I belong to a company called HealthProNutrient that distributes products to physicians only. They send me all the latest nutritional studies (not affiliated with them). Most of these studies do not get reported. The ones that do get reported?
The ones that tell us that herbs and vitamins etc are all crap and do nothing.
Study after study I have read -you can actually google studies based on the item (omega 3, stevia, etc) and the specific outcome (diabetes, autism, depression, etc) and get great study info – most of them reported only in journals. We only hear the ones the media is told to divulge.
The best ones are double-blind.
So anyway – I thought I would include some of these studies when it pertains to women and women’s health.
Here is a great one:
Higher intakes of omega-3 fatty acids and oily fish may reduce the number of occasions that women suffer depressive symptoms by about 30 per cent, says a new study.
Women with the highest intake of oily fish reduced their number of depressive moments by 25 per cent, while a high intake of the omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA reduced this number by 29 per cent, according to researchers from Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of California, San Francisco.
“Our results are consistent with […] other epidemiologic studies that have examined the association of fish intake or dietary omega-3 PUFAs with depressive disorders or mental disorders,” wrote the researchers. “In addition, several small, randomized, double-blind trials found that adjunctive treatment with omega-3 PUFAs improved depression.”
Study details
The researchers, led by Laura Colangelo, analysed dietary intakes of fish and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) amongst 3,317 African-American and Caucasian men and women. The average age of the participants at the start of the study was 35. Symptoms of depression were measured using the 20-item Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale.
Colangelo and her co-workers report that, for the population as a whole, EPA, DHA, and EPA plus DHA were associated with reduced risk of depressive symptoms at the ten-year stage.
The effect was more pronounced in women, they note. Indeed, the highest intake of fish was associated with a 25 per cent reduction in the risk of depressive symptoms, while the highest intakes of EPA, DHA, and EPA plus DHA were associated with a 34, 34, and 29 per cent reduction in risk, compared to women with the lowest average intakes.
