The Truth About Fish Oil
Heart disease, depression, diabetes, memory loss. Omega-3 fish oil has been touted as a panacea. But what does the science say?
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I recently learned from an eminent cardiologist that around half of all patients first report heart disease to their doctors by dropping dead. No conversation where the physician lays on a tender hand and whispers, “I’m a little worried about your triglycerides.” Just fibrillation followed by abrupt arrest. Boom. Finis.
To date, no one has succeeded at pinpointing the exact cause of sudden cardiac death. Is it a chemical imbalance in the body owing to years of bad dietary habits? Is it an electrical short circuit where the heart fails to get the right signals across misfiring cell membranes? No one quite knows. But a significant amount of medical researchers think it might have something to do with the omega-3 fatty acid.
What first drew me to the omega question was the same thing that draws most people to omega-3s. I was approaching 50. My blood pressure was higher, my heart rate elevated, my energy diminished. Cholesterol, the bad kind, flirted with requiring medication. When I indulged the late-night urge to troll the dark web of the supplement world, searching for some nonpharmaceutical way around all of these afflictions, standing at every turn was the omega-3.
A search for the phrase “omega-3s may” produced a bizarre panoply of speculations. Omega-3s may “help prevent coronary heart disease,” “increase brain volume,” “boost sperm competitiveness,” “build muscle in older adults,” “prevent some forms of depression,” “help lower risk of Type 2 diabetes.” Many hypotheses. Taken collectively, they promised no less than a cure for middle age itself.
But what was the omega-3? What did it actually do in the human body and in the natural world? Why was it always mentioned but never satisfactorily explained? These questions set me off on a global omega journey, from darkest Peru to farthest Antarctica, across the Mediterranean to the tippy-top of Norway, and on to the annual meeting of the omega-3 industry in the Canary Islands.
But just as I started making my way around the world, a raft of negative studies about omega-3s started hitting the…
