Should You Be Taking Fish Oil?
April 10 -- In the early 1970s, two Danish investigators noted that despite the high-fat diet of Greenland Eskimos, they rarely experienced heart attacks.
At that time, Jorn Dyerburg and H.O. Bang speculated that there might be a relationship between the low incidence of heart attacks and the particular type of fat in the Eskimo diet — fat of marine origin high in a specific type of polyunsaturated fat generally referred to as omega-3 fatty acids.
These fatty acids are commonly found in cold water fish such as salmon, mackerel and swordfish, but are also found in certain vegetable oils (canola oil and flax oil in particular) and nuts such as walnuts.
Omega-3 fatty acids have since been intensively investigated, and all of the accumulating evidence suggests that they have a potent effect to reduce death rates from coronary heart disease, and in particular, to prevent sudden death.
Growing Body of Evidence
This week three articles appear in the medical literature that add substantially to this evidence.
The first article, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reports on the association between fish consumption and total omega-3 fatty acid intake and the likelihood of developing coronary heart disease as seen in the Nurses' Health Study, a large follow-up study of 98,462 women.
The results showed that there was a clear relationship between dietary intake of fish and omega-3 fatty acids and the likelihood of developing coronary heart disease — the higher the omega-3 fatty acid intake, the lower the likelihood of coronary heart disease. This relationship was even stronger for coronary deaths.
The second article, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, looked at omega-3 fatty acid levels in blood stored from men who up to 17 years previously had entered the Physicians' Health Study, which followed 22,000 middle-aged male physicians.
This study looked directly at omega-3 fatty acid blood levels as opposed to diet. The investigators found a striking relationship between the blood level of omega-3 fatty acids present when these men entered the study and the follow-up likelihood of dying from coronary heart disease.
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