Prof. David Ma has discovered that marine-based omega-3s are eight times more effective at inhibiting tumour development and growth.
"This study is the first to compare the cancer-fighting potency of plant- versus marine-derived omega-3s on breast tumour development," said the professor in the Department of Human Health and Nutritional Sciences. "There is evidence that both omega-3s from plants and marine sources are protective against cancer and we wanted to determine which form is more effective."
[...] Published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, the study involved feeding the different types of omega-3s to mice with a highly aggressive form of human breast cancer called HER-2. HER-2 affects 25per cent of women and has a poor prognosis.
[...] Ma found overall exposure to marine-based omega-3s reduced the size of the tumours by 60 to 70 per cent and the number of tumours by 30 per cent.
However, higher doses of the plant-based fatty acid were required to deliver the same impact as the marine-based omega-3s.
Source: https://news.uoguelph.ca/2018/01/choose-omega-3s-fish-flax-cancer-prevention-study-finds/
Journal Reference: Jiajie Liu, Salma A. Abdelmagid, Christopher J. Pinelli, Jennifer M. Monk, Danyelle M. Liddle, Lyn M. Hillyer, Barbora Hucik, Anjali Silva, Sanjeena Subedi, Geoffrey A. Wood, Lindsay E. Robinson, William J. Muller, David W.L. Ma. Marine fish oil is more potent than plant based n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids in the prevention of mammary tumours. The Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, 2017; DOI: 10.1016/j.jnutbio.2017.12.011
(Score: 3, Insightful) by stormwyrm on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:51AM (3 children)
Speaks more to the miserable state of scientific/medical journalism than to any defects in actual science. Often enough when you see the actual medical journal article that is transformed into a puff piece by the popular press there's loads of caveats and maybes and hedges that tentatively reach for a conclusion that is puffed into some kind of ridiculously conclusive panacea by the popular press. And then later another paper gets published in refutation of those findings, and the cycle continues. This is what a true scientific controversy looks like: the data and experiments have not yet converged into some form of consensus on what is most likely true, and you'll see research arguing a hypothesis one way and then another, and it's usually only after several years that the scientific community sees that the most reliable and best supported research shows that the facts point to things being a certain way. Trouble is this process tends to take a long time, generally years, and by the time that the scientific community has done enough research to come to that kind of consensus (it has to be emphasised that this is a consensus of scientific research results, not of scientists!) the popular press has mostly forgotten. For example, the original paper [sciencedirect.com] from the article states in the abstract that it's based on an animal model using mice. To go from an animal model to human physiology is a long way indeed.
(emphasis added)
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @02:08AM (1 child)
I agree, but shouldn't the science establishment try to stop this sensational nonsense? Instead, they (uni PR dept, researchers) encourage the outlandish claims so as to encourage further research funding. No wonder why we have so many skeptics who deem "science" is as corrupt as Vatican.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Thursday February 01 2018, @02:53AM
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @02:37AM
It really is just a flawed method of drawing conclusions from data that nearly guarantees nothing of value is learned. Look up NHST controversy and youll find people complaining about it since the 1950s. Andrew Gelman has a pretty good blog that discusses it quite a bit.