A few days ago, headlines went flying about “Fish Oil Supplements Causing Prostate Cancer.” This has put many people in panic-mode. It has been thought for many years that fish oil was extremely beneficial for your health and your joints. I am going to briefly explain why I have trouble believing that they have “proof” for fish oil causing prostate cancer.

When doing a study on this subject, you would tend to have a placebo group and a fish oil supplement taking group. If the group taking the fish oil supplement developed more prostate cancer, this would help prove the theory of fish oil supplements causing prostate cancer. During this study, however, no such groups were formed. If no such groups were formed, and no group was ever given a fish oil supplement, how do they have proof that fish oil supplements cause prostate cancer?

Fish oil supplements contain two long-chain fatty acids (EPA and DHA). This study tested prostate cancer patients and recognized that higher levels of DHA were found in their blood. EPA, however, had no correlation with prostate patients. Now, researchers may have found that prostate patients had a higher level of DHA in their blood, but they didn’t take other things into consideration. Just because they had a high level of one thing doesn’t mean that they didn’t have a low level of something else. Maybe this low level of something else could be the cause of prostate cancer?

If DHA in fish oil supplements causes prostate cancer, wouldn’t it be easy to assume that actual fish would be just as dangerous? You don’t see that coming up in the headlines though. It sounds to me that the media is being a bit biased about supplements. Especially for the fact that supplements weren’t even used during this study! Just for the record, DHA level increases in your blood can go up for reasons other than taking fish oil supplements. One of the reasons would be from a low fat diet! Does this seem a bit odd? They are telling you to take a healthy fat supplement out of your diet to prevent prostate cancer, and then they are telling you that a diet low in fat can cause prostate cancer as well. This is why you can’t believe everything you hear or read. Until further proof and the actual testing of fish oil supplements, I will have trouble believing these results.

Fish oil supplements have been used by people for many years. Two of the main reasons: heart health and joints. Heart disease is still the #1 cause of death in the United States. Fish oil supplements have proven benefits for the heart and joints and shouldn’t be ignored. Another benefit of fish oil supplements is the fact that it doesn’t contain the Mercury that actual fish contains. Mercury can be extremely poisonous to our bodies, but many people still eat fish as part of a nutritious diet. Next time the news wants to scare the pants off of the population, they should at least use the actual product they’re bashing during the study.

-Tom