Fish Oil: There IS A Difference in Omega 3′s

There’s a great article at USA Today that does a good job of explaining how food manufacturers are misleading health conscious consumers with their Omega 3 claims. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

But grocery aisles these days are packed with food labels boasting of omega-3 content. You can buy milk, eggs, yogurt, cereal, orange juice, butter substitutes, mayonnaise and other products that carry the claim.

Behind the boom: studies that show certain omega-3 fats can help prevent fatal heart attacks and offer other heart benefits; less conclusive research hints at brain and eye benefits and possible anti-cancer effects.

But don’t cross fish off your shopping list yet, nutrition watchdogs say. That’s because many of the new products contain little or none of the omega-3 fats backed by the most scientific evidence: DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid).

“The numbers are tiny, but the claims they are making are huge,” says Katherine Tallmadge, a Washington, D.C., registered dietitian and spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association.

“It’s all very confusing,” says Bonnie Liebman, a nutritionist with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. She reviewed omega-3 food claims for a recent newsletter article (at cspinet.org).

Her conclusion: Consumers are in real danger of being misled. Even a careful label reader won’t learn, for instance, that a carton of Breyers Smart DHA Omega-3 yogurt has less DHA than a teaspoon of salmon.

And that bottle of Hellmann’s mayo proclaiming the product is “naturally rich in Omega-3 ALA”? True enough, Liebman says: Most mayonnaise is made with soybean oil, which is a source of ALA (alpha-linolenic acid). But that kind of omega-3 fat, found most abundantly in flaxseed, has not been proven to convey the same health benefits as DHA plus EPA, she says.

You can read the entire article here: Got omega-3? Not so much

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