Would you like some fish oil with your yoghurt?

So you know my whole diatribe against fancy-pants PROBIOTIC yogurts and how they’re really not all that different from regular yogurt (both contain friendly bacteria) except for the price?

Well the yogurt manufacturers have gone even further and given yogurt another health boost, but this time with heart and brain-healthy omega 3 fatty acids. For example Yoplait (and organic rival Stonyfield) have added about 16-17 mg of the long chain omega-3 DHA (most abundant in fatty fishes) to each 100 gram-ish pot.

Cool beans, eh? I mean omega 3s are great. They help prevent heart disease, promote good brain development and even out some behavioural problems in kids. They are the miracle food supplement of our age. So we should eat omega-3 fortified EVERYTHING. Totally.

Handily Martek, the company that supplement’s Yoplait’s yogurt with their algae-produced “Life’s DHA” is also adding a bit of non-fishy goodness to lots of things: cereal, milk, soy milk, nutrition bars, eggs, sushi, hamburger, cheese sauce and juice (whole list here). They also recently announced that they will be adding Life’s DHA to whole grain bread in Canada. 

But my problem here is dosing.  There is little consensus over dosing for adults and even fewer recommendations for kids. The experts I have talked to previously (Joe Hibbeln at the NIH) suggest that normal adults need 1 gram - 1000 mg - of DHA and EPA (another long-chain omega 3). And I found one newspaper article quoting a doctor who suggests about 500 mg for kids (and another that says kids over 5 and adults are the same). 

So Junior would have to eat 29 pots of yogurt to meet his daily requirement. Riiiiiiiiiight.

This is pretty fine print here and parents who think they are giving their kids the omega 3 boost they need through yogurt while avoiding the hazards of fish (all that mercury, see) will be mistaken. Unlike vitamins and minerals - that have a recommended daily dose and are listed on nutrition labels as a % of the RDI - there is no such consumer information available for omega 3s.

And while I take fish oil supplements (for a total of about 1200 mg of DHA/EPA daily), the rush to fortify foods with omega 3 always carries a risk...that it takes away from the general healthy eating rules that provide people with natural dietary sources of omega 3s. Eat some fish. Eat some flax.

And let’s not forget that nutrients from WHOLE FOODS almost always seems to carry more potency than refined products. For example, this 2006 Norwegian study found that eating actual fish was better than fish oil in terms of cardiovascular benefits, even though subjects ate the same amount of omega 3 fatty acids.

As far as short cuts go, fish oil pills/DHA supplements are pretty good. But they are still short cuts...and adding a short amount of short cut to your kids yogurt pot will dent your wallet more than it will grow their brains.