Today I have bad news for the fish oil folks. This is something that you’re not going to believe, but there’s a lot of backup for it.
I’m just recovering from an onslaught of nasty emails including one calling me satanic, for bringing you the truth about cholesterol.
And how lower cholesterol raises your likelihood of death. By quite a lot.
Higher cholesterol correlates with longer life and better health
So today I’m taking on fish oil.
Now for the record, I’ve never recommended fish oil.
I have sometimes recommended fatty fish for some of my students, but I am no longer recommending this either.
There is just too much evidence for the destructive nature of fish oil.
And it’s been known for quite some time.
So let me give you the study that we can look at together.
So the reason I don’t recommend fish oil has to do with this study.
They really wanted to find a benefit to fish.
The first trial of its type found some possible benefit of fatty fish. That study was done a few years before the one above was done.
So they repeated the study in a more controlled fashion, and they found that there was really no benefit to fish or fish oil. In fact, quite the opposite.
Potentially, fish might be okay for helping you prevent a heart attack, but
Fish oil capsules were harmful
As they study concluded
Men WERE advised to eat oily fish, particularly those TAKING fish oil capsules, WHICH HAVE a higher risk of cardiac death.
You can argue with this all you want.
But the fact is, this is one of many studies showing either no results for eating fatty fish, or poor results, meaning more risk of death or heart attack by consuming fatty fish, and especially by consuming fish oil.
But I think fatty fish can be healthy, even though fish oil is not
There are a lot of things in fish besides fish oil.
There are a ton of things, and we probably haven’t identified even 1% of those things.
So it makes sense that consuming fatty fish might be helpful, when fish oil is not.
For example, opium may be useful for pain purposes, but then you refine it and it becomes heroin, which may be a lot more damaging.
It’s very common for the refined product be more damaging than the whole, complete food.
But this study really puts the lie to fish oil.
Take a look at this second study that shows the problem with flaxseed oil, canola oil and fish oil
They compared the effects of omega 3 oils with corn oil giving it to people who it had a recent heart attack.
And he found the basically, neither omega 3 oil or corn oil particularly had any effect on mortality or heart attack rate.
And this applies to flaxseed oil, maybe ESPECIALLY to flaxseed oil…
In conclusion, we found no clinical benefit of a high-dose concentrate of n−3 fatty acids administered early after an acute MI compared with corn oil, despite an improvement in serum lipid concentrations.
I wish they had done the study with a control group who had not gone any of the oil at all.
The more I’m studying this, the more finding that not only vegetable oil but fish oil may be quite harmful to the human body.
I know this is not popular right now, in this fish oil craze world, but there is ample evidence going back decades for the fact that both fish oil and vegetable oil can be very damaging to the human body.
How fish oil can harm people
The major challenge we face as human beings and our health is inflammation. Chronic inflammation is the cause of almost all of our diseases.
Chronic inflammation produces high blood pressure.
Chronic inflammation produces heart attacks.
Chronic inflammation produces ED, and a host of other problems even high blood pressure.
Fish oil can diminish chronic inflammation, but fish oil can also cause inflammation.
The oils in fish oil produce the most inflammatory compounds in the human body, prostaglandins, and interleukin.
Without fish oil, or vegetable oil, our bodies go on and produce their own fatty acids that are essential called Mead acid.
Mead acid is much better than fish oil
Meat acid is very anti-inflammatory, and is produced in the absence of enough omega 3, fish oil or vegetable oil.
This is why I don’t think that the word essential in “essential fatty acids” is correct. They are not essential.
In fact, I think were better off without any essential fatty acids, and we can live a lot better without them.
This is why I’m now recommending my students do not consume fish oil as always, and I’m also adding a recommendation that most people consider cutting back on their consumption of fatty fish if they’ve been going crazy with it.
An occasional meal of salmon or Mackeral is fine, perhaps, but I wouldn’t eat it every day.
Most important, is not to overdo omega 3 or omega 6 fatty acids, the PUFAs, at all.
It may well be better to consume as few as we can.
The polyunsaturated fatty acids in both fish and vegetable seeds may be more harmful than we can even imagine.
Citations
fish oil study:
http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v57/n2/full/1601539a.html
corn oil v. fish oil study:
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/74/1/50.full
Click for more information on Fish Oil, for Living Healthy information, or for information about Corn oil and Fish oil.