Fish Consumption vs Diabetes

Yin & yang.  Good & bad.  There're always two sides to the proverbial coin.  In this case, I recently reviewed 2 diffferent studies demonstrating that higher fish consumption lowers heart attack & stroke risk.  Today, however, I have to tell you the rest of the story in that authors recently concluded that eating more fish just might increase your type 2 diabetes risk (T2DM), at least if you're a postmenopausal female.

Specifically, they followed 36,328 women partipants of the Women's Healthy Initiative study for an average of 12.4 years.  Those who consumed >0.2g/d of marine omega 3 fatty acids or >2 servings/d of fish had a statistically significant increase risk of developing T2DM regardless of blood pressure.  Interestingly, plant-based omega 3 fatty acids were not associated with T2DM risk.  While this is news to me, apparently this finding is consistent with those from both the Nurses' Health and the Iowa Women's Health studies.

But how does this impact us?  Well, just ask yourself, how many of you actually eat more than 2 servings of fish a day?  Most recommendations are for just 2 servings a week.  So eating fish every other day probably isn't going to raise your diabetes risk as much as it will lower your heart attack & stroke risk.  As with most things in life, too much of a good thing might actually be bad for you.  Time will tell if this really applies to fish consumption.