The news page of Linkoping University, in Sweden, has two articles that greatly interest me. One is about a surprising effect of omega-3 supplements:

One-year-olds whose mothers had ingested fish oil during pregnancy and breastfeeding had considerably fewer allergic reactions than children whose mothers did not take this supplement.

The other is about a case of extreme plagiarism: An entire material-science paper was copied, almost word for word, from PNAS. Into Madness has a nice comment:

Regarding the main authors, there seems to be a Nepali element involved! Sounds like a case for Father Brown. . . . Some Engineering students at Anna University [where two of the four authors of the paper that is a copy came from] who I talked to were not aware of this until they read the blogs. There have been no newspaper reports in India (as far as I know). How and when Anna University will react to this incident will be interesting to watch.

I agree. In the 1990s, when (a) Ranjit Chandra’s research assistant came forward and said “this research couldn’t have been done” and (b) Chandra could not produce the data, it was obvious that something was seriously wrong. Yet Memorial University, Chandra’s employer, gave Chandra a tap on the wrist.

A curious feature of this case is that two co-authors claim they are innocent:

Tom Mathews, doctor at the Indira Gandhi center for nuclear research in India and one of the four researchers named as authors, distances himself from the article in an email to DN [= Swedish newspaper]. So does Roshan Bokalawela, graduate student at the University of Oklahoma in the USA.

On the latest episode of the excellent TV show Mad Men, which takes place in 1960, a man who has just had a heart attack says, “Did everything they told me. Drank the cream. Ate the butter.” A humorous comment on how ideas change. Now, of course, many people — possibly including the screenwriter — think eating cream and butter causes heart attacks. After a year studying omega-3s, I’m sure it wasn’t the amount of fat that caused the high-fat diet/heart attack correlation, it was the type of fat (low in omega-3). Cream and butter would have been fine if the cows’ food contained plenty of omega-3.

For decades we’ve been told that cream and butter and other animal fats “clog your arteries”. It’s like a well-known experiment with split-brain patients. The patient chooses a card based on what he sees on a screen. The two hemispheres see different things. In one particular trial, the right hemisphere saw a picture of snow on the screen and picked out a card with a picture of a shovel. The left hemisphere saw a chicken claw. The left hemisphere controls speech. When the patient was asked to explain the choice, he said, “You need a shovel to clean out the chicken coop.” This happened again and again: The left hemisphere did not know why a card had been chosen but rather than saying “I don’t know” it confidently made up an explanation. Keep this in mind the next time you hear an explanation.

Studies to see if omega-3 supplementation reduces heart attacks have had ambiguous results, as Marion Nestle said. Why am I so sure that lack of omega-3 is the problem? (So sure that I no longer worry about my cholesterol.) 1. There is lots of evidence that heart attacks are due to inflammation. 2. There is lots of evidence that omega-3 fats are anti-inflammatory. 3. Eskimos had very low rates of heart disease and ate a diet high in omega-3 fats. 4. Many studies have correlated heart attack risk with gum disease. 5. My self-experimentation showed beyond any doubt that omega-3 supplementation makes the brain work better. It also showed what effective dosages are. 6. When Tyler Cowen took an effective dose, his gum disease quickly disappeared. Everyone — everyone who thinks about this stuff — knows #1-#4. It is #5 and #6 that are new and complete the chain of reasoning. I believe #6 is as meaningful as the observation that scurvy is quickly cured by lime juice.

In the 1930s, a dentist named Weston Price went all over the world looking at people’s gums. He wanted to compare modern diets with traditional diets. When his subjects ate a modern diet, he found gum disease. When they ate a traditional diet, their gums were fine even when they never brushed their teeth. In a few cases, such as an isolated group of Swiss mountain people, the traditional diets contained lots of butter and cream — from grass-fed cows. My gums vastly improved after I started taking good amounts of omega-3 (via flaxseed oil). After I reread Weston Price recently, I stopped being so careful about flossing and brushing. It hasn’t made a difference. In the past, my gums would bleed when I flossed unless I flossed daily. Now I floss rarely but they don’t bleed. I’m sure my whole circulatory system is in better shape.

In a January 2007 New York Times article about adding omega-3s to food, Marion Nestle, the NYU nutrition professor, said this:

My experience in nutrition is that single nutrients rarely produce miracles. But it’s also been my experience that companies will put anything in their food if they think the extra marketing hype will help them sell more of it.

I was critical. The single nutrients called vitamins produce miraculous improvements in vitamin-deficiency diseases. In the current issue of Scientific American, Nestle is more accurate:

In the early 1970s Danish investigators observed surprisingly low frequencies of heart disease among indigenous populations in Greenland that typically ate fatty fish, seals and whales. The re­searchers attributed the protective effect to the foods’ content of omega-3 fatty acids. Some subsequent studies—but by no means all—confirm this idea.

Because large, fatty fish are likely to have accumulated methylmercury and other toxins through predation, however, eating them raises questions about the balance between benefits and risks. Understandably, the fish industry is eager to prove that the health benefits of omega-3s outweigh any risks from eating fish. [A mysterious sentence. Perhaps something was lost in the editing.]

Even independent studies on omega-3 fats can be interpreted differently. In 2004 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—for fish, the agency equivalent to the USDA—asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to review studies of the benefits and risks of consuming seafood. The ensuing review of the research on heart disease risk illustrates the challenge such work poses for interpretation.

The IOM’s October 2006 report concluded that eating seafood reduces the risk of heart disease but judged the studies too inconsistent to decide if omega-3 fats were responsible. In contrast, investigators from the Harvard School of Public Health published a much more positive report in the Journal of the American Medical Association that same month. Even modest consumption of fish omega-3s, they stated, would cut coronary deaths by 36 percent and total mortality by 17 percent, meaning that not eating fish would constitute a health risk.

Differences in interpretation explain how distinguished scientists could arrive at such different conclusions after considering the same studies. The two groups, for example, had conflicting views of earlier work published in March 2006 in the British Medical Journal. That study found no overall effect of omega-3s on heart disease risk or mortality, although a subset of the original studies displayed a 14 percent reduction in total mortality that did not reach statistical significance. The IOM team interpreted the “nonsignificant” result as evidence for the need for caution, whereas the Harvard group saw the data as consistent with studies reporting the benefits of omega-3s.

I would have described benefits of omega-3 for which the evidence is clearer, as is done in the cover story about omega-3 in the current issue of Ode. Nabokov called Salvador Dali “Norman Rockwell’s twin brother, kidnapped by gypsies in babyhood.” I think of Ode, which put a Dali lookalike on its July/August 2005 cover, and Spy as linked like that.

Recently I described how, while testing flaxseed oil, I noticed that some eggs I had eaten seemed to have had a flaxseed-oil-like effect. The eggs came from grass-fed chickens; such eggs are believed to be high in omega-3. So the inference was plausible. But was it true?

To find out, I deliberately tested eggs. I used 2.5 large eggs (2 large, 1 small) to make scrambled eggs, which I ate. Here’s what happened:

The blue line shows when I ate the eggs. The red line is the average of the pre-egg reaction times. The main result is that, as suggested by the earlier data, there was a flaxseed-oil-like effect. I’m not sure what to make of the lowest point. I had eaten half of a cheese-and-mushroom crepe before that measurement. If the crepe was digested quickly, that would have reduced reaction time. (Sugar drinks clearly do this.)

Here are the accuracy values.

Mostly there was little change in accuracy. However, one value (90%) was very low, the lowest value in a long time. It happened before the biggest changes in reaction times. It might be due to the eggs.

My main conclusion is that yes, the eggs acted like flaxseed oil — presumably because of their omega-3. In addition, the results increase my belief that this method can measure the brain effects of ordinary food and can generate ideas worth testing.