The Longevity Nutrient.”
“I'm so grateful, so grateful for those dolphins. And it's great that they, so they're now getting supplemented, which is wonderful, so that they know for sure, regardless of the fish that they're eating, that they're getting the C15:0 that they need,” said Dr. Venn-Watson.
One day, she hopes she can say that about people around the globe, too.
