

The Great Fish Oil Experiment - jseifer
http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/fishoil.shtml

======
apinstein
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?

~~~
jseifer
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.

------
chris123
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..."

------
chipsy
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.

~~~
jrockway
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.)

------
donaldc
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.

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

------
chaostheory
summary? fish oil isn't healthy?

~~~
jseifer
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.

------
brazzy
> 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!

