Healthy Andy

“Fish Oil May Not Prevent Depression, Says Study”, says the headline on a leading news website, even though the study isn’t about taking fish oil. Lies and misrepresentations tend to make me froth at the mouth in furious anger, so I just can’t let this go unanswered.

The latest in a long tradition of crappy science mixed with crappy journalism, this MSNBC article summarizes the results of a poorly-designed study which leaps to incorrect conclusions, and in the process, misleads the reader even more by interchanging the words “fish” and “fish oil”. Well, let’s see if Healthy Andy can’t untangle this mess for you.

First off, the study is question was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and was based off of a large nutritional survey that followed over 50,000 nurses over ten years. To sum up, the researchers checked to see who was eating fish, compared that to who ended up getting depressed, and found no correlation. Then, they declared that EPA and DHA, the main active ingredients in fish oil, have no effect on preventing depression.

Hang on, buster. Not so fast.

Let’s start by correcting the journalist who wrote that misleading headline. This study did NOT study the effect of taking fish oils. It studied the effect of eating fish. It’s not the same thing.

Does it sound like I’m splitting hairs? Here’s why there’s a difference: dosage. Eating fish obviously will provide EPA and DHA from the oils naturally present in the fish. However, it’s nowhere near as much as you get by taking a fish oil supplement.

In fact, dosage is the big reason why this entire study and subsequent news article should be kicked in the head and shown the door. If you eat some high Omega-3 fish every day, you MIGHT end up with a gram or two of EPA and DHA. And while that’s the dosage range I recommend for people without any problems to use as a basic health maintenance dose, if you look at the dosage used to actually treat depression, that’s a whole other story.

If you want to actually treat depression or similar mood disorders, you need to think bigger than a gram or two a day.  Try more like nine or ten grams a day of EPA and DHA.

So, not surprisingly, if you only give someone about one tenth the required dose to make a certain change in the body, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO SEE ANY CHANGE.

Plus, how much fish were these women eating?  What counts as “eating fish”?  Do shellfish count?  Farm-raised fish (which has very little Omega-3)? Did they calculate out the EPA and DHA content of the fish?  That would be pretty hard to do in this case, seeing as how they are relying on a recall survey (“what did you eat yesterday?”), and people really suck at estimating portion size.  Did these women eat fish every day?  Every other day?  How much and what kind (since different varieties of fish have differing Omega-3 contents)?

The bottom line is, the researchers really can’t tell how much EPA and DHA these people were ingesting on a regular basis.  Which means, they really can’t reach any conclusions about anything.

At best… at BEST… if you ignore the  fact that the researchers couldn’t accurately estimate Omega-3 intake, this study suggests that it’s hard to eat enough fish to improve mental health.  Which, I could’ve told you before, simply by looking at the dosage used to treat depression (nine to ten grams daily… you’re talking several pounds of high-quality fish here).  But to use a headline stating that fish OIL doesn’t have any effect on depression, is just plain wrong and misleading.

In fact, fish oil does seem to have a positive effect on depression.  You just have to take a sufficient dosage.  So shut your face, MSNBC, and do your homework before you go writing headlines.

A couple of idiot researchers have come up with a fantastic suggestion to actually increase the amount of refined grain products in the diets of children.  Because we’re apparently not fat enough already.

Oh, they think they’re helping.  In fact, the suggestion is basically this:  let kids eat more snacks made with whole grain flour, because hey, it’s whole grain, so it has to be good for you, right?

Wrong.  Listen, folks, just because the food has buzzwords like “whole grain” or “organic” on it, doesn’t mean it’s automatically good for you.  I cringe whenever I hear somebody bragging about scarfing down a bag of cookies that they bought from Whole Foods, like that somehow changes the fact that they just sucked in enough sugar to choke their pancreas for a week.

“Whole grains” are only healthy to eat when you eat them like that… AS WHOLE GRAINS.  As in, oatmeal.  Wild rice.  That sort of thing.  Not if you pound it into flour, add a bunch of sugar, salt, sweeteners, and God only knows what other sorts of processing chemicals, and turn it into a “Whole Grain Snack”.  No, sorry.  A whole grain cracker is still just a cracker, and will still spike your insulin levels and make you fat.

Oh, sure, the fact that you used whole grain flour to make it might make it SLIGHTLY less horrible for you, but that’s like smoking low-tar cigarettes.  It’s still a bad idea.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again.  Any time you process a food, ANY TIME you process a food, you start to make it unhealthy.  The more processed or refined it is, the more unhealthy it is.  The nitwits who wrote this study are trying to make it sound like eating graham crackers- crackers full of sugar and made with hydrogenated vegetable oils- should actually count as a eating whole grains.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.  I guess Grape Soda counts as eating fruit now, too.

If you’re looking for a guarenteed way to get fat and stay that way, start pretending that sugar-filled processed snacks are whole foods. I mean, jeesh, this was an old Bill Cosby comedy routine!  He used to joke about how he baked his kids chocolate cake for breakfast because it contained eggs, milk, and wheat, so it must be healthy!

Part of the problem is the outdated food pyramid and so many researchers’ stubborn refusal to open their eyes and realize that it isn’t working.  Some people simply do as they are told, believe what they are told, and refuse to look into the facts for themselves.  This is a real problem in research, obviously, but that really doesn’t stop it from happening.

If these researcher had stopped to think for a microsecond, perhaps they would realize that a focus on getting anything at all with the words “whole grain” involved into your body might not work out as planned.  However, here’s what happens.  Somebody declares “We need to find a way to get kids to eat more whole grains!” and the solution doesn’t need to make sense so long as the words “Kids eating more whole grains” is somehow involved.

HEY!  I’ve got an idea!  Here’s a way to get kids to eat more whole grains!  Make waffles out of whole grains, and drench them in maple syrup!  Thin City, here we come!  Then we’ll soak spinach in sugar water, and put chocolate sprinkles on carrots… I AM A GENIUS.  I have single-handedly just solved our nation’s obesity epidemic.  Just turn everything into a sugar-covered snack, and it will all work out just fine.

Or, we’ll all explode into fatness even faster than we are now.

And parents, I know kids love snacks.  Of course they do.  Everybody does. They’re tasty.  But pretending a sugary snack is somehow good for you, because some microscopic portion of it is made of something that used to be healthy, isn’t helping.  You can’t fool Mother Nature.  The laws of physiology don’t care if you really, really, REALLY want to believe that eating a graham cracker is the same as eating a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal.

The only way to lose the weight (diet-wise) is to cut out the processed foods, especially those with sugar or sweeteners added, and stick with a whole foods, unprocessed diet.  There’s no real way around it.  So instead of lying to yourself and getting frustrated with not getting any results, simply focus on changing your habits to match up with what works in reality.

In the meantime, I’m going to buy these moronic researchers a bicycle and tell them to pretend it’s a rocket ship.  So they can go straight to the Moon and stop making such stupid claims.

Stay healthy!

Source: http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2010/07/23/Sneaking-in-whole-grains-via-snacks/UPI-82061279937609/

Science stubbed its toe again today, as researchers leapt to an incorrect conclusion on the basis of vague data concerning how effective antioxdiants are in helping folks with rheumatoid arthritis (RA).

This is an unfortunately common occurence, my friends. Everyone seems to be in such a rush to get published, that they’re willing to shout out a “finding” from a poorly designed or flawed study.

The study in question is the Nurses’ Health Study, which tracks a humongous number of nurses (over 100,000) over the last several decades.  Now, that may sound pretty cool (and it really is), but big giant studies like that can have a number of problems, the biggest of which is that they’re typically very vague. 

It’s hard to figure out specific reasons or mechanisms with that many numbers, so these studies are usually mostly effective in identifying general trends that smaller, tighter studies can follow up on in more detail.

Yeah.  These researchers didn’t do that.  They just announced that antioxidant intake didn’t help RA, which isn’t what they found at all.

You see, the biggest problem was this.  “Antioxidant intake” wasn’t actually measured.  They guessed.  They guessed how much antoxidants were in someone’s diet, based on self-report.  If there’s one thing I learned through a bazillion classes on psychological research design (that was my undergrad degree) it’s this: YOU CANNOT TRUST SELF-REPORT.

People lie.  They forget.  They embellish.  They’re just plain wrong sometimes.  So asking someone to tell you how much antioxidants they think they took or ate, reeeeeeeeally isn’t all that accurate.

Plus, they only included four of the basic antioxidants (A, C, E, and selenium), none of which belong to the powerful polyphenol class of antioxidants.  Browse through the articles I’ve written in the “Antioxidants” section of the “Supplements” category, and you’ll see that a lot of the antioxidants that have the most dramatic effects are the polyphenols like resveratrol and pycnogenol.  These antioxidants weren’t even checked.

So, a vague guess at intake of a partial list of antioxidants led researchers to believe that antioxidants don’t help RA.  Gee.  Thanks, guys.  How about the next time you go to the doctor, he forms a diagnosis on partial blood work he thinks he remembers reading a few weeks ago?

Go back to the drawing board, Science, and let me know when you’ve got something better for me.

Source:http://health.yahoo.net/news/s/nm/us_health_antioxidants

So I came across this article on fish oils posted on msnbc.com and got so angry that my shaved head began to emit steam (it happens, sometimes).  If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a poorly designed scientific study.  If there’s one thing I hate more, it’s when people misinterpret that study’s results, and even worse, plant a deceptive headline that’s totally incorrect and misleading.  That’s bad science AND bad journalism.

“Fish oils doesn’t benefit the brain, study shows” goes the headline.  WRONG.  First off, they contradict themselves within a few sentences, by stating that multiple studies HAVE shown a cognitive benefit to fish oils.  But really, it only gets better, when you actually read the details of the study in question.

Basically, they took a bunch of 70-somethings and gave them about 500 mg of fish oils a day for two years.  Then they tested cognition and found no difference.

Let me put this in technical terms first.  NO DUH.

Where do I begin?  Okay, let’s start with the fact that we are using 70-somethings as our test subjects.  Do you think maybe, just maybe, the fact that there was no difference in cognition MIGHT just be because we’re using an elderly population?  I know it may not be PC to say that the older brain just don’t adapt as quickly as young ones, but sorry, it’s true.  So any decline in mental function has already occurred, and could be permanent no matter what you give them.  This is like putting on your seat belt AFTER an accident and declaring that seat belts don’t do squat.  If you really want to test if fish oils will prevent cognitive decline, then you must PREVENT cognitive decline, as in, pick much younger test subjects, and give them fish oils, and see how they do.

Then there’s the issue of dosage.  500 mg?  Really?  That’s nothing!  A typical recommended dosage for a healthy, young person is 1000 mg of fish oil, just as a health maintenance sort of issue.  I take 3000 mg a day.  Why?  Because I’m Healthy Andy, that’s why!  And because fish oils are super-fantastically healthy for you!

The point is, they gave these people a miniscule dose, and were shocked when it didn’t perform miracles on a 75-year old brain.  REALLY.  This just in, folks.  In a related story, fish oils are not magic beans, that will grow into an enormous beanstalk leading you to a land of adventure and excitement.  In case you were wondering.

How about we actually design a study that makes sense?  Say, use a realistically sufficient dose of fish oils, on a population that might actually be able to PREVENT decline… you know, BEFORE it occurs?

Guess what?  If you never change the oil in your car, and let all that engine wear and tear accumulate, and then at 100,000 miles start changing the oil, don’t expect a dramatic increase in engine performance. All this study proves, is that a very low dose of fish oils doesn’t dramatically reverse the consequences of aging in the 75 year brain.  Shocking.

Of course, that finding is accurately depicted in the headline oh WAIT.  No, it isn’t.  The headline suggests that fish oils have been definitively proven to be useless for issues of cognition, which, of course, is crap.  Way to go, Journalist Guy.  Because nobody just reads a headline, skims past the article, and assumes the headline is accurate.  Yeah.  Nobody.

Okay, now I’ve vented and the steam is starting to dissipate from my head.  The real truth is, fish oils have been proven over and over again to be an essential part of a healthy lifestyle.  It’s pretty staggering, actually, how many studies have been done showing all kinds of health benefits from fish oils.  So don’t let headlines fool you, or poorly designed studies steer you astray.

Of course, that’s why I’m here- to help sift through the nonsense and bring you the real deal.  Stay healthy!

Oh, I saw the article here-

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36832338/ns/health-aging