First, a headline relevancy rant: the headline here is both vague and misleading. "Researcher: 1970s Inuit heart disease fish oil study flawed" maintains the word count of CBC's article while conveying far more information. The headline as chosen is akin to a headline in a Poughkeepsie, NY, newspaper headline "3 killed in house fire" ... where the fire in question turns out to have been in Osaka, Japan. A human tragedy, yes. Likely highly relevant to most in Poughkeepsie? No. Would those with friends or relatives in Osaka be better served by the more accurate headline? Yes. As given the headline is linkbait -- it fails to provide sufficient context to determine whether or not the article is worth reading.
Fish oil has been tied to multiple benefits, not just heart disease. Claiming a blanket lack of efficacy for fish oil supplementation presumes that 1) there is no heart disease benefit (all we know is that there are methodological errors in the Inuit study) and that there are no other health reasons for supplementing with fish oil. From the Wikipedia article, identified (all specifically tied to studies).
But there is a new study ... and the new study is the important part of the article. This new study found more or less the opposite result of the old study.
A study or even a few does not prove anything. There are just too many ways to get it wrong. You need multiple high quality studies that all agree before you can be sure. And even then a small chance will remain that it is a statistical mirage that will be disproven by a future high quality study. Sorry to let you down but that is the nature of medical research.
My point isn't that the claims are all proven. I was pointing out that the Wikipedia claims are sourced to actual research papers, rather than some random blog (or worse: some random supplement sales site).
What this addresses is TFA's claim that fish oil has no benefits based on an analysis of one study concerning one claimed benefit. That claim is just as unsubstantiated as it claims the Inuit study benefits are.
the article focuses on the cardiovascular benefits... which appear to have been self-propagated by some adhoc "because x study says it helps!" without anyone doing critical thinking on their own part.
Unfortunately it isn't apparent that that is the the focus until you look at where the article is hosted. So I'll vehemently agree with your initial observation that the original title is link-bait at best.
There are many studied and documented benefits of fish oil. This hardly "puts a nail in the coffin" for the supplement but hopefully it gets people thinking and some more studies funded so we can get a better picture.
Of course if our food just had a better omega-3 :omega-6 ratio we'd be in a situation where the supplement wouldn't be the necessary...
Fish oil has been tied to multiple benefits, not just heart disease. Claiming a blanket lack of efficacy for fish oil supplementation presumes that 1) there is no heart disease benefit (all we know is that there are methodological errors in the Inuit study) and that there are no other health reasons for supplementing with fish oil. From the Wikipedia article, identified (all specifically tied to studies).
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