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Comment by dntbnmpls | Hacker News Reader

"The researchers caution that this is still preliminary work in uncovering the role nutrition plays in the link between brain development and antisocial behavior. The changes seen in the one-year period of the experiment may not last, and the results may not be generalizable outside the unique context of Mauritius."

Wish articles/research papers/etc would put such warnings at the beginning of the article rather than towards the end.

Also if omega-3 is truly a miracle "food" then can't we simply compare the populations that consume a lot of omega-3 ( fish primarily ) vs those who don't? Can't we compare nations that consume a lot of fish vs those that don't? Are one more antisocial than the other? Are the children better behaved in one vs the other? Are the brains healthier/more developed in one compared to the other? If the answer was yes, maybe then we should do further research on omega-3?

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Another study (from 2006): https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2006/oct/17/prisonsandp... "Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat ... Research with British and US offenders suggests nutritional deficiencies may play a key role in aggressive behaviour ... Demar has been taking part in a clinical trial at the US government's National Institutes for Health, near Washington. The study is investigating the effects of omega-3 fatty acid supplements on the brain, and the pills that have effected Demar's "miracle" are doses of fish oil. The results emerging from this study are at the cutting edge of the debate on crime and punishment. In Britain we lock up more people than ever before. Nearly 80,000 people are now in our prisons, which reached their capacity this week. But the new research calls into question the very basis of criminal justice and the notion of culpability. It suggests that individuals may not always be responsible for their aggression. Taken together with a study in a high-security prison for young offenders in the UK, it shows that violent behaviour may be attributable at least in part to nutritional deficiencies. The UK prison trial at Aylesbury jail showed that when young men there were fed multivitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids, the number of violent offences they committed in the prison fell by 37%. Although no one is suggesting that poor diet alone can account for complex social problems, the former chief inspector of prisons Lord Ramsbotham says that he is now "absolutely convinced that there is a direct link between diet and antisocial behaviour, both that bad diet causes bad behaviour and that good diet prevents it." ..."

Weston Price touched on this a bit in "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration". He did find increased "antisocial" behavior as traditional diets were abandoned in favor of modern diets.

Fantastic book. Highly recommended.

If you compared children in Japan to children in some poor country that doesn’t eat much fish, would the strongest correlation likely be fish consumption?

>can't we simply compare the populations that consume a lot of omega-3 ( fish primarily ) vs those who don't?

That's how we came up with the hypothesis in the first place. But that's all such a study can do, give us a hypothesis. There are too many confounding factors (smoking rates, alcohol consumption, poverty, environmental toxins, ethnicity, other dietary differences, etc) to answer the question of omega 3 relevance. We need studies like this one, only with objective measurements instead of asking subjective questions to draw conclusions.

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