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Fish oil will teach children to read
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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"Reading is the best education." One cannot but agree with the statement of the great Russian writer A.S. Pushkin. An interesting book can captivate, transfer to an exciting and beautiful world.
However, many primary school students have difficulty learning to read. Most parents believe that the problem is laziness and the child's unwillingness to learn something, so they try to force them to read, setting a quota for the child to complete in a day, hoping to interest the child and instill a love of reading. Often, this leads to the opposite effect - children completely lose interest in books, and no amount of persuasion can help here.
However, scientists from Oxford University know one “recipe” that will be useful to parents in such a situation.
When mothers and grandmothers "stuffed" their children with fish oil, they knew what they were doing. Fish oil was considered the best source of vitamin D, the deficiency of which leads to rickets. And recently, scientists have found out that this "delicacy" also contains polyunsaturated fatty acids Omega-3, which can improve children's reading skills.
The scientists' experiment involved 362 children aged 7 to 9 who had problems with reading skills. One group of children took 600 mg of Omega-3 fatty acids in capsules daily for 16 weeks, while the other group took a placebo.
Before the experiment, all children underwent a reading level check. The specialists did the same after the children took the supplements.
It turned out that fish oil had no overall effect on the children's health, but the scientists noted significant success among the children in the first group who took the supplements. After taking the drug, they caught up with their peers in their studies, and compared to the group taking the placebo, they improved their results by 20%.
The study's authors note that the worse the child's performance, the longer he took the supplements.
"Our data suggest that daily supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids has positive effects on improving children's reading skills," said study co-author Dr Alex Richardson. "Moreover, parents reported that children with behavioural problems were significantly less likely to engage in 'challenging behaviour'."
Now scientists at Oxford University are studying the effects of similar supplements on struggling children.
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