Seth’s blog

A WSJ article doesn’t reach much of an answer:

Hardly a month goes by without a study suggesting that the omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil can fend off disease — including heart attacks, strokes, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, psoriasis and even attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

The problem is, to get the health benefits seen in clinical trials, you probably need to take fistfuls of capsules.

“The kind of benefits seen in most of the clinical trials with omega-3 generally have involved much higher doses than you see recommended on supplement labels,” says Charles Serhan, a Harvard Medical School expert on omega-3’s activity.

Which raises a little-discussed point. For practical purposes, it’s not enough to show that a drug works; you also need to find out the minimum dose that produces near-optimal results. In layman-speak, you need to find “the right dose.” Studies that compare drug and placebo are no help; much better would be studies that compare dosages (e.g., Group A gets one dose, Group B gets a different dose).

Here are three more useful comments:

1. I found that about 3 Tablespoons/day of flaxseed oil was enough to produce the best brain performance. As I’ve said, the amount that optimizes brain performance is likely to be a good amount for everything else. For the same reason that the best voltage pattern for your TV is likely to be a good voltage pattern for your other electrical appliances.

2. You can choose the minimum dose of fish oil that makes your gums perfectly pink. The transition from reddish gums (a sign of inflammation) to pink gums (no inflammation) takes about a week.

3. You can do mental tests to choose your dose, as I have done. The big problem here is practice effects — you will get better at the test just from doing it. So you will need several weeks of doing the test before the practice effects become small. You have to be a little bit sophisticated at data analysis — at least, able to plot your data — to take this approach.

In the future I can imagine people repeatedly measuring their mental ability with short (2-3 minute) tests, just as diabetics measure their blood sugar today.

Thanks to Santosh Anagol.

Yesterday I knocked something off a table and caught it before it fell very far. “Nice catch,” said an observer. I too was surprised. Today the same thing happened. Something fell and I surprised myself by catching it. I think it’s the omega-3. Tests showed that flaxseed oil reduces my “simple reaction time” — the time to push a button as quickly as possible in response to a signal.

Tom commented on my earlier post on this topic:

I imagine that the lady you met must have been newly diagnosed. I have had ulcerative colitis since 1996. Most of the people that I know with u.c. take omega-3, though perhaps more commonly as fish oil. All of my gastroenterologists have agreed that it can be a useful adjunct to other therapies. In fact, one of the drug companies is developing a supplement drink that combines omega-3’s with the soft fiber found in bananas, vitamin D and some other foods that are very beneficial to u.c., but hard to get in the right propotions. In general though, doctors seem reluctant to recommend diet-only solutions. I have a relatively mild case, but have had two bad flare ups. Consequently I take two of the drugs listed in addition to fish oil. I am hopeful that one day I will get off the other meds, but for now I just take a very low dose of the drugs thanks largely, based on my self-experimentation, to the omega-3s.

The lady I met (who had ulcerative colitis) had had the problem for 14 years. She had not previously heard of using flaxseed oil. “This is your lucky day,” I told her, not because I told her to try flaxseed oil but because I could tell her a good dose (at least 2 T/day). How much is crucial information.

It is very difficult to do experiments, even self-experiments, that measure the effect of different doses of flaxseed oil on ulcerative colitis. I’m sure they haven’t been done. It was her lucky day because I’m pretty sure I was the only person in the world who could have told her with confidence what dose to take. (Which I could do because of the optimize brain –> optimize body principle.) The gastroenterologists who recommend omega-3 as useful additions — they couldn’t say what the best dose is. The drug company making a supplement drink can’t say what the best dose is.

Until you know the best dose of a drug or nutrient — the one that delivers the largest possible effect — you are very likely to underestimate its effectiveness. If Tom starts using a large-enough dose of flaxseed oil he may no longer need other medications.

The press release had a curious title: “Omega-3 fatty acids protect against Parkinson’s.” The certainty suggested an experiment, but Parkinson’s is too rare to study prevention experimentally. The press release turned out to be about a rat study that used a drug called MDPT to cause brain damage that resembles Parkinson’s. Rats given a high-omega-3 diet suffered much less damage — apparently none — from the drug.

Rats given the high omega-3 diet had much less omega-6 in their brains than control rats — one more reason, in addition to the Israeli Paradox, to think that omega-6 may be just as bad as omega-3 is good. Omega-3 may act by displacing omega-6 (they are almost identical physically).

The results could have been taken to suggest both (a) eat more omega-3-rich foods, such as fish and (b) eat less omega-6-rich foods, such as most nuts and vegetable oils, but only the first recommendation reached the public.

At the November meeting of the Psychonomic Society, a group of experimental psychologists, I gave a 15-minute talk (PowerPoint) about my omega-3 research. (Anyone know how to add audio to a PowerPoint file?) Almost all the data in the talk I’ve posted here, but it had one not-blogged idea, which I summarize like this:

optimize brain –> optimize body

The intake level of a nutrient that optimizes brain function should be close to the level that optimizes the function of everything else. In particular, the omega-3 intake that makes the brain work best should be close to the level that makes the rest of the body work best. This is because the brain and the rest of the body are bathed in the same blood.

It is easy to see why this is so. I have many electrical appliances: clock, telephone, TV, microwave, refrigerator, laser printer. In spite of vastly different innards and functions, all of them run best when their electrical supply is very close to house current. The electric current that makes my laser printer work best is very close to the electric current that makes my refrigerator work best. Of course, this is by design. LIkewise, the different parts of our body, although doing vastly different things, have all been adjusted by evolution to work best with the nutritional equivalent of house current. Just as we might study laser printers to learn what current to use with our refrigerator, we can study the brain to learn what nutrients optimize immune function.

This is a new idea in nutrition (at least, new to me). It is supported by and explains some of the most interesting data I’ve posted. It explains why Tyler Cowen’s gums got so much better so quickly — because he was taking almost exactly the best amount of flaxseed oil for his gums. Tyler chose his intake of flaxseed oil based on my behavioral data, which suggested the best amount was between 2 and 3 tablespoons/day. The gums and the brain could hardly be more different, but the best level for the brain turned out to do a wonderful job of healing his gums. Same thing with Anonymous and sports injuries.

By the way, this shows the scientific value of blogging. My gums got better, too, but not as impressively as Tyler’s. I didn’t have a lot of injuries to heal. The big improvements noticed by Tyler and Anonymous were “accidents” (unintended consequences). Science thrives on accidents; blogging, it turns out, is a new way to generate them.