Saving Seafood

Why Migraine Sufferers May Want to Eat More Fish

August 2, 2021 — For most of her life, Tanya Kamka suffered migraine headaches on a weekly basis.

The headaches would usually come on gradually and then build, causing excruciating pain and pressure behind her left eye that would culminate in her vomiting or visiting the emergency room. The ordeal would often leave her feeling weak and exhausted for days afterward.

“Anytime I had a migraine I’d be wiped out for three or four days,” said Ms. Kamka, 58, a post office clerk who lives near Fort Bragg, N.C. “I missed a lot of work because of migraines.”

But a few years ago, Ms. Kamka and 181 other people who routinely experience migraine headaches joined a clinical trial, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, which was designed to test whether a special diet could alleviate their frequent headaches. The diet that Ms. Kamka was assigned to follow emphasized foods that contain large amounts of omega-3 fatty acids, the oils found in some fish, while limiting foods that are rich sources of omega-6 fatty acids, such as many vegetable oils.

Omega-3s and omega-6s are both considered essential fatty acids — critical for health, and because our bodies can’t make them, they must be obtained from foods. Historically humans consumed roughly equivalent amounts of both fatty acids. But the typical American diet today tends to contain a much larger proportion of omega-6 fats. Some health authorities see this as a good thing: Vegetable oils and other rich sources of omega-6 fats have been found in many studies to be beneficial for cardiovascular health. But others argue that this could be problematic because omega-6 fats have been shown to promote pain and inflammation, while omega-3 fats tend to have the opposite effect in studies, helping to reduce pain and inflammation.

The authors of the new study wanted to know: Could a diet that boosts omega-3 fats while lowering omega-6 fats make life easier for people burdened by frequent migraine headaches?

For Ms. Kamka, the benefits of a change in diet were striking: After a few months of increasing her fish intake and avoiding many common vegetable oils, she noticed that her headaches had all but disappeared. Other people on the new diet also reported fewer headaches. Although the trial ended after 16 weeks, Ms. Kamka has remained on it ever since. Gone are the days when she ate foods like fried chicken, French fries and potato chips that were cooked in vegetables oils rich in omega-6 fats. She now makes a point of eating foods like cod, tuna, sardines, spinach salads, hummus and avocados, and she cooks with olive oil instead of corn, soybean and canola oils.

Read the full story at The New York Times

For Infants With Rare And Scary Disorder, FDA Approval Of Fish Oil Could Be Life Saving

August 7, 2018 — The following is excerpted from a story published by WGBH:

The FDA approved a drug last month that provides nutrition to children born with a scary condition. That approval is the result of 16 years of work by doctors and researchers at Children’s Hospital in Boston.

When Gib Brogan’s daughter Ellie was born, he says at first everything seemed perfect. But things changed quickly.

“Soon after she was born, early, early one morning, she got very ill. She started vomiting dark green,” Brogan said.

Ellie was rushed to the neonatal ICU, where doctors quickly realized something was very wrong.

“They told us she had short bowel syndrome. She was missing 90 percent of her small intestine and 30 percent of her large intestine,” Brogan said.

The NIH says short bowel syndrome affects about three out of every million people. Ellie had surgery to connect her intestines, but there wasn’t enough there to really work right.

“On that first day the surgeon told us that she can be fed by I.V., but there is a bit of a race that comes when you feed an infant through an I.V.,” Brogan said.

That race is to get them eating regularly as soon as possible. Because while you can feed newborns through an I.V, over an extended period of time, the fat that they’re given, which comes from soybean oil, can damage their livers, meaning they’ll likely need a transplant.

By the time Ellie was transferred to Boston Children’s Hospital, at just a few weeks old, she already had the yellowed skin and eyes of jaundice — a sign of liver damage.

“And one day we were sitting at Children’s and a doctor knocked on the door and he came in and said, ‘My name is Dr. Mark Puder. I have something I’d like to talk to you about,'” Brogan remembered.

“And I approached the family,” Puder said, “because we had developed something in the laboratory that we’d already given to some patients and had reversed that liver injury.”

“He sat down and he told us that there were a little over 20 kids that they tried using fish oil with,” Brogan said, “and that in that limited number of kids they had seen great things with their livers — that the damage had not progressed, and in some cases it had cleared up.”

The Brogans agreed to be part of the trial. And it worked.

Read and listen to the full story at WGBH