Omega-3 lesson: Not so much brain boost as fishy research
One tiny brain-imaging study of fatty acids has been used to endorse fish oil as education's magic pill
A trial testing children on pills containing omega-3 acids, naturally occurring in mackerel, found no educational improvement.
Fish oil helps schoolchildren to concentrate ran a headline in the Observer. Regular readers will remember the omega-3 fish oil pill issue. The entire British news media has been claiming for several years now that there are trials showing that the pill improves school performance and behaviour in mainstream children, despite the fact that no such trial has ever been published.
There is something very attractive about the idea that solutions to complex problems in education lie in a pill.Oddly enough, someone has now finally conducted a proper trial of fish oil pills, in mainstream children, to see if they work: a well-conducted, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, in 450 children aged 8–10 years from a mainstream school population.
It was published in full this year – and the researchers found no improvement. Show me the news headlines about that paper.Meanwhile, Euromonitor estimates global sales for fish oil pills to be at $2bn, having doubled in five years, with sales projected to reach $2.5bn by 2012. The pills are now the single best-selling product in the UK food supplement market. This has only been possible with the kind assistance of the British media, and their eagerness for stories about the magic intelligence pill.
