Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

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The money line is this:

> Indeed, R.B.’s lawyers won’t let its marketers claim that MegaRed [krill oil] pills actually lead to a healthier heart. They can only suggest it with scientific-sounding language like “supports three markers of heart health”: triglycerides, C-reactive proteins and the omega-3 index.

It's rare to see such a straightforward and clear admission of how much bullshit there is in advertising. Using weasel words that don't actually mean anything (so that the customer can't say that your product didn't deliver), and selling stuff that people don't really need but which they buy because they make them feel good. Of course, this is more obvious in OTC health products, but actually present in most categories of ads. I think that the omnipresent advertising we're facing in the modern world is nothing more but pollution of the mind, implanting thoughts that aren't really our own but that only serve a for-profit purpose of a multinational corporation.

Most people don't think advertising changes their behavior, but the numbers say the opposite. We're surprisingly naive about how easily influenced the human brain is. For this reason I'm extremely careful about what kinds of friends I keep. I might not have much control over how they influence me, but I can control the kinds of people I hang out with.

The science of consciousness suggests, with the caveat that it's very early days, that we don't actually have free will, and are we really just the sum of our past environments and genetics interacting with our current environment. Your genetics and past are immutable, but your current environment can be changed, and that's likely the best chance you have of putting the future "you" on a good course. So watch what kind of inputs you feed into your brain computer, because those will determine the outputs.

(I don't like to dwell on the no free will part, I find it useful to pretend I have an "I" and a free will, even if it may not be true.)

You're interpreting "their lawyers won't allow them to say X" to mean "they don't actually believe X", "they can't substantiate X", or "X isn't true". Except with medical advertising, at least in the US, there's very strong restrictions on what medical claims you're allowed to make for your product.

And the reason for those restrictions is to protect consumers. If there was evidence that fish oil pills improved health, RB would have paid for the medical research already.

Note that Lovaza is a fish oil preparation that is FDA-approved for treatment of "very high" triglyceride levels. There's probably a patent issue preventing other similar agents getting approved for the same indication for a number of years.

There's some evidence, enough that some doctors will recommend you take them, but there's not strong enough evidence that the FDA will let you make the marketing claim.

There is absolutely NO conclusive evidence. Your doctor is not a scientist (http://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/328/7454/0.9.full.pdf). It's not up to doctors to decide what works and what doesn't. The fact that doctors prescribe Omega 3 pills means absolutely nothing. The fact that there is no scientific evidence to say the pills are conclusively beneficial DOES mean something. The only evidence of effect has been based on studies of large groups of people who claimed to consume Omega 3 or not. However, proper blind experiments do not reach any conclusive outcome. There is no evidence to suggest the effect is anything but correlatory. (That said, most supplementary pills will do you no harm, either.)

Even RB themselves write this on the homepage: "Supportive, but not conclusive research shows that consumption of EPA and DHA Omega-3 fatty acids may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease."

I didn't say there was conclusive evidence, and I agree that correlational evidence is low quality. A large randomized study on Omega 3 consumption would really help here, but in the mean time we have to use the evidence that's available.

(Though http://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/omega-3-fatty-ac... judges the evidence behind the pills as "strong scientific evidence for this use" in several categories.)

I think, it's because FDA (or whatever the agency controls supplements) doesn't allow these statements.

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