Omega-3: Intervention for childhood behavioral problems? (2015)

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150515134827.htm

by prostoalex • 6 years ago

95 44 6 years ago

Wow, this is amazing. My parents use to give me 2 or 3 capsules of cod liver oil daily growing up (since I was 4 or 5). I didn't know realize it had such a huge health benefit. The other daily supplement I took was liquid Feroglobin, an iron supplement.

I'm feeling thankful that they were so health-conscious.

noja• 6 years ago

How is cod liver oil made? Is it extracted from cods livers? :)

If yes, is there a risk of heavy metal poisoning?

wolco• 6 years ago

Yes this is one of the reasons why many avoid. The other is the high vit A (4500 per spoon fill) which interfears with vit d.

amelius2• 6 years ago

I've read stories that they just dump fish remnants in a large pot with boiling water and scrape the oil from the top. But it may be FUD spread by the more expensive brands.

Someone• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_liver_oil#Manufacture.

And the liver is a filter, so heavy metals and PCBs do accumulate there, yes. I wouldn’t know whether that is a big concern.

eitland3• 6 years ago

I used to get cod liver oil as well: a spoonful a day in the morning, served with half a glass of orange juice for vitamin C and to get rid of the taste :-@

It only helped so much, here I am, just a software engineer, not a millionaire yet :-p

vixen99• 6 years ago

Many formulations now contain lemon oil which really does (for me at least) completely mask the totally disgusting (for me) taste of cod liver oil. Worth a try for those who can't stand it otherwise.

adrianN• 6 years ago

I wonder how much of the association of poverty with crime can be explained by poor nutrition.

dao-• 6 years ago

I wonder how much of the association of poverty with crime can be explained by how capitalism works.

easytiger• 6 years ago

I wonder how much of the world's dearth of personal responsibility can be blamed on an incredibly meaningless definition of economic systems.

godelzilla2• 6 years ago

Not to mention systemic racism...

elric3• 6 years ago

Poor nutrition, more likely to live in more heavily polluted areas. Can't be a good combination. We now have a pretty good understanding of how bad leaded gasoline was. Maybe in another fifty years we'll look back at junk food and wonder "how could we have been so stupid"?

I think it would be wise to increase funding of nutritional science. Many of the most basic controversies remain unresolved (fat, sugar, salt). The most bizarre conditions can sometimes be treated using supplements of seemingly unrelated nutrients (behavioural problems: omega 3, migraine: b2). But sample sizes are always small, double blind studies are hard and rare, there are tons of confounding factors.

partyboat1586• 6 years ago

I agree. Nutritional science is in its infancy but it's impact could be huge in a few years if it's properly funded. Unfortunately there are lots of vested interests in nutritional science not advancing and remaining a gray area. The main contenders are fast food companies, companies that produce unhealthy foods for the supermarket and big pharma who can't patent a food or food supplement.

To be blunt it's just not a profitable business to sell good nutrition, much more profitable to get people hooked on junk food and pain pills.

eitland3• 6 years ago

I think it would be wise to increase funding of nutritional science. Many of the most basic controversies remain unresolved (fat, sugar, salt).

Yep, just be careful. We are just now recovering from the phase where one actual scientists mislead others to think that fat was bad and sugar wasn't :-/

In the eighties many children died because of SIDS because of one scientist who convinced others that infants shouldn't sleep the way they had always slept - face up.

etc etc.

jerome-jh3• 6 years ago

It is thought that wide spread contamination of food with lead, caused by lead cookware used by the elite, is the origin of the demise of the Roman empire.

akavel• 6 years ago

Oh, so cool, from first impressions it looks like solid good scientific method at work:

- 200 participants, which is not super many, but already something to at least start talking about in terms of statistics & non-fluke probability;

- your gold standard of: "put forward a theory, then run an experiment that can falsify it" (vs. e.g. retroactive)

- according to the article's title, randomized, double-blind, and placebo-controlled.

I didn't read the actual article, and I'm not a scientist myself or good enough in statistics to be able to validate it further for no errors, but the initial signals already make me so happy that in nutritioning there are people trying to do good science! <3

tsco77• 6 years ago

I've seen similar studies bouncing around. The results are always kinda promising, maybe.

The important thing here is fish burps.

Omega 3 pills are relatively inexpensive with the really only negative side effect being fish burps. So maybe it does work for aggression, antisocial behavior (heart disease, protection from Nuero cognitive disorders later in life), or maybe it doesn't. But if all it costs is a few bucks and some fish burps, isn't it worth trying?

dntbnmpls• 6 years ago

"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?

sokoloff• 6 years ago

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?

asdkjh345fd• 6 years ago

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.

dilap• 6 years ago

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.

pdfernhout• 6 years ago

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." ..."

jerome-jh3• 6 years ago

Omega-3 can also be had from unprocessed vegetable oils, especially colza/rapeseed. But because not only omega-3 matters, a mix of olive and colza oils is advised for a good balance of omega-3-6-9.

I have not read the full article. It just reminds me of my mother's view where food decides everything else.

vga8052• 6 years ago

EPA and DHA can be had from plants? Which ones? Rapeseed only has ALA. As far as I know, those other omega-3s are only found in fish or algae oil.

amelius2• 6 years ago

ALA converts to EPA and DHA to some extent.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9637947

vga8052• 6 years ago

Omega-3 is not a single thing. There are three important acids, ALA, EPA, and DHA. The first can be found in some plant sources, I mostly get it from flax, soy, and kale.

The latter two are only found in fish, and for the vegetarians, algae. A few people have mentioned cod liver oil. I supplement with an algae oil, it contains the omega-3s and I believe avoids the worry of toxic metals.

marton78• 6 years ago

avoids the worry of toxic metals.

And, more importantly, of overfishing. When I looked into supplements a year ago l, the algae capsules named "Opti3" had the highest EPA & DHA / Cost ratio and are fully vegan.

hkyeti• 6 years ago

Yup, go straight to the source (where fish get theirs)

chelovek89• 6 years ago

You can also get omega-3s from grass fed beef and pastured eggs. 3 quality eggs in the morning and I get 210mg+ DHA. The more people knew this the more demand there would be for local meat and away from factory slaughterhouses, especially now that the pandemia exposes their vulnerability. We've got workers risking disease to bring us low quality, nutrient sparse meat.

735tsdfe442• 6 years ago

Sardines and anchovies eat mostly plankton so there is no toxic metals there.

slicktux• 6 years ago

It’s important to note that not all omega 3 is equal; plant derived omega 3 (ALA) is hard for the body to synthesize and use where animal derived omega 3 (EPA & DHA) is easier to synthesize for use.

is_this_valid2• 6 years ago

Endocannabinoids are produced by the body when Omega-3 is consumed.

Too much Omega-6 seems to limit the body's ability to utilize Omega-3.

Reducing inflammation (which is good for hyper-inflammation, which pollution can cause or worsen) is one function of the endocannabinoid system (ECS).

A search for `Omega-3 endonannabinoids` on GScholar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=ome...

The Omega-3 wikipedia page lists a number of foods sorted by Omega-3 content in descending order: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-3_fatty_acid#Dietary_sou...

The top two sources (flax and hemp) are plant based and thus have ALA but not the DHA or EPA that some animal sources have.

Fish don't produce Omega-3: they eat algae and then the PUFAs (polyunsaturated fatty acids) are stored in fat.

Fish and cheap fish oil may have other contaminants due to pollution in our lakes, streams, and oceans.

It's important to eat a balanced diet. Eating anti-inflammatory (and anti-oxidant) foods is one way to regulate hyperinflammation.

Any form of combustion (burning carbon matter) produces carbon monoxide. CO is terrible for most living things in part because the unbound oxygen binds to whatever it finds (oxidization).

Omega-3: Intervention for childhood behavioral problems? (2015)

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