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Can we talk about fish oil and choline supplements during pregnancy? I absolutely hated taking the prenatal with fish oil; it made me so nauseous when I had morning sickness. But if there was anything I could do to help my baby’s brain develop, I would do it.
—Anonymous
Fish oil: The Cochrane Review on this topic concludes two things: first, we have relatively limited evidence and, second, the evidence we do have gives us no reason to think this supplementation improves cognitive outcomes for kids. A trial from 2021 suggested that supplementation might cause children, especially boys, to reach milestones earlier. But it’s a good example of some issues with interpreting randomized trials. The researchers only find impacts for boys, they only find impacts on some of the many, many outcomes they consider. It’s a classic example of “p-hacking,” where people try many different subgroup analyses and many different outcomes and selectively report or emphasize only the ones that are statistically significant.
On top of this, I’m not sure how clinically significant it is if your baby stands with help 18 days earlier.
Choline: There are at least three small randomized trials of choline supplementation and infant cognitive performance. They show inconsistent results — the largest one shows no impact; the smallest shows an effect on “processing speed” (measured by how quickly they turn to look at things). It is extremely difficult to measure cognitive performance in 10- to 12-week-old babies, which may relate to some of these effects. But there is nothing in this data that would suggest that choline supplementation is some kind of magic bullet.
Overall — meh. I definitely do not think this is worth puking for.
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What are your thoughts on the follow up studies that authors of the smaller study performed? https://doi.org/10.1096/fj.202101217R