And there's a reason behind my local pharmacy offering THC-focused or CBD-focused pot, and my local supplements store offering DHA-focused and EPA-focused softgels, produced by the same company and under the same brand. How these these products act varies by active substances content and the person. Both "Omega 3" and "marihuana" are dumbed-down terms, meaningless when it comes to studies or papers.

There's a ton of studies on nih.gov about EPA's potential as an antidepressant, misaligned with DHA-related articles on the subject, that I could link. But I can say - purely anecdotally - that I removed psypost.org feed from my RSS reader a few months after ChatGPT became public.

There's a whole lot of work between this study and anything actionable other than for planning further research to confirm and better understand the effect, and whatever more general problems psypost.com may have, reporting the source of the effect as "Omega-3" is both consistent with the paper and not overly general given the actual facts.

[0] Linked from the story, but: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235228952...

You mostly only find THC/CBD/etc in marijuana; and we mostly only consume marijuana to get those particular active ingredients into our bodies. So you can forget about "marijuana" as a category for describing those compounds, and just speak of the compounds themselves — measure marijuana strains by the presence of those active ingredients; extract and purify one particular active ingredient and sell it; etc. Doing this doesn't lose you anything; in fact, it's a pure win, as the use of precise language gives people a tool to leverage to more precisely ask for the effect they're looking for, and gives suppliers a tool to more precisely describe what they're selling.

While the omega-3 constituent compounds can be treated this way, they are not solely a thing we extract or synthesize to put in precise-molarity-per-dose pills; they're also a thing found in food. Many different foods; with most of them being foods people eat for reasons beyond just getting omega-3s in their bodies. In other words, the "omega-3" constituent compounds are nutrients.

And many of these omega-3-containing foods — fish, for example — aren't carefully cultivated species that have known ratios of the omega-3 constituent compounds that could be put on the label of the food-product. Rather, the ratio of those constituent compounds is pretty much random per individual food item. One salmon at the grocery store has omega-3 fats which happen to be high in DHA, while the next salmon beside it in the same cooler display is higher in EPA. All you can in general about a food product — all a supplier can say, and all a food shopper can generally expect to look for — is a food that is "high in omega-3s."

As long as people are interested in optimizing their health in a loose manner by eating "healthful foods" — rather than taking specifically-formulated supplements — I don't expect they'll let go of the generic categorical term "omega-3." When it comes to food, "it contains omega-3s" is almost always the tightest bound you can put on the "nutritional value" of a given food.

In fact while in Japan I used to specifically select my bags of dried sardine (niboshi) and mackerel cans by the content of EPA and DHA, clearly indicated in mg per 100g. Every such products had these indications with content varying by brands.

I guess that if you master your process you can ensure and advertise a consistent quality.

The problem with large, wild-caught fish, is that different fish are going to be living in slightly-different regions, or migrating through given regions at slightly-different times, and so eating different things; and so will have more or less of any given nutrient coming from those things in their bodies.

If you're catching large swarms/schools of fish, all the fish in a given school will be mostly identical in their nutritional content. And so, if you're doing some bulk operation like canning or drying, and you're doing it on fish that swarm/school and get caught as whole swarms/schools (such as sardine or mackerel) — then, for each catch delivered to your plant by a fishing vessel, you can take a few samples from that catch to get a sense of the average micronutrient values of that catch; and then you can store these catches separately, titrating together the different catches into each processed mixture, to achieve the a steady nutritional value in the result. (This is roughly the same thing that e.g. orange juice companies do with the truckloads of oranges they buy to achieve a consistent output juice product.)

But if you're just buying e.g. one salmon, then it came through an entirely different logistics pipeline to get to you — either an "independent" one where a small-time fisherman sold some fish directly to a local fishmonger, who then sold it directly to a local grocer, a few fish at a time; or a "big chain" one where a stream of flash-frozen fish from fishing vessels is being just-in-time streamed out to various grocery stores. (This lack of a fan-in processing step for raw large fish is also why grocers end up with so much mislabelled fish; the guy who works at a fish processing plant near the fishery will recognize all the fish that fishery tends to pull out of the water; but there's no similar expert in the meat department of a random grocery store in Idaho — in fact, that person might not even know which fishery the fish they're receiving came from!)

Both are necessary for most people, especially for males and for older people, because the inter-conversions between the various omega-3 fatty acids are done inefficiently by humans.

The other omega-3 fatty acids do not have known functions, except as sources of DHA and EPA, after an enzymatic conversion.

I have severe chronic dry eye, and omega 3 is one of the first things they recommend. But then in the past 5 or 6 years there have been a bunch of studies that have shown there is no actual measurable effect.

Some people still claim that it helps, but that you have to get it by actually eating Omega 3 rich fish, and not just taking the supplements. Either way, I've never seen any difference with my dry eye symptoms.

"Fish oil helped save our son" https://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/19/health/fish-oil-brain-inj...

> Most of the studies about omega-3 for traumatic brain injury are in animals, but they indicate potential for healing the human brain.

> After a trauma, the brain tends to swell, and the connections between some nerve cells can become damaged, while other cells simply die.

> National Institutes of Health research suggests that omega-3 fatty acids may inhibit cell death and could be instrumental for reconnecting damaged neurons.

> Another recent study revealed genes that are activated to contain massive damage – especially inflammation – when the brain is injured. What activates those genes: omega-3.

> “We have strong data that suggest omega-3 will activate good proteins to cope with brain damage and turn off proteins that cause neuroinflammation,” said Dr. Nicolas Bazan, director of the Neuroscience Center of Excellence at LSU Health in New Orleans and author of the study.

> Bailes consulted with a fish oil expert and eventually decided that administering 20 grams a day of omega-3 fish oil through a feeding tube might repair the myelin sheath. (For comparison: A typical supplemental dose for someone with an uninjured brain is about 2 grams a day.)

Why would I refer to anecdotes from a medical doctor? If this is a real thing, we should be seeing it by now. The article you linked is nearly 15 years old.

People have been eating fish oil capsules in droves over the last two decades. They are readily accessible to people with TBIs. Where are all the miracles?

I skimmed the article, but I didn't see any specific medical terms used. The reason I am curious is because I do not think that mTBI like concussions cause brain swelling since the injury is more of a functional injury than a structural injury.

I like to play ice hockey as an adult, and I try to do everything reasonably possible to protect my brain from vulcanized rubber disks flying at my head at 0 < x 100 mph. Perhaps I will add some fish oil back into my diet. I already uses Lion's Mane, but I am not sure if it truly does anything, but I love the taste of the product I use, so I will continue to use it regardless. Not sure if I have ever had a "real" concussion, but definitely some ringers.

I don't understand. "Trauma" was fairly well defined in physical terms: see Trauma Centers specializing in accident/crime victims.

Psychological "trauma" is only by analogy, and not classical "trauma", and the term is rapidly undergoing its own expansion, to a point where high prices at the grocery store can "traumatize" a sane adult with a social media account.

Your table salt is a pure and translucent white because it's nutritionally worthless. You can season food, but you're not adding any micronutrients. And this is why low-sodium diets became very important: not because the salt itself was harmful, but because its essence has changed!

Salt's name will not inform you whether it's been refined. Sea salt, Himalayan salt, Kosher salt. The key is inspecting it for dark particles and natural impurities. Beware opaque boxes.

Unrefined salt may carry an FDA-mandated warning that claims it doesn't contain iodide, but welcome to Bizarro World, because they don't remove naturally-occurring iodide, but since it hasn't been added back in, they're obligated to deny it.

You should also consider the inestimable value of salt to the ancient world, and perhaps not merely for its preservative uses. Perhaps salt today is uniformly worse than it was thousands of years ago, because all the really good deposits are tapped out?

Salt is one of the many things that is still trading on its "brand name" and reputation, yet it's been replaced by an impostor.

I don't buy the claim that unrefined salt is less worse than refined salt because we're talking about minute amounts of nutrients. You get the nutrients from the food you eat, not the salt you put on it. Do the math and show me otherwise.

Ingesting iodine, much less deliberately fortifying salt for everyone to ingest, is the worst possible way to use it. Ingested iodine can lead to serious trouble, and does not produce the desired effect on the thyroid.

I ordered some potassium iodide from an organic supplement vendor. Indeed, the product directions said to take by mouth. I was directed in no uncertain terms to ignore that. I applied it transdermally.

Transdermal application has great advantage. You can't overdose. The skin will absorb a necessary amount, and no more. Wipe off the excess.

About 20 years ago, an inexperienced but eager PA started me on Levothyroxine for no good reason. It appears that no lasting damage was sustained by my thyroid.

Today, my TSH/T4/T3 levels are completely normal. I've been drug-free for over 12 months. Last week, my PCP agreed that there is no evidence of thyroid dysfunction.

Eye exercises!

Eye tissue is very suspectable to drying and eyes are fed with only one small artery.

This makes simple exercises super effective!

To enforce a routine I use 'safeeyes' on Linux. A mac alternative is EyeLeo (haven't tested). If you have a windows one, please share!

I change settings to have a break every 10 minutes for 15 seconds. Today I'll add a new exercise to do the focus shifting exercise¹, because your dry eye scared me.

It's funny, but in the weeks when I'm not using PC and don't remember to exercise eyes without prompting, I can feel my eyesight degrading and my eyes hurt.

P.S. if you've never trained your eyes, it will hurt the first few time, but it's the good pain, like from stretching. Don't overdo anyway!

¹ focus shifting exercise - taken from Huberman Lab episode on eyesight and preventing myopia: you put a thumb in front of your eyes and focus on it. Then you slowly extend your arm forward, keeping the focus on it. After your arm is stretched, you switch focus to something as close to you as your extended arm and slowly move to different objects (or trace a wall or ground), changing objects when required, until you reach horizon (or furthest possible point). Then you trace back and end up moving your thumb towards your face again. One very good exercise that is missing from safeeyes.

As an aside, you can definitely over-dose on omega-3 which can cause afib, and increase your chance of stroke. I was taking 2 grams per day and definitely had arrhythmia issues. Decreasing the dosage to 500mg per day eliminated the arrhythmia.

By the way, how can you detect arrhythmia? Blood pressure monitor or Apple Watch? General feeling?

The things that work the best for me currently are Systane Hydration PF eye drops, NuLids, Manuka Honey gel, OcuSoft lid scrubs, moving out of a dry climate, and limiting screen time. Inflammation in general causes it to flare up -- diet, lack of sleep, alcohol, stress, staying up late coding or gaming, all seem to cause inflammation and make it worse for me.

I've also done Restasis, Xiidra, Cequa, IPL, Radio Frequency, warm compresses, and punctal plugs, without much success.

I'd like to try autologous tear serum next.

Naturally you have some little bacteria called Demodex on your eyelashes, but they might cause problems. The only way to get rid of them is clean your eyelashes with Teatree extract. I was recommended Blephademodex wipes, which I had to warm up in microwave and then clean my eyes.

All this solutions together made my dry eyes more manageable.

Here's a HN post with a really good top comment that talks about psychological eye strain that really resonated with me, plenty of other advice in there too you might like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34518343

Good luck!

Thank you for the link! It resonates with my experience. I do think there's a psychological aspect of it for me. When I'm depressed or disassociating (which is frequent) it's easy to just stare at a screen and not blink at all.

What worked for me was drinking massive amounts of water throughout the day.

Not so much to cause hyponatremia, of course, but it was a cheap easy way to establish a baseline for me (i.e. helps with dry climates, salty foods, dehydration, etc). And yeah, I tried some of those other things too.

anyway lots of tips online for LPR that are true for me:

* nothing carbonated. this is one of the worst things i can do

* nothing acidic. some fruit juices like pineapple in particular are really, really bad for me. coffee, even with milk and ice and sugar, is also really bad for me. overly acidic foods (vinegar, tomato based stuff, etc) are also bad.

* anything spicy is really bad too

* no caffeine

* stopping eating before i feel full. this is hard for me because i've been a "eat until i'm stuffed" person my entire life and it's really satisfying for me to do so.

* stopping drinking helps but i got symptoms to go away pretty well even with moderate+ levels of drinking. but mostly just sticking to liquor and no cocktails or beer or seltzers. wine seems okay.

* sitting upright after eating for at least an hour or two

* not eating for at least a few hours before bed

* exercise helps a bit but isn't critical for me

* daily allergy pill and nasal spray, even missing one day sucks

dry eyes are my first symptom that i did something "wrong". once i learned to listen to that it helped a ton. if i do "wrong" things for like a week straight, the constant dizziness starts, and if i go on much further than that then the vertigo attacks start.

So we are effectively left with pseudoscience as the only other option, but what would you rather do - sacrifice all of the insight and knowledge we are learning at such a rapid pace in medicine today, just because there's no feasible way to prove it within your lifetime (like, if you wait 20 years for observational studies to show that humans benefit from Omega 3 you will have missed the entire window when it would have been beneficial).

We have to find a balance, but it can't sit at the extreme of requiring everything to meet an impossible bar of scientific proof before we start to benefit from it. But the price to pay is that some of them are not going to pan out.

- Viva Naturals from recommendations and testing (Labdoor)

- Nordic Naturals is a well-known premium brand

frankly I haven't documented, these are just some things out of the top my head

That's why you should get it from seafood and grass fed mammals (if you need long chain PUFAs) or flaxseed (if you need short chain PUFAs).

There are probably many other things in seafood that co-exist with Omega 3 for a reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacopa_monnieri

Also I can drink coffee and won't make any effect on my sleep, while my wife gets the boost. I wouldn't be surprised the effects of all those supplements depend on your body chemistry.

They can't differentiate the population, so all these studies will average zero.

This study used EPA: 0.55 mg/kg/day, and DHA: 0.55 mg/kg/day.

Among the largest I've heard in human studies are things like 4,400mg EPA and 2,200mg DHA.

Examine.com is one of the best resources to understand what evidence shows about supplements.

EPA appears to be the component that works for depression.

Also, important these days, is the quality: it should be filtered from heavy metals, and processed and stored in a way that avoids it going rancid by the time you consume it.

I strongly believe in the benefits of having a higher omega-3:omega-6 ratio than is common nowadays.

I think they are trying to show biological causes by carefully controlling the mice’s entire life and then cracking them open at the end of the study. Can’t really do that with humans.

It also seems pretty low-quality. "Our oil uses some mysterious process labelled 'oil released in 15 minutes' so it's good! Their process uses a grinder and a centrifuge, and look, we added bloodstains and made the centrifuge brown to show how bad that is!"

I didn't notice the color as distracting, the oil actually change color when heated up.

Look if you are interested in your health, there are plenty reputable source of information on cod liver oil.

For instance https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...

> The results indicate that although currently produced fish oils may undergo rigorous purification procedures and show low contaminant levels, cod livers sourced from the Baltic and consumed locally, continue to contribute substantially to the dietary intake of these contaminants.

I would eat about 2/3rds of a pound of raw salmon and notice this effect (which would be like $60 or more at a sushi restaurant). I've done this at least 20 times now and never had any issues.

Generally I don't mention the mental effects of the salmon to people because I feel like they wouldn't take it very seriously, but since you're asking and it's on-topic, I thought I'd share.

I have read though that omega-3 supplements seem to not do much, it's the intake of them dietarily that show results, I'm not sure how current that research is. I've also read that algae as a source might be better? There's a tremendous amount of conflicting information.

afaik that holds for a lot (if not most) commonly used supplements (vitamins are another popular offender). Sometimes the reason is the food matrix effect, where just isolated nutrients are not as beneficial as when they are consumed along with other nutrients. Sometimes (like vitamin D or testosterone), the biomarker is reflective of health status, not predictive.

From this [1] podcast (2y old at this point) I too seem to remember that it doesn't do much most of the time, that supplements are generally untrustworthy w.r.t. dosing and purity and there's also a slight chance of giving yourself afib.

1. https://soundcloud.com/user-344313169/episode-193-fish-oil

I feel the same way about the "Boar's Head" meat recall in the US due to Listeria. 7 million pounds of meat must be disposed of. That means every single one of the pigs died for that meat died for absolutely nothing at all. It just doesn't sit right with me.

Another one is D. over the course of three years i managed to help my wife get above 100ng/ml 25-hydroxy-D on a blood test. Of course every doctor called and said "too high" and her Calcium is too high too, but not from the D3, folks, because she takes K2 Mk7. Her calcium is high because she mostly drinks fortified orange juice and was taking 1200mg calcium per day at the direction of her oncologist. She has a lot of chronic issues and we're slowly trying to mitigate everything possible with diet and supplements. The specialist said "stop calcium immediately" and "reduce D for 1 month" only. for those aware her Ca was 10.9 ("good" range is ~9.0 - 10.2). I guarantee that her calcium will go back to normal because of the K2 between now and her next blood panel. note: they don't actually test D levels unless you ask, in general. One might wonder why that is - i know i certainly do.

In fact, i was just about to go to the pharmacy to get Omega-3 supplements when i saw this post. Her chart shows that she must supplement omega 3, since she won't eat baked salmon. My kid already has vitamins with omegas in them.

What i recommend is actually reading studies - completely - and if you have any questions or doubts, befriend researchers in biology or other life sciences that can skim the paper and tell you "meh" or "hey that's cool". Studies contradict, studies may have bad inputs or methodology, the only way to know for sure is to read as many as you can as thoroughly as you can, and if possible, consult experts. Medical doctors of the "PCP" persuasion are not experts, generally.

> Fish oil supplementation has been noted to be comparable to pharmaceutical drugs (fluoxetine) in majorly depressed persons, but this may be the only cohort that experiences a reduction of depression. There is insufficient evidence to support a reduction of depressive symptoms in persons with minor depression (ie. not diagnosed major depressive disorder)

They give it a B for the research and an effect size of moderate improvement. Also a B with a small effect size for anxiety.

https://examine.com/supplements/fish-oil

I’d note it also says:

> A meta-analysis of 35 small, randomized trials found that fish oil can slightly improve depression when compared to control. However, this improvement may be too small to be noticeable. Also, adding fish oil to antidepressant medication seems to be more beneficial than antidepressant treatment alone

In short, sounds like it’s worth throwing in as an adjunct treatment for people wanting to take a kitchen sink approach

To be fair, this is among the most highly rated things on the entire site - let not the "B" scare you off. A moderate effect size is pretty substantial, all things considered.

I came to the conclusion this diet would help me by noting the polymorphisms in my FADS1 and FADS2 genes linked to needing more long chain PUFAs.

You might also be interested that omega 3 is responsible for making natural Cannabinoid (endocannabinoids) in humans which could be linked to the lower anxiety.

Avoiding vegetable oils (and foods that are cooked with it) and just using coconut oil, tallow, butter etc. reduces my anxiety to the point that it's barely noticeable.

Also knowing how things are encoded in neural networks, where it's a combination of variables that sets off some behaviour. Why do Scientists still persist on trying to isolate a single variable.

I was. Hot baths don’t work, but that’s just me. Blanket recommendations are useless and harmful. It turns out I have a genetic issue causing my mood issues and diet is my treatment.

Are there purines, like Inosine and Guanosine, in food?

Did you even ask what my genetic disorder is?