The Great Fish Oil Experiment | Hacker News Reader

The Great Fish Oil Experiment

raypeat.com

25 pointsjseifer11 comments

From the article: The US government and the mass media selectively promote research that is favorable to the fish oil industry.

Don't countries with completely public health systems have the opposite incentive? Health care costs so much that certainly at least some countries in the world are actually interested in reducing costs associated with self-inflicted conditions...

I always have a hard time buying hard-core conspiracy theories against contrarian science. There is so much incentive in being the only "right" person if you can really prove it that there are always people trying to be that guy... right?

Although "selectively promoting" seems like a pretty mild conspiracy theory, I agree with you on the whole conspiracy theory angle. That kind of supporting evidence almost always lowers believability of the rest of an overall argument. The article would be just as, if not more, effective without that statement.

Here's an interesting op-ed from the NYT the other day: "A Fish Oil Story": http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/opinion/16greenberg.html

" For the last decade, one company, Omega Protein of Houston, has been catching 90 percent of the nation’s menhaden. The perniciousness of menhaden removals has been widely enough recognized that 13 of the 15 Atlantic states have banned Omega Protein’s boats from their waters. But the company’s toehold in North Carolina and Virginia (where it has its largest processing plant), and its continued right to fish in federal waters, means a half-billion menhaden are still taken from the ecosystem every year. For fish guys like me, this egregious privatization of what is essentially a public resource is shocking. But even if you are not interested in fish, there is an important reason for concern about menhaden’s decline. Quite simply, menhaden keep the water clean..."

I tried supplementing with various forms of omega-3. It took me a while to figure out the exact correlation, but as it turned out, too much EFA in general made my skin bruise and swell up readily. Hence, the days where I took fish oil and ate almonds and a salad with oily dressing would leave me literally crawling to do things by bedtime because my feet had become so unbelievably swollen.

I dropped the supplements pretty quickly, but was now hyperfocused on the swelling, because it still cropped up occasionally, and, I now realized, had done so for years, but in the past I had just written it off. It took another six months to figure out that vegetable oils - regardless of their ratio of EFA content - were the source of the swelling. Once I got rid of those, problem solved.

I have almost the opposite problem. When I forget to take fish oil for a few days, my skin becomes very dry and forms a weird rash near my elbows. Fish oil fixes the problem.

(It is hard to correlate supplement consumption and wound healing, but this has happened enough for me to be somewhat convinced that it is true. I was introduced to fish oil to specifically to "treat" this condition.)

Vegetable oils and nut oils are primarily omega-6 and omega-9. This is why people take fish oil and other omega-3 supplements; it's much easier to get omega-6 and omega-9.

I'm curious if your problems were caused by EFAs in general or a particular type of EFA, e.g. linoleic acid.

From the article: The US government and the mass media selectively promote research that is favorable to the fish oil industry.

I find this unlikely. The fish oil industry is not a giant industry on the order of the corn industry, or the beef industry. It just doesn't have the size necessary for that kind of pull.

That said, it's good to read some skepticism about the utility of fish oil. As with many possible substances, there are trade-offs.

I linked this in a previous HN thread but thought having a thread with its own comments would be interesting.

summary? fish oil isn't healthy?

To summarize: fish oil is a polyunsaturated fat which has been experimentally shown to cause shrinking of the brain and gonads in animals as well as early aging. While there are short term benefits to using fish oil we still don't truly know how harmful the long term effects are, similar to how X-Rays used to be prescribed to treat inflammation before we knew about the radiation that they caused.

> The editorial boards of oil research journals often include industry representatives

Um... there are oil research journals, plural? I am shocked and apalled that this abundance of ungual knowledge has hitherto escaped my attention!

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