Young people need fish oil

A new study gauging the impact of consuming more fish oil showed a marked reduction both in inflammation and, surprisingly, in anxiety among a cohort of healthy young people. The findings suggest that if young participants can get such improvements from specific dietary supplements, then the elderly and people at high risk for certain diseases might benefit even more. The findings by a team of researchers at Ohio State University were just published in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity.

Psychological stress has repeatedly been shown to increase cytokine production so the researchers wondered if increasing omega-3 might mitigate that process, reducing inflammation. The researchers hypothesized that giving some medical students omega-3 supplements would decrease their production of proinflammatory cytokines, compared to other students who only received a placebo. Half the students received omega-3 supplements while the other half were given placebo pills. The supplement was probably about four or five times the amount of fish oil you'd get from a daily serving of salmon. Those receiving the omega-3 showed a 20 percent reduction in anxiety compared to the placebo group. An analysis of the of the blood samples from the medical students showed similar important results. They saw a 14 percent reduction in the amounts of IL-6 among the students receiving the omega-3. The study was supported in part by a grant from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a part of the National Institutes of Health.