Dear All, This is my response to Dr. Barry Sear's Fish Oil, omega-3 fatty acid video. Thanks for watching!

For more information on fish oil and what fish to eat, please check out my blog:

http://bostonmedicalstudent.wordpress.com/

Here is more info:

1) For a general overview of omega 3 fatty acids, this is a good summary:
http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/infocenter/othernuts/omega3fa/

This Newsweek article is also a good summary (it's a shorter article):
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19681540/

2) For my video, I relied primarily on: Lee et al., Current Clinical Applications of Omega 6 and Omega 3 Fatty Acids. Nutrition in Clinical Practice 21:323-341. This is the review article written by the faculty and doctors at Harvard Medical School.

Other random, but interesting facts:
"There have been a number of clinical trials assessing the benefits of dietary supplementation with fish oils in several inflammatory and autoimmune diseases in humans, including rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis, lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis and migraine headaches. Many of the placebo-controlled trials of fish oil in chronic inflammatory diseases reveal significant benefit, including decreased disease activity and a lowered use of anti-inflammatory drugs."
From: http://www.jacn.org/cgi/content/full/21/6/495

"As such, at the moment, there is some expectations of benefits and a reasonable certainty of no harm (from omega-3's). Dose requirements for the prevention of sudden death (in the order of 0.85 g/day EPA plus DHA in the GISSI-Prevenzione trial [98]) are certainly higher, in the order of 3--6 g/day for effects on triglycerides (64) and, more important, for slowing down the progression of vascular disease and for thrombosis prevention (1.5 g/day in JELIS [103,157]) and plaque stability (1.4 g/day in one study [102])."
From: Diabetes Care 30:1012-1026, 2007


"Health benefits of omega-3 EFA may be especially important in patients with psychiatric disorders, due to high prevalence rates of smoking and obesity and the metabolic side effects of some psychotropic medications."
from: J Clin Psychiatry. 2006 Dec;67(12):1954-67.

"Findings of controlled trials indicate that nutritional interventions, including vitamin A palmitate and omega-3-rich fish, slow progression of disease in many patients."
From: Lancet. 2006 Nov 18;368(9549):1795-809.

"Increased dietary intake of omega-3-polyunsaturated fatty acids reduces pathological retinal angiogenesis."
From: Nature Medicine 2007 Jul;13(7):868-73. Epub 2007 Jun 24.

"Maternal consumption of a docosahexaenoic acid-containing functional food during pregnancy: benefit for infant performance on problem-solving..."
From: Am J Clin Nutr. 2007 Jun;85(6):1572-7.

3) I said in my video that omega-3's are best studied for heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, schizophrenia, and major depressive disorder (major depression).
For other problems, more research needs to be done. Sang et al. writes, "there are suggestions of benefit (for omega-3 and other applications) but there are too many discrepancies in study design and too much variability in the data." In my video though, I wanted to alert you to all those "suggestions of benefits" -- because those suggestions benefits are backed up by clinical or epidemiological studies.

The main problem with nutrition research is that for something to go from "suggestions of benefit" to "definitively proven," you need to do a large-scale randomized controlled trial. However, due to lack of funding -- it is often impossible to do such a trial. Further applications of omega-3's will remain unresolved for perhaps many years, and so sometimes, "suggestions of benefits" are all you got -- and really important for you to know.