That linked article goes in to way too much depth to really paste anything useful here but he basically says that while there are short term benefits to fish oil, it could actually be quite harmful to take it in the long term.
As someone who recently started taking fish oil (prescribed my my doctor) due to low HDL levels, I find this highly frustrating. And it's not like I could just eat fish; it seems most of our fish sources are contaminated. The more I learn about nutrition, the more uncertain I become about what to eat, and the angrier I become towards our entire agricultural industry.
I was a one-time subscriber of Men's Health and let me tell you something: everything, absolutely everything is potentially bad for you.
In one issue they could say that drinking a beer a day in moderation can prevent certain cancers and taking too much health supplements can cause irreversible, long-term damage to your liver. Then six issues later they could say to get the dream abs you've always wanted, you must take these same health supplements every day and cut out all beer.
They can provide facts and statistics to sell you any nutritional scare story, and the whole game is this: they want you to think that you NEED them, so that you will continue to buy their magazine. Most people take one story or more from this type of scare tactic and run with it. Every diet has its secret. Every nutritionist has his angle to keep you living for longer or to get results in the gym faster. No wants makes money on the obvious: eat equally from every food group and without bias, exercise regularly (cardiovascular and weight training) and most importantly - have a bit of luck on the way - and you'll be fine.
Indeed, if we would listen to every message abt food wish is contaminated with gen altering stuff, traces of lead through the tins and coating, pesticides on fruits, and contaminated soil, ... we couldn't eat anything.
Still, from what I read, effects show up only long-term. I might get impotent because of these plastic altering stuff, which makes plastic softer (ie bottles) but this stuff leaks into the fluid/food - alter genes, increase cancer risk, and act like estrogen.
I read a lot of the citations quoted by this guy and they seem to be saying different things than he does.
For example he says that fish oil has toxic effects on the liver and cites Ritskes-Hoitinga, et al., 1998. The actual paper says that fish oil may have hepatoxic effects in herbivorous animals and that therefor when using herbivorous animals to study the effects of fish oil on atherogenesis, the effects on these animals livers may need to be excluded (because it's not observed in other animals).
I'm not sure if he mentions it in the article I linked but there's a podcast (http://eluv.podbean.com/2008/10/10/eluv-live-interview-with-...) where he talks extensively about oil (coconut in particular) and he touches on fish oil and what happens when oxidized.
That was my take also. It oxidizes easily being poly-insaturated and it may negate benefits of Vitamin E. Elsewhere I've read what we need is not really the quantity but the balance between O-3 and O-6 which nowadays is consumed disproportionately (from vegetable oils mainly)
From your link I ended up reading a lot of Ray Peat's content and it is very very dense. There are so many levels of different interactions he describes that my instinct is to run away screaming and want to repeat the mantra: just eat what the oldest living people eat, lots of vegetables, many root vegetables, and a little fish and a bit of meat.
I was particularly intrigued by his discussion of how different fats impair or are required for mitochondrial functioning, but I barely understood it.
FYI, the author mentions "flax oil also fits the bill", which from what I know, and from the most recent Nutrition Action Newsletter (nonprofit consumer information organization), isn't true. It's in their latest (November) issue, but I can't find a link to it online. http://www.cspinet.org/nah/index.htm
Flax oil I believe contains mostly omega-6, which people aren't generally as needy of with our current diets.
The problem with the omeaga-3 in flax oil is that it's ALA, while we really need EPA and DHA. Although the body can convert ALA, it doesn't do so with great efficiency.
As I understand it a high amount of Omega-6 means that you cannot absorb the omega-3. From WP:
> Thus accumulation of long-chain n−3 fatty acids in tissues is more effective when they are obtained directly from food or when competing amounts of n−6 analogs do not greatly exceed the amounts of n−3.
Fish oil contains a higher ratio of omega-3 to omega 6 than other sources (flax seed).
Also, fish oil contains Vitamin D which is very good for teeth (if you get enough vitamin D, holes in teeth repair themselves).
A lot of fish oil is also specified as "cod liver oil". So I don't think that it uses the above fish and i don't think that the cod livers is used in food (so it is a byproduct).
> if you get enough vitamin D, holes in teeth repair themselves
I'm interested - do you have a citation for that? I've read that teeth can repair themselves to some extent in Weston A. Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.
I bet it's even easier to get it directly from the source.
I think in terms of what is economical for food production and what is bioavailable to human eaters, that is not the case yet today. Scientists are working on that, I have read elsewhere.
Soon it will be even easier to get. The new GMO coming down the pike is a soybean that produces omega-3 via SDA (converted to EPA by humans once ingested) which is a more efficient conversion process than the ALA -> EPA process that most other botanical sources provide.
> I think in terms of what is economical for food production and what is bioavailable to human eaters
I've been taking Algae based DHA supplements for a while. The consensus seems to be that it should work just as well as DHA from fish oil but so far there are no studies using this form so it isn't 100% certain. The cost is somewhat more than fish oil (maybe 2 or 3 times the prices) although I'm sure that is mostly because it is a niche product. There are also version with both DHA and EPA but they are a fair bit more expensive and the conversion of ALA to EPA is generally viewed as good enough for flax seed oil to be used for EPA.
It is not clear that dietary or supplemental omega 3 fats alter total mortality, combined cardiovascular events or cancers in people with, or at high risk of, cardiovascular disease or in the general population. There is no evidence we should advise people to stop taking rich sources of omega 3 fats, but further high quality trials are needed to confirm suggestions of a protective effect of omega 3 fats on cardiovascular health.
There is no clear evidence that omega 3 fats differ in
effectiveness according to fish or plant sources, dietary
or supplemental sources, dose or presence of placebo.
The null conclusion of the Cochrane report rests entirely upon inclusion of one trial, DART 2 2. This was a randomized dietary trial with clinical endpoints testing the effects on total mortality of either giving advice to eat fish or providing fish oil capsules to men with angina. Surprisingly, while total mortality was not statistically different in the two groups, there was less sudden death in the control group than in the intervention group. Upon exclusion of DART 2 from the meta-analysis, the overall decrease in relative risk with omega-3 consumption became similar to that reported in a previous meta-analysis by Bucher et al: 0.83 (95% confidence interval, 0.75 to 0.91) 3
In our view, the weight of the evidence available in May of 2006 is sufficient to conclude, even in light of the Cochrane analysis, that EPA and DHA reduce risk for cardiovascular diseases. Not only do we feel so, but also the American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology 15 , the European Society for Cardiology 16 , a systematic review conducted for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality at the NIH 17 , the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis 18 , and a number of other national and international bodies 19-22
There is no clear evidence that omega 3 fats differ in effectiveness according to fish or plant sources, dietary or supplemental sources, dose or presence of placebo.
There are effectively no plant sources, except for algae.
25,000 years ago we consumed omega-3 and omega-6 precursors in a 1:1 ratio. Today, thanks to the widespread consumption of cereal grains and few sweetbread meats, that ratio is about 1:20. That has drastic implications for the production of essential lipids like EPA that the body cannot create on its own.
That might be a business opportunity - create a magazine that publishes rewrites of Wikipedia articles in need of references (for a moderate fee). It could actually even be a magazine with interesting, if diverse, content!
I've been planning to get fish oil for quite some time and today I finally bought some capsules. Thank you frankus for the reminder :)
EDIT: Hm. Maybe I've should've RTFA before I commented. I hope that the product I bought is one of the 75 that do not deplete the menhaden stock. Maybe a certificate for this would be nice?
The discussion about flaxseed oil holds for walnuts, too. The type of omega-3 in walnuts is called alpha-linolenic acid, or ALA which is widely believed to be not as beneficial as EPA and DHA for the human body.
> the company’s ... continued right to fish in federal waters, means a half-billion menhaden are still taken from the ecosystem every year.
... this egregious privatization of what is essentially a public resource is shocking.
The whole issue is that public federal waters and fishing rights are being abused but this guy complains the problem is privatization.
Ah, it's a private company that does all the fishing and books all the profit. As in, catches 90% of the fish. Apparently they don't need any special license to do this.
Because obviously, left to their own devices, businesses generally won't make terrible long-term decisions to gain short-term profits. Especially when decision-makers have no long-term obligations and are smart enough to cash out before problems become apparent.
The "tragedy of the commons", sort of deal. Freakonomics talks about it.
It would be better (according to the book, to the best of my memory), to legalize ivory and elephant ranching, as it provides people with actual, personal, benefit into insuring elephant survival. If they're MY elephants, I take care of them. If they're NOBODY's elephants, I talk a lot at parties about how "somebody should save the elephants", but then I forget about it.
This line of thinking turns on the assumption that people are rational. Obviously it would be stupid to destroy something that gives you an infinite stream of income (in most cases; I have seen it demonstrated that this is actually the most profitable option in some cases.) Take away rationality and the whole argument falls on its face. And there is plenty of evidence that humans are myopic, irrational beings. So I would be extremely reluctant to fork over elephants, whales or pretty much anything to a capitalist.
Starting with Kahneman and Tversky, a lot (most?) of interesting work in economics over the last 30 years has been in revising the standard rational actor model to incorporate all of the irrationalities which are reliably exhibited by we homo sapiens.
It's become very fashionable among the intelligentsia to make these sorts of claims.
I have never liked elitist thinking, which is why I vote the way I do.
With regard to elephants in particular, I give you buffalo, as an example of an endangered herd animal which is no longer endangered, and in fact, is available for your next BBQ at the local grocery store. That's not intelligentsia, elitist theory, that's history.
As for whales, or fish, things become more tricky, if you can't put a fence around them and say "these are mine".
I really cannot fathom the kind of confusion necessary to regard empirical knowledge as "elitist".
I don't particularly like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but calling it elitist and voting for people who promise to ignore it really wouldn't accomplish much.
And there is plenty of evidence that humans are myopic,
irrational beings.
I was responding to the above statement, which, in the context you used it, was frankly, elitist, in that you imply that the unwashed masses need guidance from their betters.
Yes, I realize that was the intended argument. It's a charming idea that, unfortunately, happens to be wrong.
It works fine as long as you have single ownership by a relatively rational person. hyperbovine pointed out the problem with the latter assumption; but the former is similarly problematic.
On the other hand, once ownership passes to a collective entity with diffuse responsibility (e.g., a corporation), it's easy to end up in a situation where no single individual actually has an incentive to ensure the long-term benefit of the collective, and by extension the elephant's survival.
A simple scenario along those lines is low-level employees paid unrelated to their impact on the company, high-level employees rewarded in response to short-term results, and a large number of small shareholders, none of whom have a large enough stake to justify time spent monitoring the company's actions directly.
Privatization as a cure-all for tragedy of the commons is an idea with the rough shape of a solution, but oversimplified into something barely sensible enough to be called "wrong".
Actual economics tends to be a bit more complicated than what popular presentations suggest, or what people with quasi-religious notions about how the economy should work wish.
Sure, a corporation might be insane, irrational, myopically short-sighted, or so dysfunctional that the management and employees pursue their own short-term enrichment at the expense of the shareholders' long-term assets.
But these things, when they happen, are recognized as problems and eventually corrected -- at least enough so that most large corporations don't malfunction in asset-obliterating ways. (Even if you think corporations amorally destroy others assets via negative externalities, they do a reasonable job of protecting their own assets -- so much so that even labor unions and left-wing wealthy people keep most of their wealth in corporate shares.)
That is, corporations malfunction plenty, but not often catastrophically, and they remain pretty good at holding and efficiently exploiting assets without destroying them.
Compare that to the case of an unowned, depletable commons that's exploited my many individuals and corporations. If you think one corporation could tend to poor management, then the 'commons' case has no hope: every participant, including amongst them flawed corporations with short-sighted managers, can only profit by racing others to use the pool before it's inevitably gone.
A government or regulatory agency could theoretically act the part of a single rational long-term-perspective owner -- but those multiparty hierarchical institutions have the same flaws you've pointed out in corporations. In my observations, they're even worse -- larger, with responsibility even more diffuse, and the 'shareholders' even more distracted and unable to hold staff accountable for egregious failures to protect stewarded assets.
I'm far from certain monopoly ownership would work but it needs to be compared against what's actually happening, and against what's actually possible with unowned/government-driven approaches. It's not enough to just note, corporations sometimes malfunction and ownership might also result in overfishing.
Well, I never claimed to have a solution. I was just remarking that "privatize it!" is, alone, not a solution either (although a viable solution might very well involve privatization).
But yes, the eventual reality check of competition, stock prices, &c. is why market-based economies work out better in the end. But that's only a statistical guarantee, and doesn't necessarily help with specific cases, particularly when destruction is somewhat irrevocable, as with depleting wildlife populations. When a massively dysfunctional corporation couldn't really do any permanent damage, giving the market free rein is probably the best choice for average expected outcome.
And actually, in some ways regulatory agencies have more incentive to "protect" whatever it is they exist for--they wouldn't have jobs otherwise, and there's less likely to be the destructive short-term incentives pushing in the other direction. The flip side is that they also have incentive to complicate, prolong and expand the scope of whatever problem they're supposed to be "regulating"--eventually "protecting" it to the point where no one wants anything to do with it because of the mountains of paperwork involved.
As an aside, this is why unchecked monopolies are so dangerous--no competition means no reality checks and nothing to keep the company from going off the dysfunctional deep end.
His point was that fishing rights aren't privatized: any company, or individual, could step in and compete. Your point is that a single company should not be allowed to abuse its fishing rights. You two are talking about different things and are missing each others' point.
You're right. What we really need to do here is grant a monopoly, which will solve the problem immediately. Then we can move on to privatizing the air and things like that.
Interestingly, if air were in danger of being over-breathed then privatization would be the best solution. The only reason we don't have a tragedy of the commons in the air is that there's an awful lot of it and nobody has anything to gain by breathing a hundred times more.
The tragedy of the commons is not about how many people abuse the commons, but about the fact that the commons is abusable precisely because there are no property rights in it.
The obvious solution is for fish farms to start raising Omega-3 production, but the fact that the fish in the ocean are unowned means it's still cheaper to overfish, and the only time that won't be true is immediately before the ecological disaster (assuming it is one) of menhaden extinction.
1. the solution to a tragedy of the commons is not always to privatize the common resource. Private firms have historically continued to harvest their privately held resource until gone (e.g., privately held old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest) because they can use the resource (the land the forest once grew on) in some other profitable way.
As long as there continues to be some means of profit from the resource (in forestry, replanted pine tree farms for wood pulp where formerly redwood was harvested; in fisheries, aquaculture or harvest of other species) there is little or no incentive for the private firm to preserve the original resource.
Here, with menhaden, as long as the private firm can continue to harvest something profitable they will have no incentive not to overfish the menhaden till the stock collapses.
The reason is simple; the resource that is publicly beneficial is live menhaden, filtering the water by consuming algae. The resource that is privately beneficial is dead menhaden, pressed for oil and ground for animal feed. This is why public protection is sometimes necessary; because the public good cannot always be made to coincide with private profitability.
2. Fish farming is unlikely to be the answer for the simple reason that farm raised fish are not fed a diet consisting mostly of algae (the primary source of the sought after omega-3 fatty acids). Farm raised fish are, as a result, lower in these beneficial fats than their wild counterparts.
Private firms have historically continued to harvest their privately held resource until gone (e.g., privately held old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest) because they can use the resource (the land the forest once grew on) in some other profitable way.
In such a case, the fact that someone else didn't buy the land with the forests on it suggests that this was the most efficient use of the old-growth forest and the land it was on. That is, just because you or I find the solution unpleasant doesn't mean that it's not the efficient outcome. If it is an inefficient outcome, then there should be a market solution which makes the implementer lots of money.
"The tragedy of the commons is not about how many people abuse the commons, but about the fact that the commons is abusable precisely because there are no property rights in it."
Now this is rather circular reasoning. The tragedy of the commons relies on multiple persons. The whole theory of the tragedy of the commons says, that since you are not sure how much the other person will use the resource, you will use it as much as possible (even if it results in destruction of the resource). The whole reasoning falls apart if there is only one person using it. You must be working from a completely different definition of "tragedy of the commons."
Agreed - I read that sentence and asked myself "How are they privatizing federal waters? Fences? Guard Boats? Exclusive Fishing Licenses?"
It read like the resource was still public. I wonder though, if we can consider it a "Tragedy of the Commons" when a single player is doing most of the (alleged) damage to this resource.
That linked article goes in to way too much depth to really paste anything useful here but he basically says that while there are short term benefits to fish oil, it could actually be quite harmful to take it in the long term.