Bad news: Omega 3s don't confer any significant health benefits; good news: They're mostly harmless

That’s generally my diet plan. :smiley:

These meta analyses are statistical studies of research which is also statistical studies of dissimilar people who get dissimilar results. It’s the best we can do right now, given our lack of tools to track masses of cells working in situ, but we really don’t know what the right proportion of omega 3 vs omega 6 vs other lipids is for maximum health. We won’t know that until we develop much better tools and much more massive data processing capability, so we can get rid of the primitive techniques we currently call the “gold standard”.

This is not a final study that defines the role of omega 3 molecules in human biology. What it mainly observes is that we don’t know some things we thought we knew. It’s not true that it shows that they “don’t confer significant health benefits” - all it shows is that prior claims were not supported by existing studies. But that’s not a click-bait headline, so you’ll never see an honest headline about a study like this.

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Assumes that there is a right proportion.

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Another possibility: apparently it was common in the Canadian Maritimes (perhaps everywhere?) to have all teeth pulled and replaced with dentures as a preventative measure. Dental hygiene being so bad and all, it was simply easier to yank 'em; no teeth, no teeth problem.

My maternal grandmother and grandfather, born & raised in PEI, had a full set of dentures as long as I can recall. My mother says this was done when they were in their twenties, so probably in the 1920s. And her grandmother & grandfather, my great-grandparents, both had full dentures, although they were in their 80s when I first met them.

Recently a friend from New Brunswick mentioned the same thing, especially on the maternal side.

How does one eat an apricot pit? They’re as hard as rock!

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this was in scotland, in the early 1980s, but may well have been a ‘we give up’ situation. That side of my family does not have the teeth.

This has always utterly baffled me. I’m fascinated by quack medicine and have read lots of books about Hunza and the weird idea that apricot pits could cure cancer (which persisted for decades), but I have never figured out how people go about snacking on those things. Maybe toasting them? I’m genuinely befuddled by this.

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I’m hoping that this news will cause the price of salmon and other fish to fall. Those of us who always enjoyed eating them might be able to afford more, once news gets around that this particular health food fad is over.

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I’m glad that this worked for you. Don’t stop believing!

crack the shell w/ a nutcracker. the kernel is like a bitter tasting almond (yeah, cyanide). stop eating when/before your finger tips tingle & turn blue.

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The seed is inside the pit (stone). The seed itself looks like a shelled almond.

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Don’t. There are many such studies.

(There are many more, and more recent, articles like these if you search, but this one had easy pull-quotes):

Don’t take your vitamins

Two years later the same journal published another study on vitamin supplements. […] Investigators stopped the study when they found that the risk of death from lung cancer for those who took the vitamins was 46 percent higher.

Then, in 2004, a review of 14 randomized trials for the Cochrane Database found that the supplemental vitamins A, C, E and beta carotene, and a mineral, selenium, taken to prevent intestinal cancers, actually increased mortality.

Another review, published in 2005 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that in 19 trials of nearly 136,000 people, supplemental vitamin E increased mortality. Also that year, a study of people with vascular disease or diabetes found that vitamin E increased the risk of heart failure. And in 2011, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association tied vitamin E supplements to an increased risk of prostate cancer.

Finally, last year, a Cochrane review found that “beta carotene and vitamin E seem to increase mortality, and so may higher doses of vitamin A.”

The main take-away is that the antioxidants A-C-E are bad to take, not just useless.

(Vitamin D, however, has loads of studies saying you should take it.)

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Avocados were only good for being ugly waxy and green all along. The right way to eat them is to shoot them with a compound bow with dull arrows and then slide around the kitchen in your corrupted socks, putting long gashes in the flooring where the hulls caught. Make nice 1" thick multigrain toast and eat it to taunt the remaining avocados, which will emit a disagglommerating pheromone that’s good for everything.

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This, until someone publishes a meta-analysis showing that meta-analyses are flawed.

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I knew the fish would betray us.

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The saturated fat story is hiding the much larger sugar story, with the sugar industry acting like the tobacco industry. There also seems to be more and more understanding of the chronic inflammatory states of high refined carbohydrate diets and obesity. This is a interesting short review article:
http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/51/15/1111

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Agreed. It was the movie Fed Up that opened my eyes to the sugar problem/scam, can’t recommend it enough.

Wow, that brings me back to my TRS-80 days

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I have worked with folks from backwoods Kentucky that had done this before they turned 20 - 25. (in 2000 - 2003) Always thought wtf…

Yes. Here’s an NIH paper which explains this pretty well. This latest study is just a meta analysis of some preliminary statistical studies which look at very narrow measurements of health. It’s not sufficiently fact based to say there are no significant health benefits from omega 3s. It’s bad journalism.

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