Another Nail in the Coffin for Fish Oil Supplements

More people than ever take fish oil dietary supplements—around 8% of US adults in 2012 compared with around 5% five years earlier, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. But a recent meta-analysis of 10 large clinical trials came to a disappointing conclusion: The popular capsules do little to protect patients with heart disease. The findings are at odds with advice from the American Heart Association (AHA), including a 2017 science advisory recommendation to consider fish oil supplementation for patients with a recent myocardial infarction, or heart attack.

The new meta-analysis, published in JAMA Cardiology in January, looked at randomized trials of marine-derived omega-3 fatty acid supplements involving almost 78 000 participants with a history of coronary heart disease (66%), stroke (28%), or diabetes (37%). The trials lasted an average of 4.4 years and compared fish oil with placebo or no treatment in at least 500 participants.

All told, fish oil supplements did not reduce the risk of coronary heart disease deaths, nonfatal heart attacks, fatal or nonfatal strokes, revascularization procedures, or all-cause mortality among the full study population. The supplements also didn’t protect against major vascular events in any subgroups, including people with a history of heart disease, diabetes, high cholesterol, or statin use.

Parsing the effects of fish oil supplementation in prespecified disease subtypes and participant subgroups is something that wasn’t previously possible with the published data sets, said Robert Clarke, MD, a professor of epidemiology and public health medicine at the University of Oxford who led the review. Clarke’s coauthors included principal investigators from 9 out of 10 of the included trials, who provided unpublished data necessary for the meta-analysis.

“They looked every way they could to find out if there was a signal and nothing panned out,” said Lawrence J. Appel, MD, a coauthor of last year’s AHA advisory, who was not involved with the analysis.

The findings are just the latest to cast doubt on the usefulness of fish oil supplementation for major cardiovascular disease end points. Although early trials showed a substantial mortality benefit, the supplements haven’t lived up to their promise in later studies.

Two 2012 reviews of randomized trials published in JAMA and the Archives of Internal Medicine (now JAMA Internal Medicine) by separate research teams found little benefit of fish oil supplementation for heart health. A 2016 systematic review from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality essentially reached the same conclusion.

The authors of the new analysis concluded that it “doesn’t provide any support for the current recommendation from the American Heart Association to use omega-3 fatty acids for the prevention of fatal coronary heart disease or any coronary heart disease in people with prior vascular disease,” Clarke told JAMA.

Despite having coauthored the conflicting AHA advisory, Appel, who is director of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology, and Clinical Research at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health, said he was “not at all surprised” by the results. “After a few high-profile trials done over a decade ago, … it’s really been a pretty disappointing landscape for fish oil, which [was] sort of like the supplement du jour,” he said.

The aggressive way heart disease is treated today—with statins, β-blockers, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, and aspirin, along with procedures to restore blood flow—may largely explain why the benefit of fish oil supplements appears to have dwindled over time. Trials for the most part have tested secondary prevention, which means they included participants who were already receiving treatment.

“Once you get a heavily medicated group, it’s really hard to detect further benefit,” Appel said.

Improved diets—including greater fish consumption—may have also reduced the magnitude of effect over time. The omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) found in cold-water fish are believed to be the main drivers of cardioprotection in seafood and are the primary components in fish oil capsules.

SOURCE 






Identity politics violence is tearing America apart

The group identity fixation is all coming from the Left so they must bear responsibility for its effects. And they love its effects.  Disrupting society is a basic aim for them

Three years ago, a bloody summer of black nationalist violence claimed the lives of eight police officers with the massacre of five police officers by Micah X. Johnson in Dallas and the murder of three police officers in Baton Rogue by Gavin Long.

Johnson had declared his support for the Black Lives Matter racial nationalist group and told police that he wanted to kill white people, and especially white police officers.

In the fall, Marc LeQuon Payne tried to run over Phoenix police officers. Next spring, Kori Ali Muhammad went on a shooting spree in Fresno, murdering three white men.

Muhammad and Long were both part of the Moorish Science Temple black nationalist movement. Muhammad had posted Nation of Islam content which claims that "white devils" are subhuman. Long had admired the killing spree by Johnson. Payne had posted that, “the Caucasian needs to be slaughtered like the pigs that they are right along with the niggas who serve and protect them.”

Long wasn’t alone in viewing Johnson as a black nationalist hero.

A former Miss Alabama had described the racial nationalist killer as a “martyr”. Babu Omowale, a co-founder of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, said, "The fact that Micah just got five of the bastards, that's what got you all upset right now." Yafeuh Balogun, another co-founder of the black nationalist group named after the founder of the Black Panther Patyu, wrote, "He shall be celebrated one day."

While the white nationalist shooters of this year have been banished to 8chan, Johnson, Payne and Long were radicalized and posted their rantings on Facebook. The outpouring of support for their acts of violence also took place on Twitter and Facebook with no effort at censorship by the social media sites.

The alternating mass shootings by white nationalists and black nationalists predated Trump. They’re part of a cycle of violence going back decades if not generations. The cycle of violence had largely died down until it was triggered by the resurgence of identity politics in the Obama administration.

The rise of a new age of identity politics was not a response to injustice, but a cynical political strategy.

Facing a more challenging political landscape after his original victory, Obama pivoted from universal appeals to racial nationalist rhetoric. “Punish your enemies,” he urged Latinos. Joe Biden told black people that Republicans would "put y'all back in chains." The racial nationalism became more strident as the political position of the Democrats weakened. Race riots were stirred up from Ferguson to Baltimore. The violence spiraled into mass shootings of police officers and white people.

Violence was only the most explosive symptom of a deeper racial polarization. White nationalist hate groups, long considered a joke, experienced their biggest revival in decades. Black Lives Matter protests convulsed major cities. Christian churches were vandalized with graffiti reading, “Negroes Are the Israelites,” while two synagogue shootings and a rash of swastika graffiti exploded into the news.

The hate group revival was tapping into polarized racial attitudes. Their growth was not an outlier, but an expression of the deeper sickness of identity politics. Polls showed that perceptions of race relations on both sides had cratered. Politics had become driven by naked appeals to racial interests. America had become a fractured country whose inhabitants identified as members of warring tribes.

The identity politics fracturing of the country was motivated by the political roadmap of the Democrats.

Trump had performed better with black voters than Mitt Romney, but black voters had become a larger share of the Democrat base, and the Democrats relied largely on racial appeals to mobilize their votes. These appeals highlighted a classic racial nationalist message that that pitted blacks and whites against each other with black people depicted as being the enslaved and oppressed victims of white people.

Such messages only deepened the racial polarization on both sides. And the political racial polarization limited the options of the Democrats who had become inescapably dependent on the black vote, yet knew no other way to speak to black voters except through conspiracy theories of racial victimhood.

The Democrats feared losing the black vote and the only way they knew how to keep it was by doubling down on the racial polarization that had divided the country and hollowed out their political party.

Conspiratorial messages of racial victimhood were meant to stem the defection of black voters and increase turnout by spreading racial paranoia and hostility toward white people and Republicans.

By 2014, what had been a cynical and divisive political strategy became a killing field as violence exploded in major cities, initially by mobs, and then through acts of racial nationalist terrorism.

The gunmen spreading terror and death are the manifestation of the identity politics strategy.

Racial violence is a deliberate effort to polarize the country by sowing racial hatred. The gunmen in their manifestos often speak of a desire to radicalize and divide the country along racial lines. The objective of the killers attacking churches, shopping centers and public streets is another brand of identity politics.

White and black racial terror plays into stereotypes and hostilities on both sides. Beyond inspiring a small group of potential imitators, the shooters also reinforce the racial nationalism of the other side. They play into the identity politics conviction that beneath the surface, a racial civil war is underway.

Identity politics was born out of an effort by leftist activists to identify and mobilize potential supporters by breaking down a sense of national solidarity along the lines of group victimhood. Every act of terror breaks down national solidarity further and strengthens the appeals to race over nationality.

Lessons about tolerance, white privilege and racial consciousness don’t end racism. They spread it.

What inhibits racism isn’t leftist politics, it’s nationalism. We are less likely to view each other as the enemy if we are all on the same team. When nationalism declines, then tribes arise. Identity politics is the politics of tribalism. Its group nationalisms are not positive affirmations of a common strength, but negative identifications of a common enemy without and a common weakness within the victim group.

And it’s only natural for warring tribes, taught that they are the victims of oppression, to turn violent.

Nations make war on rival nations. When a nation fractures into rival nations warring with each other, acts of racial terror become commonplace. That is what is happening to the United States of America.

The only way to stop racism is by rebuilding our common purpose as a nation.

Without nationalism, different groups will find their own purpose through a lens of group identity. These identities will be innately hostile to each other and to the country they were formerly part of. They will reject its founding principles for failing to serve the interests of their tribes and they will destroy them.

Democrats and their media eagerly denounce these behaviors when they manifest in white nationalism, while upholding them when they appear in black nationalism. And that’s the problem. The politics of racial nationalism are either good or bad. They can’t however be good for one race and bad for another.

When you divide a country along racial lines, the divide will cut along both sides, not just your side.

The resurgence of racial nationalist violence won’t end until we affirm the centrality of the nation over the identity politics that has fractured our political and cultural life. Until we get rid of identity politics, racial nationalist violence will continue tearing apart communities across a divided United States.

SOURCE 





Hate crimes against Poland’s Catholics rise after profane gay parades

Poland’s Catholics are witnessing a sharp increase in hate crimes in the wake of LGBTI+ marches, with incidents of violence, desecration, destruction of church property, workplace harassment and violence against clergy being reported all over the country.

“Almost every day we learn about attacks on the Church and believers. Catholics are being harassed with impunity. The number of obscene profanations in public has never been seen before. They write to us from all over Poland,” attorney Jerzy Kwaśniewski, president of Ordo Iuris has said in the legal institute’s latest newsletter.

“There is no week in which we do not receive reports of another desecration, destruction of church property or harassment against someone in the workplace for confessing their faith. Many complaints come to us after the next ‘Equality Parades,’” Kwaśniewski stated.

“Only in the last week have we taken action on five new cases regarding attacks against believers,” he added, noting that Ordo Iuris had also notified the prosecutor’s office regarding the case of Dominika K. from Wrocław, for selling obscene figurines combining the image of Our Lady with the “six-colour LGBT logotype and female genital organs.”

“The number of obscene profanations in public has never been seen before.”

The Ordo Iuris newsletter cites the July 28 attack on 68-year-old Fr. Aleksander Ziejewski by three men who entered the sacristy of the Basilica of Saint John the Baptist in Szczecin demanding liturgical vestments to celebrate Mass.

TVP News claimed that the perpetrators wanted to perform a “homosexual marriage.” Fr. Ziejewski later denied the reports. However, he said that one of the men started blaspheming, pushed sacristan and security guard and assaulted him using a rosary as brass knuckles.

In a pastoral letter to Fr. Ziejewski, president of the Polish Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki, wrote that the “[i]ncreasingly frequent acts of hatred against believers, including priests, and acts of profanation of sacred objects, places and objects of worship, so important for the Catholics in Poland, arouse my highest concern.”

Earlier on June 10 in another incident, Fr. Ireneusz Bakalarczyk, was on his was to celebrate Mass at the church of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the Sand, in Wrocław city centre, when a 57-year-old man started a conversation about the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, before pulling out a knife and stabbing the priest in the chest and abdomen.

Later in July, Saint Maximilian’s Church, Konin, in Włocławek diocese, was desecrated and the monument next to the church was destroyed. In a parallel incident, a blasphemous inscription was painted on the wall of another church in Brzeźno near Konin.

On July 26, four people attacked the parish priest of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Turek. The three women and a man wanted to file an “act of apostasy”—declaring their separation from the church.

After explaining that only a parish priest could accept and sign the document in accordance with the law, Fr. Vicente Remigiusz Zacharek was attacked by a man who grabbed a cross from a bookshelf and threw the priest from the chair to the floor. The assailants were also blaspheming against the priest and the church.

“These shameful acts are more and more frequent. It seems that their goal is to push frightened Catholics into the catacombs,” Mirosław Milewski, auxiliary bishop of Płock, in his homily on the silver jubilee of the chapel of Our Lady of Częstochowa in Garlin.

“We need to make clear our disagreement with such anti-Christian acts and actions. We can never accept that the barbarians taunt our sacred ordinances and objects. Let us pray for repentance for those who have been strangled by evil, but also, as far as we can, let us protest against acts of profanation,” added Milewski.

A dozen Catholic churches have been desecrated in the last two months across the country, according to the Krakow-based Polonia Christiana association.

Responding to allegations of rightwing violence against homosexuals at the Bialystok “Pride Parade” on July 21, Bialystok archdiocesan spokesman Fr. Andrzej Debski said the march had “unleashed actions of evil” on both sides. He rejected claims the church itself had “caused the aggression.”

“Other Equality Marches this year in Warsaw, Gdansk and Poznan, organized in the name of tolerance and anti-discrimination, have shown just the opposite: the enmity of LGBT circles towards Christianity,” Debski said in a statement released by Poland’s Catholic Information Agency, KAI.

“Are we not seeing double standards at work when sacred symbols are profaned during these parades, alongside blasphemies against God?” he asked.

Meanwhile, in breaking news, LGBTI+ activist Fr. Paweł Gużyński has called for the resignation of Marek Jędraszewski, Metropolitan Archbishop of Kraków.

On his Facebook page, the Dominican priest has called upon Catholics to protest against the archbishop for describing LGBTI+ activism as a “rainbow plague.”

In a sermon given to mark the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw uprising by Polish resistance fighters against Nazi occupation, Jędraszewski said Poland was no longer affected by the red plague of Marxists or Bolsheviks, but warned the LGBTI+ rainbow flag was born of the same spirit.

SOURCE 





ACLU Blames ‘Inaccurate Stereotypes’ for Opposition to Male Athletes in Girls Sports

The American Civil Liberties Union blames “inaccurate stereotypes” for opposition to biological male athletes competing in female athletics, despite scientific research showing transgender athletes have advantages.

The ACLU is leading a petition campaign in support of two male athletes, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, who are dominating high school girls track in Connecticut. “While Andraya and Terry’s teammates and coaches support them, some cisgender athletes want to keep them out of girls’ sports,” the petition states.

One of Miller and Yearwood’s female competitors, Selina Soule, has repeatedly criticized forcing girls to compete against male athletes. “Currently, in Connecticut I am the only girl who is speaking out,” she said last month. “Everyone else is too afraid.”

The Connecticut runners are just two of several examples of biologically male athletes racking up victories in women’s sports.

Democrats in Congress, including New York Rep. Jerry Nadler and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, have denied transgender athletes have unfair advantages in female athletics.

A recently published paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics found that suppressing testosterone levels in male athletes isn’t enough to eliminate their natural advantages over female athletes.

The paper concluded that male athletes who identify as transgender women have an “intolerable” advantage over their female competitors.

A spokeswoman for the ACLU declined to comment, recommending instead that The Daily Caller News Foundation reach out to liberal academics who support including biological males in female sports.

SOURCE 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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