@greenwitch I was still waiting on the numbers on that claim. 
OK!
Good for your daughter BunsenBurner. That must have been terrifying and satisfying all at once.
It’s not unreasonable to think that fish oil supplements can have beneficial health effects in some people. Two FDA-approved drugs Lovaza and Vascepa have been shown in large, blinded, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials to significantly reduce the blood triglyceride concentrations in people with elevated levels. And there is abundant evidence that having elevated triglycerides is a risk factor for heart disease. Lovaza has been on the market longer and its prescription sales are now over $1 billion per year. Apparently a lot of doctors find that they help some of their patients. And both drugs are basically glorified fish oil.
Now I suspect that the reason the meta-analyses haven’t shown any big heart health benefit for non-prescription fish oil is that the benefit for the patients who are helped gets swamped out by the thousands of healthy patients who don’t have high triglycerides in the first place. Lowering theirs isn’t going to help them much. But not finding a benefit for thousands of healthy people doesn’t mean that they are worthless. It just means that they won’t help people who don’t need them.
Like any other drug, you gotta use fish oil properly if you want it to work.
Wow, @BunsenBurner your daughter is a hero! You raised her extra good!
It was a team effort, but she said her lifeguard training kicked in with the adrenalin. I know how horrifying it feels - I once rescued a kid from the bottom of a swimming pool.
Anyway, a sweeping recommendation of drinking 8 glasses of water a day seems to be a total crock, not supported by any scientific rationale. Here is an interesting collection of scientific publications related to water:
http://www.elsevier.com/connect/8-facts-and-myths-about-water
It is always beneficial to have a common sense. Common sense may be (as one example) based on few thousands of years of dietary preferences and certain life styles that produced certain very obvious results. If a latest diet craze does not coincide with the ones that have positive influence based on our human history, then most likely it is going to be proven wrong. Eating simple natural foods that are not over-processed make sense to me. It is my preference anyway as I do not like to cook and also do not like to go out and I hate TV dinners. If you are like me, then you are forced to consume lots of fruit and vegies with some protein foods that takes few minutes in a oven. Well, there is no guarantee in anything any more as bad stuff is added to everything before we touch it. We can only strive to minimize our own negative impact on our own body, we cannot be perfect…
Re: BMI being used because it is convenient
Perhaps waist / height would be just as convenient, unlike hydrostatic body fat measurement. But it seems that most people have a mindset of weight, not waist, being the main measure of obesity.
I agree with you on that, ucb. It also wouldn’t hurt for more to be aware of waist sizes since large amounts of belly fat has its dangers.
I was speaking specifically about hydration in HEALTHY people. Obviously dehydration in people who are ill or malnourished is a serious, life-threatening problem.
speaking of false beliefs, what is the US Preventative Services Task Force?
I suppose sponsored by the insurance companies to cut care to women under 50?
http://q13fox.com/2015/07/10/doctors-call-new-mammogram-guidelines-distressing/
I guess this is actually funded by taxpayers.
Of all the places to make budget cuts.
It is hard to separate out fact from fiction and figure out the right things to do, and the hype from the reality. For example, the whole ‘gluten free’ mania. For people with celiac disease or gluten sensitivity this is a real issue, but that covers a relative few percent of people. Others point out, rightfully, that cutting down wheat products can be beneficial to health, especially weight, which is true, but you can do that without ‘gluten free’.
One of the bigger things today is the so called Paleo diet, that argues that we are eating things we aren’t supposed to be, that our ancestors didn’t eat grains, that we genetically are meant to eat certain things, etc. A lot of what the Paelo people say make sense, they for example emphasize eating non processed foods, to have a diet heavy in vegetables, protein and to cut down or eliminate grains,and as a diet plan that is pretty healthy. The problem is they also take it too far in my opinion and stretch facts versus ideology. So called Paleo man of 10,000 years ago ate what they could get,and while most of their diet would be what they could forage, hunt or scavenge, they did eat things like beans and legumes. They may not have eaten olives, but that doesn’t mean as they claim man can’t digest those items, human beings have evolved over 6+ million years and we are omnivores, and I suspect over that time we developed a wide range of abilities to eat different foods. The idea that we should only eat what they ate is kind of problematic, especially since by then humans had expanded to cover a lot of the globe, and every climate was different. The fact that people could survive in all those areas says something towards flexibility of our bodies. I think that the idea of paleo, of eating non processed foods is great, of limiting certain things is great, but using a ‘scientific’ argument that isn’t just muddies the waters. Bean and legumes are good for you, and grains in limited amounts have benefits, and to me it is a crime not to eat olives or cheese (in moderation) cause our ancestors probably didn’t eat them:)
Also, the plants that we eat today didn’t exist in their current form 10,000 or more years ago. You can’t help but be eating the products of many thousands of years of human agriculture.
Exactly greenwitch.
Growers have increased protein in wheat because that brings a higher price.
But higher protein brings less digestibility for some people.
Two hundred years ago, food had a smaller footprint.
Its not local anymore.
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/10/10/curious-case-chinese-chicken-import-export-business-273699.html
“So called Paleo man of 10,000 years ago ate what they could get,and while most of their diet would be what they could forage” of course they did and they lived maybe to 18 years old. I would not do what caveman did.
While we’re on the subject of agricultural products, science & false beliefs, what’s the feeling on genetically modified (GM) crops. I just watched a BBC news report on poor farmers in india being given GM insect-resistant eggplant seeds for free. No profit motive.
GlaxoSmithKline certainly was happy to make millions on Lovaza, the drug company version of fish oil. It is about $3500 per year out of pocket for most people.
It is virtually identical to the large bottle of OTC supplements one can buy at Sam’s Club, which would require one to take 11 per day to get the same dosage as the 4 Lovaza recommended. So that cost would be $18, out of pocket to take the supplement.
Of course, good supplements have a nasty way of disappearing from the shelves as soon as the pharmaceutical companies want to monetize them.
There actually is generally a profit motive because modified seeds may need more water/ nutrients & require pesticides to grow.
And guess who sells the chemicals? Monsanto!
@@
http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/08/12/india-sues-monsanto-over-genetically-modified-eggplant/
@emeraldkity,
The whole point of the eggplant strain was that it uses LESS PESTICIDE.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/05/gm-crop-bangladesh-bt-brinjal
I may be unpopular, but I’m all in favor of genetically modified crops that allow for a reduction in pesticide use. Or higher yields, resulting in more efficient crops. I think a lot of the opposition is based on hysteria. (Ducks to avoid the tomatoes being thrown at me.)
Can I join you in the tomato attack shelter, nottelling? There is a GMO, and then there is a GMO. Not all generically modified plants are created equal.
A side note. For some reason, human gene therapy was all the investor rage in the late 90’s -early 2000’s. Imagine, GM humans with an artificially added copy of a gene that makes the protein which has been missing and causing some horrid metabolic syndrome? Frankensteins among us!!! It did not pan out quickly, and the VC community is not tolerant of long-term projects like that, so they went back to funding apps.