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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

It's not that fish oil is an unalloyed good, mind; just that we get way too much Omega-6 in western diets, and it seems that Omega-3 "cancels it out." In cultures with balanced Omega-3/6 intake, like Japan, fish oil has no benefit.

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Correct. The alternative to pounding fish oil supplements is simply stop eating so much refined seed and vegetable oils. A ratio can always be fixed in at least 2 ways obviously.

It's harder than that. Our food supply has changed; sixty years ago when cows ate grasses, beef naturally had some omega-3s in it. Now that their diet is largely corn, beef brings virtually all omega-6s.

Ditto for "shelf-stable" foods. Omega-3 fatty acids go rancid at room temperature, so many packaged products have had the omega-3-based fats removed so they'll last longer on the shelves.

Source: my wife, who has a PhD in nutrition.

My understanding (from investigating this a couple years ago) is that grass-fed beef, while higher in O3's than corn-fed beef, is not a particularly significant source of dietary O3.

I think that is accurate. I only meant to use beef as an example of how our food supply has changed, not to suggest that beef is any sort of good source for omega 3s.

Check out http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16500874

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not just that grass-fed beef is higher in Omega 3, but lower in Omega 6. So it's not just about Omega 3 intake, but the ratio between the two.

I believe that is the main reason it is labelled as such and more expensive than regular grain fed beef. Same with free range/cage-free eggs.

Wild Salmon should be a good omega-3 source, while Norwegian grown salmon is probably not.

Here is a link to small study about this.

> The results show a little more of the healthy long-chain marine omega-3 fatty acid forms known as EPA and DHA in farmed salmon than in wild salmon.

> [..]

> “Indeed, there is a larger amount of omega-6 in farmed salmon. You get nine times as much as when you eat wild salmon,” says Research Fellow Ida-Johanne Jensen at the Norwegian College of Fishery Science.

http://sciencenordic.com/farmed-salmon-retains-good-fats

So it says that farmed salmon has slightly more O3 and 9x more O6. But how are the absolute ratios, is the salmon O6 content enough to matter if we want to balance out the presumably much larger O6 already in our bodies?

There's a certain optimal ratio between the various omegas. You could get too much or too little from any particular kind. It just happens that modern diets have too much omega-6 and not enough omega-3.

Plus the Japanese diet tastes better than a fish oil gel cap ... speaking of which, does this mean that the incidence of depression in Japan is low?

Well, according to this article about a recent study:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/11/07...

Japan has the lowest rate of diagnosed cases of depression of any country in the world (<2.5%). Of course, there could be other causes for this, and the accuracy of how well the diagnosed rate represents the actual rate is an open question. In particular, in east asian countries thre seems to be a cultural taboo against admitting mental illness and seeking treatment in order to get diagnosed in the first place. The fact that Japan has one of the highest suicide rates of any country in the world is an especially telling statistic that the diagnosed rate may not be telling us everything.

I work in the pharma industry in Japan and I can confirm that depression is massively under-diagnosed, and that the market for depression treatment is expected to boom in the coming years. So much, that they are now doing TV campaigns to encourage people to be diagnosed. So yeah, don't count on the current statistics to tell you anything significant, there are many cultural barriers at play in Japan, just like for many other aspects of the Japanese life.

> I work in the pharma industry in Japan

I wonder if we've crossed paths in some way before. I also work in the pharma industry (peripherally?).

Maybe we have? :) We should exchange contacts :)

I just realized why your username looks familiar -- we just talked in the Kyoto HN Meetup thread the other day.

Indeed - if you ever come to any HN Kansai event you'll probably see me there :)

How can I get in touch with you?

get on pandoralive.info and hit the "about us" section and there is a contact form there :)

So you will be working hard to make sure that Japan knows that it is depressed, and your pills will solve the problem for them, eh? Sounds honorable, kimosabe.

There's nothing wrong with using pills. I've had severe MDD (clinical depression) since childhood and my mum is the last person who would resort to feeding me pills; they were the only things that were effective enough to let me live my life somewhat normally. They still are.

I tried to substitute them a few times with more exercise, herbs, teas, voodoo, and comedies. I'd be OK for a week or two, but I'd eventually start degrading into a shit state.

Thank the fuck and heavens for the pharmaceutical industry.

First, I don't work on Depression so I can't really answer your comment in any sensible way. I was just sharing my knowledge of the market. Besides, there are conditions where you need treatment. I don't know if you have ever met REAL people suffering from depression but basically when you have that condition you can't function at all anymore. You can't work, you can't have friends, you can't communicate well anymore and when you reach that point I tell you you'd be glad to be able to take some pills to make you a normal person with normal emotions again. Your comment makes me think you don't really know what you are talking about, because depression can lead to suicide and having the right drug at the right time can really save you. I'm not saying the solution is ONLY about drugs, but when you hit the bottom, it's helpful to get back up.

Might be nice if societies didn't develop dependencies on massive, corrupt, for-profit, international pharmaceutical agencies though, wouldn't you think?

While we’re all for disruption here at hacker news, the International Socialist Revolution variant of it seems to not be as popular in these parts.

(Un)fortunately, depending on whether you consider previous implementations the best possible ones or not.

Hey, whatever your -ism, there's still gotta be a Dealer in the addict equation, right? Its not like these things synthesize themselves...

A healthy diet is really not a remotely sufficient substitute for a healthy social context.

One of the reasons there's a link at all is because we often eat with people.

It may not be that deterministic, as if it's either diet or social context. One thing can feed on the other.

It can start as an emotional response, deflagrating an inflammatory process, revealing the nutritional deficiency. Or it can start with a nutritional deficiency, deflagrating an inflammatory process, which the brains reads as depression.

This mechanism is already seen regarding stress and magnesium. High stress -> Mg depletion. Low Mg -> Stress symptoms.

I wonder if we can make the assumption that a suicide must have come from depression. Or at least, I'm not sure if the reasons/depressions experienced in Japan are comparable to other countries. I'd also agree that the admittance of mental illness may be lower than the actual. There are some pretty strange conditions out there, like hikikimori.

Right, I'm not saying that suicide necessarily comes exclusively from depression. Obviously there are other cultural factors at play in Japan that may lead to higher suicide rates. Just that the massive discrepancy between suicide rates and diagnosed depression rates is suggestive of the fact that the actual depression is at least somewhat higher than what we see.

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