Omega 3 for Smarter Kids!

The importance of ´brain food´ for children that all parents and grandparents should know.

Perhaps it was the amount of fish oil that the Vikings ate that gave them such good health, vigour and brains that when they left their Northern homelands they were able to conquer and colonise not only much of the UK but Ireland, large areas of France and also to spread eastwards into Russia and down to the Balkans.

Their strength not only lay in their muscles but in their intellect. Although Vikings were great warriors this didn’t stop them from also being philosophers, poets and artists. Fish oil is known to help the joints, to prevent heart disease and strokes but few realise that it has an influence on intellectual development, especially in babies and in young children. The magic fish oil that may now help someone win a place at Oxbridge may have been the basis of the great minds that wrote the sagas, the Viking poetry, and gave us carvings and sculpture that museums and billionaires fight for in 21st century auction houses. Fish oils almost certainly accounted for the Viking’s record of good health, a standard of health only matched today by fish eating Inuits (Eskimos).

One of the tragedies of the last few years has been the increasing scarcity and cost of fish. In my childhood visiting the Scottish herring fishing fleet as it worked south from Aberdeen to Norfolk was a treat. As a child I was taught to gut herrings by one of the Scottish fisher girls, the women who followed the fleet, gutted the catch, placed it in barrels ready for salting and export to Russia. My ability to gut herrings stood me in good stead when I joined the army. As a penance for being a potential officer I was given a six foot high mound of herrings to gut and prepare for cook house. The sergeant walked away with a satisfied smile as he thought how my whole Saturday would be spent doing them. Little did he know about my childhood training. I had done the herrings within an hour and was able to spend the rest of the day polishing kit.

The value of fish oil has been recognised for centuries. When I was first at school we had to have it every day to keep colds at bay. Pure cod liver oil for those who could take it, and for those who found it too nauseating, special permission was granted to take cod liver oil and malt instead. There were double doses if there were colds or flu viruses around in the district. In Norfolk our grandparents and parents swore by fish oil as a way of relieving arthritic stiffness and pain, they had no idea that scientists would in the future show that fish oil has similar anti inflammatory properties to modern COX 1 inhibitors, such as ibuprofen but without causing gastro intestinal inflammation and possible bleeding. They only knew from experience that their knees, hips and fingers were less stiff in the mornings, and that their joints ached less, when they took fish oil regularly.

The modern history of the understanding of the value of fish oil and why it is so valuable to health came with the understanding of the nature of polyunsaturated essential fatty acid omega 3. This started in the 1950s when Danish research workers studied two groups of Inuits from Greenland. One had stayed in Greenland, the other had migrated to Denmark. Although the migrants thereafter lived together in the same community they no longer enjoyed the amount of fish they had in Greenland. There were twelve times as many cases of heart attacks in the Eskimos who had migrated to Denmark than who had stayed behind eating their fish in Greenland.

Between the 1970s and the 1980s another team of research workers studied differences in the heart attack rate among the fish eaters of Greenland and those who enjoyed the normal western diet of Denmark. They showed that the life preserving molecule that was the foundation of the excellent cardiovascular health of the Inuits was omega 3.

Thereafter there was a mass of evidence confirming the value of omega 3 in preventing cardiovascular disease. A study in the Netherlands for example showed that the consumption of thirty grams of fish a day halved the number of deaths from coronary arterial disease. Further afield in Chicago another trial demonstrated that taking fish, even at 17 grams a day reduces the heart attack rate by ten per cent, but by taking 35 grams daily the heart attack rate falls by 37 per cent. Later scientists demonstrated that it is not only the amount of omega 3 that is important, but that the proportion between omega 3 and omega 6, another essential fatty acid more abundant in vegetables and absent from fish is also important.

Later work in the 1990s and early twenty first century have continued to show that omega 3 fatty acids found in fish are strongly associated with a reduced risk of sudden death among men whether they had had previous heart attacks or not. We know that omega 3 has an effect on the platelets, the small particles in the blood involved in clotting and decreases the amount of fibrinogen, another clotting factor. Omega 3 also increases the proportion of the good heart sparing high density cholesterol and reduces the proportion of the pernicious low density cholesterol that damages the blood vessels. Unlike most medicines and foods that alter blood fats omega 3 reduces the amount of triglyceride, another blood fat that leads to heart disease and strokes.

The value of omega 3 as a means of reducing the chance of older people – mum as well as dad – from dropping dead has been known for forty years. As the Vikings demonstrated it is likely to be equally useful in brain building in babies and young children, developing their early intelligence (and incidentally their early vision) and later their intellectual ability in the early years at school. It is now possible to buy pure omega 3 fish oil in a tasty capsular form.

Fish oil is found in abundance in herrings, mackerel, tuna, eels, salmon and lampreys but not everyone has an abundant supply of lampreys – or now even herrings. They too can get their omega 3 in fish oil by taking fish oil supplements rather than by eel catching expeditions. Fish oil supplements and even cod liver oil supplements can be obtained without potentially damaging quantities of vitamin A being present, the manufacturers have found ways of cunningly reducing this to safe levels.

Article issued: 14 December 2005

Article by
Dr Thomas Stuttaford
Dr Thomas Stuttaford is best known as medical columnist of The Times where he’s been writing for twenty one years. He also contributes regularly for many national magazines and is a frequent broadcaster. Trained in medicine at Oxford, he was a GP in Norfolk and served in the NHS as a genitourinary physician as well as in private practice.