Why Don't We Have More Omega-3s Added to Our Foods?

For all the amazing amount of confirmed health benefits of omega-3 fatty acids coming out of years of clinical research, you might think food manufacturers would be falling all over themselves to add it into food and drinks.

You would be wrong.

It is crystal clear that the lack of omega-3s in our diets are hurting us … badly. Because we don’t eat enough of the foods that contain omega-3s (cold-water fish, chia, flax seeds, walnuts, olive oil, etc.), we’re far more susceptible to everything from heart disease and stroke, to cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, even rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

Most people are not going to be eating two big servings of salmon a week, which might just about bring them up to the minimum amount needed to be useful to their bodies. Fish oil and krill oil producers have for a long time now had technologies to make the omega-3s in their products tasteless, odorless and capable of being added to things like dairy and beverages and bread, so that people who aren’t able to afford supplements or don’t know about their importance could get a leg up on disease by simply ingesting fortified foods.

But North America food producers just haven’t been interested. One major figure among fish-oil producers, Robert Orr, chairman of Ocean Nutrition, puts it this way:

“Nutrition costs money, particularly in North America. Europe respects the nutritional value of food, but in North America we are addicted to food as energy. We’ve got the most efficient food distribution system on the planet … but what we’re eating the most of are things like high fructose corn syrup. Clearly the chronic disease situation is due to our food system.”

Forty years of advertising and buying food cheaply from outlets like WalMart and Costco have allowed us to think that cheaper is good – you can still buy a liter of Coca Cola for 99 cents, while a gallon of milk is about $3.50. If you’re watching your budget, the choice is an easy one, even if it is costly to your health.

The problem, according to those in the industry, is that food companies haven’t been any good at conveying a health message to consumers. When consumers began demanding better foods, the food companies focused on “lesser evil” marketing – reduced fat, reduced salt, more fiber, and so on. The problem, if you’re paying attention, is that many of these foods are processed and very high in carbohydrates, sugars, and worse. So consumers are being misled into thinking they are buying healthy products, when in fact they are simply buying health problems.

Unfortunately, it will likely be 4-5 years before we begin to see omega-3 fortified foods proliferate on grocery store shelves. Unless the American public begins demanding it from the food companies.

Let’s Compare Krill Oil and Fish Oil

Is there really any difference?

You may have heard about krill oil by now. Krill are the tiny crustaceans being harvested in the Antarctic for fish food and for their oil, which is used in supplements for humans. People are beginning to wonder if oil is better for you than fish oil.

Krill oil is another rich source of omega-3s, beyond fish oil and vegetarian sources such as hemp and chia. Krill oil also contains phospholipids and astaxanthin, a powerful antioxidant. Antioxidants enter your blood and scavenge for DNA-damaging free radicals. Free radicals are formed when a molecule in your cells loses an electron. This can be triggered by the presence of environmental factors, such as pollution, radiation, herbicides or smoking (among many other agents). Free-radical activity can even be triggered by consumption of excessive calories, such as those found in simple sugars.

Free radicals are unstable and they try to steal their needed electron from another compound ­– a method used to gain stability. The compound from which the electron is stolen sometimes becomes another free radical, which can begin a chain reaction that will damage living cells, something that accumulates with age.

The phospholipids found in krill oil are the stuff of which our cell walls are made. The phospholipids found in krill oil are also rapidly absorbed into our bodies. Fatty acids bound to the phospholipids are fed into a complex signaling cascade known as the eicosanoid system, which regulates a bewildering array of the body’s functions.

So is krill oil any better than fish oil?

… or is krill oil any better for you than an algae-based (vegetarian) omega-3? It depends on what you want.

First, let’s explain some of the terms we’ll be using. Phospholipids are made up of two fatty acids, which are bound through a phosphate link to the essential nutrient choline. Choline is really important for your brain. The fatty acids from cold-water marine creatures like krill are often omega-3 fatty acids. Therefore, the phosphatidylcholine from krill has a unique benefit to structures like the brain, and can enhance attributes like mental sharpness.

Many of the fats we ingest from food, vegetable oils, and fish are in the form of triglycerides. Tri means “three,” and triglycerides have three fatty acids bound to a simple backbone. Triglycerides are a source of energy for our bodies, containing twice much energy as carbohydrates or proteins. However, triglycerides cannot pass through cell membranes freely. Special enzymes on the walls of blood vessels called lipoprotein lipases must break down triglycerides into free fatty acids and glycerol. High levels of triglycerides in the body are linked to atherosclerosis (vascular disease), heart disease, and stroke.

While there is some excellent information about sources of omega-3 fatty acids on the web, there is a great deal of writing that is focused on selling a specific brand of product. This makes it tough for us regular folks who are looking for all the promised benefits of taking omega-3 supplements to figure out what to spend our money on.

Perhaps the following chart will shed some light on the subject. Without endorsing any particular form of omega-3 supplements, let’s illustrate some simple comparisons between several of the forms in which omega-3s come – fish oil, algae oil and krill oil.

OMEGA-3S SOURCE COMPARISON
	Fish oil	Algae oil	Krill oil
CONTENTS
EPA	x	x	x
DHA	x	x	x
Choline			x
Phospholipids			x
Astaxanthin			x
Triglycerides	x	x

You are likely to read that a typical fish-oil capsule contains more DHA and EPA than a capsule of krill oil. This is true, but you are less likely to hear that the EPA and DHA in krill oil are bonded to phospholipids, which have unique attributes in human biology. There are several studies now underway that examine the potential bioavailability benefits of phospholipid-based omega-3 fatty acids.

As yet, the body of scientific research on krill oil is presently much smaller than the research on sources of omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil. But you can read the summaries of several such krill-oil studies here, here and here.

James Townsend is editor in chief of WellWise.org, a nonprofit organization for the dissemination of science-based information about supplements, nutrients and strategies for health.

Will Your Multivitamin Kill You?

Pardon the sensationalistic headline, but I am making a point of how the old formula of “playing the fear card” is still considered effective by mass media, in politics as well as something as basic as food and nutrition. I just watched an MSNBC video from The Today Show titled “The Truth About Supplements.”

The title of the segment itself is crafted to create doubt, and the related link that runs across the bottom of the screen is even more explicit: “5 Truths, Lies about the Vitamins in Your Life.” The guest on the segment is Dr. David Katz, a celebrity physician and a Yale physician who reiterates a Reader’s Digest article (the “related link” above), that basically says you’re wasting your money on vitamins and that they may even be dangerous. I can’t imagine what Katz is reading beyond Reader’s Digest, but every day I read scientific studies that come to an opposite conclusion.

Katz claims that it is a “myth” that vitamins can protect against heart disease or cancer. I haven’t seen a lot in the scientific literature about multiple vitamins being studied for prevention of these common killers, but I just came across one today in Medical News Today from the American Association for Cancer Research, about a study on vitamins and calcium supplementation reported on at the organization’s annual conference. Jaime Matta, Ph.D., a professor in the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico, said about the study, “It is not an immediate effect. You don't take a vitamin today and your breast cancer risk is reduced tomorrow. However, we did see a long-term effect in terms of breast cancer reduction.”

Then there is the study I referred to in my last blog about omega-3s reducing breast cancer risk by 25 per cent.

To be fair, Katz does say in the end of the interview not to “throw out the baby with the bath water.” He correctly says that we’re all deficient in vitamin D, recommends a minimum of 1,000IU, and that more and more he is recommending krill oil to his patients.

So he’s not against supplementation, as it were, only taking multivitamins … unless they are whole-food vitamins. Makes me wonder if he has a thriving business on the side selling whole-food supplements.

Good news for women’s hearts

Yet another study of the health benefits of omega-3's, this one published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. This was no small study: The Swedish Mammography Cohort analyzed data from 36,234 women over the course of 18 years, 651 of whom experienced heart failure. The researchers found that those women with the highest intake of fatty fish (fish with high amounts of omega-3s) reduced their risk of heart failure by a minimum of 25 percent.

Now compare that with the latest attempt by AstraZeneca to sell its cholesterol- lowering drug Crestor to healthy people, those with perfectly normal cholesterol, written up in the New York Times.

In the studies that the Food and Drug Administration based its approval of Crestor for this expanded use for healthy people, the rate of heart attacks experienced by people who a sugar pill (placebo) was 0.37 percent, it 68 patients out of 8,901 who took the sugar pill. Among those in the study who took Crestor, 0.17 percent, or 31 patients, had heart attacks. That 55 percent relative difference between the two groups translates to only 0.2 percentage points in absolute-- or 2 people out of 1,000.

As the New York Times article said, "Stated another way, 500 people would need to be treated with Crestor for a year to avoid one usually survivable heart attack... At $3.50 a pill, the cost of prescribing Crestor to 500 people for a year would be $680,000 to prevent one heart attack."

So which makes more sense, eating fatty fish once a week (or taking an omega-3 supplement such as fish oil or krill oil), or taking an expensive statin drug that has well-documented side effects?

Read more of the latest wellness news at WellWise.org.