Fish oils/Omega 3 Opinions

nesf

I'm curious as to medic's views on these two related things. The drug companies are pushing them quite hard but how well does the evidence stack up for benefits from them?

Sitric

They seem to be cardio protective and improve peoples HDL/LDL ratios. A teaspoon of cod liver oil is probably a good supplement to most healthy individuals diets.

I think they are being promoted for certain benefits that are dubious at best such as increasing intelligence/attention/memory, I don't think they have been shown to improve mental function when tested. I would be concerned that people are taking too much, there have been a couple of threads on the fitness and nutrition forums where people have talked about taking 5 - 6 even 10 - 12 capsuls a day, it has to be pretty easy to build up too much vitamin A doing that.

It's also my personal opinion that I get less colds when taking a spoonful a day. (I throw salt over my shoulder too though!)

Anthony16

Sitric wrote: »

They seem to be cardio protective and improve peoples HDL/LDL ratios. A teaspoon of cod liver oil is probably a good supplement to most healthy individuals diets.

I think they are being promoted for certain benefits that are dubious at best such as increasing intelligence/attention/memory, I don't think they have been shown to improve mental function when tested. I would be concerned that people are taking too much, there have been a couple of threads on the fitness and nutrition forums where people have talked about taking 5 - 6 even 10 - 12 capsuls a day, it has to be pretty easy to build up too much vitamin A doing that.

It's also my personal opinion that I get less colds when taking a spoonful a day. (I throw salt over my shoulder too though!)

does fish oil contain high quantities of vitamin a then?

Sitric

Anything made from liver will have a lot of vitamin A in it.

I'm not actually sure about other fish oils though, I was thinking about cod liver oil.

bleg

http://www2.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab003177.html

Summary
There is not enough evidence to say that people should stop taking rich sources of omega 3 fats, but further high quality trials are needed to confirm the previously suggested protective effect of omega 3 fats for those at increased cardiovascular risk
The review shows that it is not clear whether dietary or supplemental omega 3 fats (found in oily fish and some vegetable oils) alter total deaths, cardiovascular events (such as heart attacks and strokes) or cancers in the general population, or in people at risk of, or with, cardiovascular disease. When the analysis was limited to fish-based or plant-based, dietary or supplemental omega 3 fats there was still no evidence of reduction in deaths or cardiovascular events in any group.

DrIndy

On a more general note - omega-3 is derived from plant and animal sources and then created and distributed as set pharmaceutical quantities per caplet of these oils.

The alternative is of course to increase dietary intake of omega-3 instead by increasing oily fish and FREE RANGE chicken sources (battery chickens have next to no omega 3 unlike organic/free range hens which peck about eating grubs and bugs). This may in fact be cheaper too. Omega-3 supplement is ideally targetted to people who have fish allergy etc and cannot alter their diet.

As Bleg posted - the evidence is promising but not wholesale convincing yet but unlike many other studies on nutrition in population - is coming much more strongly in favour despite confounding factors which plague getting hard evidence from these types of population studies (bowel cancer association with low vitamin B6 etc....)

SomeDose

nesf wrote: »

I'm curious as to medic's views on these two related things. The drug companies are pushing them quite hard but how well does the evidence stack up for benefits from them?

From a cardiovascular perspective, NICE in the UK have recommended omega-3 supplements for secondary prevention of MI i.e. patients who have had an MI in the previous 3 months, and who cannot consume 7g per week of omega-3 from their diet. Now I don't know exactly how much tuna, oily fish etc must be consumed to get 7g of omega-3 but I suspect it is, in scientific parlance, a sh*t-load.

You are correct that drug manufacturers are aggressively pushing these products...my hospital was bombarded with reps trying to get it added to our formulary. I do know the cardiology pharmacist had reservations about some of the data from the early GISSI Prevenzione study, although I can't remember exactly what the issue was unfortunately.