the heart, said Dr. Jean Olson of the National Heart, Lung and Blood
Institute, which funded it. For consumers, "the bottom line is, 'Eat
more fish,'" she said .<<

COMMENT:

Another unhelpful opinion from another government "expert" who just
doesn't get it.

We are repeating the vitamin wars of 20 years ago, in which all kinds
of good things were found out about this or that vitamin (folate,
say),and a ton of government money was spent to find out how much this
or that vitamin was in foods, and how they should be prepared, and how
much leached out into the water you boil your vegetables in, and ad
nauseum. But it made a lot of nutritionists happy for decades because
it paid their salaries. And did the public no good at all. Finally, in
the case of folate, after a few thousand more deformed babies were
born, there was a giant argument between a bunch of government
conservatives (at the NIH) and another set (at the FDA) until finally a
third bunch of government types who were a wee bit more enlightened (at
the USDA) finally won out. Then the feds just started mandating the
addition of folate to "enriched" flour. That actually began solving the
problem. It was very much the same story as adding iodide to salt three
generations earlier. And as with iodine, the food-fettish nutritionists
fought folate pills all the way until the day folate finally wound up
in flour. Then they shut up. And moved on to the next nutrient.

We've seen this before. It took about half a century for
multivitamin/mineral pills to be accepted by nutritionists, because
such pills made about half of what nutritionists did for the whole 20th
century (measuring vitamins and minerals in foods and recommending
foods with particular nutrients), irrelevent. But that doesn't mean
that nutritionists have stopped hating supplement pills just because
they finally gave in on multivitamins. As we said, if what's in the
supplement pill is added to your food by your helpful government, that
nutrient will drop off the nutritionist radar screens. Until then,
however, professional nutritionists will be in the middle of things,
screwing things up, wasting money, and trying to get people to do
*anything* but take the nutrient pill.

I suspect we won't be rid of the unwanted and unhelpful advice of this
pesky profession on the omega-3 issue until the USDA finds a way to add
EPA+DHA to the food supply somehow---- and since that's going to be
very difficult due to the needed dose and oxygen sensitivity of these
nutrients, I suspect his nonsense will instead drag on for decades.
Look for a lot more fishmeal to be fed to chickens and pigs and beef,
but it won't be enough. After all, it took decades to get DHA into
canned infant formula (lowering a lot of infant IQs in the process, no
doubt), and that is an EASY chemical problem compared with getting DHA
into the general adult food supply in any kind of preventive amounts.

So meanwhile, here we are again, back with a new thing (long chain
omega-3 FA's) and we're stuck at war with the anti-supplement-pill
nutritionists as usual. Will we never learn? Unless you eat sardines or
red/sockeye salmon, you really don't know how much omega-3's in that
fish in front of you. So why go through all the nonsense trying to
figure it out?  Take an omega-3 EPA/DHA supplement! It's cheap (25
cents a day). It works (has been proven in prospective double blind
studies of fish oil supplements in heart patients). End of omega-3
problem. It seems too simple. It IS too simple.

The simple fix is not happening for more than one reason. Not only do
we have the anti-pill nutritionists screwing things up so more people
don't take fishoil pills, but on the other side we have the Rx
*pill-pushing* pharm-FDA industrial complex. This coalition has made
sure the government (or your government sponsored health plan) is
paying for some share of your prescription items, and that you don't or
won't really count a pill as "real" medicine or "strong" medicine
*unless* a doctor prescribes it for you, a pharmacist gives it to you,
and your health plan pays for it. Which, in the case of fish oil
capsules, the FDA and the DHHS and USPTO are making difficult enough
that it's not likely to happen.

Again, however, fish oil pills are supplements which do as well or
better than the top-selling statins at preventing cardiac death in
people with coronary disease. But, even though the AHA weakly endorses
fish oil pills (along, of course, with all the various kinds of fatty
and confusing fish) relatively few people with coronary disease take
them. The government pays for their angioplastics, their bypasses and
(yes) their statins. And their cholesterol binders and niacin and
fibrates and so on. Even their aspirin (provided it can be made to look
powerful and be extra expensive). But not their fish oil pills. The
only thing the government DOES pay for nutritionally, is studies by a
bevy of nutritionists to look at fish as food and figure out ways to
divert people's attention from fish oil supplements. Go figure.

Fish oil capsules are example of an easy, inexpensive, and fairly
effective treatment for a very difficult and expensive problem
(coronary disease--- I don't review the many other uses for them). Of
course, fish oil capsules are not a cure-all. They won't fix heart
disease. They don't lower cholesterol that well, though they do a good
job on triglycerides. They are apparently excellent antiarrhythmics.
They may act synergistically with prescription drugs in heart disease
to prevent death, and I expect they do. They merely deserve to be seen
as on par with the best pharmacological therapies (in terms of effect)
and as easily beating many medical therapies in terms of cost, safety,
and side effects. I personally have zero commercial interest in them.
But in terms of bang-for-buck, I find them incredibly impressive.

And yet, your government is doing almost everything it can, short of
making fish oil pills actually *illegal,* to keep the average person
from swallowing them. They pay for prescription drugs that don't work
(fibrates). They pay for studies on what fish to eat (but none which
can tell you for sure how to avoid those full of mercury and which have
little omega-3s). The government is unlikely to pay for studies on fish
oil pills (the biggest one was done in Italy), and the government
prescription drug benefit of course will not pay for the fish oil pills
themselves. How is that for strange?  It's almost enough to make one
wonder about conspiracies. But it's not. It's simply the usual
confederacy of dunces we saw with iodine, niacin, folate, and so on.
And it's the usual information problem which crimps our use of almost
any nutrient in a pill.

And it's not as though the health care system we have, has much "bang
for buck," that they don't need to look for other ways to attack health
problems. Rather the opposite. Those treadmills, CCU's, nuclear heart
scans, bypasses, angioplasties and statin drugs are breaking the
healthcare system. They contribute greatly to medicaid costs which are
growing exponentially everywhere. I heard the governnor of Virginia the
other night on CNN bemoan the fact that medicaid is now 24% of his
state budget, and doubing in cost every 7 years (that way lies
bankrupcy very soon). Medicaid costs now DRIVE most state budgets, even
ahead of K-12 ed.  But no state is going broke trying to supply
"vulnerable populations" with fish oil capsules. They ARE, however,
going broke trying to decide whether to pay for Lipitor vs Pravachol.
The fish oil, by contrast, would actually be financially do-able. How's
that for irony?

SBH