February is the time when the majority of us can revisit all those New Year's resolutions made in the wine-soaked fervour of fireworks and countdowns which mark the beginning of a new year...
I'm sure I'm not the only one whose enthusiasm for embarking on new goals for last year of the naughties evaporated with similar speed as a hangover on New Year's morning...
Drink only good wine (hard in Southeast Asia where good wine quickly breaks the credit card limit; easier to adapt the long-ago learned sex mantra: that bad sex is better than no sex at all. Substitute wine and sex (not literally of course) and the conclusion is similarly logical).
Another was eat less fried foods. Oh well, it seemed like a god idea at the time...
But one I'm holding to is eating more fish. Oh, but not deep-fried, of course...
Being married to a seafood fanatic, I have no excuse really. I'm just fussy about bones (having had one stuck in my throat in my youth) and to be honest, I'm a lazy eater - I prefer to savour the flavours of food than dig about like a dentist in a morass of silver skin and calcium to spear slivers of fish floss on my fork... Thus when Madame orders whole baked fish from our local Thai restaurant I prefer the boneless duck curry.
I digress. The point of New Year's resolutions is to make a change for the better.
And eating more fish, is the simplest way to add more long-chain omega-3 fatty acids to the diet. I don't have heart disease, but enhancing one's Omega-3 diet is a useful step in ensuring I stay that way.
The December 2008 Fats of Life and PUFA Newsletter - electronic publications from the US - summarise findings that seafood omega-3s protect the heart, eyes and developing brain among other benefits. And god knows my addled brain needs all the nutrition it can get...
An Italian study with nearly 7000 heart failure patients reported over three years that those who took omega-3s were 9% likely to die or be hospitalised for heart disease compared with those who took a placebo. Similarly, a 13-year study with about 111,000 Japanese participants found that all types of heart disease (18%), and especially heart failure (42%), were lower in those eating the most omega-3s.
And seafood omega-3s may also benefit the heart in people with atherosclerosis, according to another new US study: participants with higher intakes of omega-3s had a third less chance than others of adverse thickening in their carotid arteries, which is associated with atherosclerosis. "This observation reinforces many reports that eating fish protects the heart by discouraging atherosclerosis," reports Fats of Life.
In other research, more than 25,000 Danish women who consumed 3.5 fish servings per week prior to delivery and who breastfed eight months or longer had children with higher total developmental scores at 18 months of age compared to those who ate little fish and breastfed only one month or less. These findings strengthen previous evidence that fish consumption during pregnancy is associated with better childhood development.
Finally, omega-3s may also delay the onset of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a leading cause of adult blindness. Eating fatty fish weekly was shown in a recent European study of 5000 elderly people to cut their risk by 50% or more of developing advanced AMD.
Of course, there is an even better reason to stick to this resolution. Fresh fish, cooked soon after purchase, tastes bloody great. And that's enough for me.