For those who want a concise explanation of what is wrong with the
"science" behind omega 3 claims:
The professional nutritional literature points out how dangerous omega
3s can be. New studies, however, do not pay any attention to how long
animals live if they are fed diets high in omega 3s. Instead, they
look for "markers" considered "bad." If the omega 3s lower the amount
of these markers, they can claim that omega 3s are "good." Few, if
any, of these studies determine whether animals actually live longer
when fed a high omega 3 diet. Few, if any, of these studies compare
several different diets, but instead just compare a high safflower diet
to one of a mixture of safflower oil and fish oil. Why not feed a
group fresh coconut oil as their source of fat, for example, since it
is undeniable that people on diets high in coconut products have hardly
any "chronic disease?"
The "markers" are mostly due to too much arachidonic acid (an omega 6
polyunsaturated fatty acid), which is due to too much consumption of
oils like safflower, sunflower, corn, vegetable, soybean, etc. When
you switch to a mixture of safflower and fish oil, for example, you
will get less of the "bad markers" that come from thee omega 6s, but
you also get new molecules that are probably more dangerous than the
old ones (due to the fact that fish oil is more biochemically unstable
than safflower oil, and how young animals fed fish oil died in the old
experiments that actually waited to see how long the animals lived).
However, in most of these studies, they only look for certain markers,
and so what they are doing is creating a false conclusion. Most people
would rather have a long and healthy life, regarless of what "markers"
are in their bodies. On the other hand, who would want to die young,
but have wonderful "markers?" This is the Alice in Wonderland world
these "researchers" are inhabiting these days. They are told that
certain markers are good, while others are bad, and they never question
whether this makes sense or in fact is false. They also tend to ignore
old studies, and for some of these people, anything done in the 1990s
is too old to take seriously, so you can see how such a sad state of
affairs came to pass. They won't look at the old material, which
determined actual mortality, but instead just focus on markers of "ill
health," which are really just markers of arachidonic acid overload.
Many things can attenuate arachiodonic acid overload, but not all of
them are safe. Fish oil is one of the least unhealthy ways of
attenuating arachidonic acid overload. And as I've said many times
before, all you need to do to confirm this is to get some really
inexpensive mice and feed them a few different diets, and see which
group lives longer. It would take a few hundred dollars, but instead,
we get these highly misleading (and much more expensive) studies of
"markers."