Fish oil DHA and Speech or Language Delay
Ming, a speech therapist, examines whether fish oil supplements help kids with speech delays. Parents report benefits for behavior and focus, but he rarely sees direct speech improvements in his practice. He suggests trying it since it's safe and might help concentration, which could indirectly support speech development.
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Hey, this is Ming here, a speech therapist from agentsofspeech.com today we want to talk about the age long, I don't know, ancient myth, or rather maybe ancient truth about using fish oil for treating speech and language delay. Okay? So that being said, I believe that there's a lot of signal and a lot of noise on the Internet, okay. I try to be more of the coherent signals that you can rely on. I'm trying my best. At the same time, there's just a lot of stuff you can read online about fish oil. Okay, I'm going to share a bunch that I saw on the Internet with you. And most of them are trying to say that fish oil is helpful towards speech and language delay. First of all, the more you search, the more confirmed you will feel like it because we have a free Facebook group with over 8,000 parents now inside. And you will see that every week or so people will be asking, oh, is this DHA good? Is this fish all great? Or whatever. So first of all, I want to talk about my experience with fish oil. Okay. For me, at the very least, when I see children who are on fish oil, which is nearly 900% of the time, who has a fish oil intake for my, for my students, I really cannot see a significant difference, to be honest with you. Okay. But at the same time, if I think if fish oil can improve a child enough to not see me, then I wouldn't even know. I would be not seeing those children and I would be out of a job, basically. I'm not saying this to be cynical, but what I mean is the improvement of the fish oil can only be known if you remove it. Just remove it from the diet and we compare as such. Okay. And from what I hear from like parents, the moms especially, and the dads sometimes, is that supplements are very, very useful to a certain extent. And different children react to like, different supplements in different ways. Okay. I had a student who, who couldn't sleep and magnesium really helped her to calm down at night. Right? That's one of them, Right. The other one reacted differently to magnesium, where there's nothing that happens to them at all whatsoever. So it's kind of waste of time and money to buy magnesium. So for myself as well, I do get jittery after caffeine before. Some of my friends, they can drink caffeine at like 11pm and they can still sleep. Right? So that's the thing about like just using supplements or whatever. It really depends on your, your child's tolerance and how they react to such. Okay. And fish oil is rather, you know, it's. It's a safe bet first of all. Second of all is, is that I don't see a major downfall and negative thing to use fish oil. In fact, I take fish oil every day. And after taking fish, I feel that I'm less inflamed, less bloated. In fact, I know that for sure. And with that it will should help with a child's mood as well. Right. If you think about it. Okay, so let's talk about what parents are saying and what the Internet is saying about this whole thing. Okay? So here you will see this. Teach me the doc. Great blog and great YouTube channel. You should check it out. So here in this thingy, I. I'll put it in the description. In this, this blog it talks about how fish oil supplements really help apraxic children. Okay. In a very short period of time and days. A very high percentage of children to. So to speak. Okay. And they were using Yahoo. Groups back in the day. Right. So this has been here for like 10 plus years. This is 2008, this article. And then as a result the prompt trained SLP a way of doing speech disorders. Okay. I've got all her clients on fish oil and has seen improvement in all. Okay. I am not sure to be honest. There are no resources and it links to one journal and when I click onto it, there's nothing here, which is kind of strange. Okay, I'm just saying that there's loads of information out there and I don't know what to see. And then there's another journal from Egyptian1. I'm not sure what's going on here, but the conclusion is that this fatty acid, this polyunsaturated fatty acid, which is basically E, EPA and DHA and so on, which is like the stuff from like fish oil. It shows that dietary supplement of this stuff has a beneficial role in the management of specific language impairment along with speech therapy. Okay, fair enough. So I will put all of these in the description and you can take a look yourself. And the last one I'm talking about here is that this is quite a crazy claim. Fish oil capsules help children with speech disorder find their voices. I mean this is also in 2006, right? And this is where it says. Right. Speech language pathologists who monitored reports significant improvements just within a few weeks. Improvements are noted not only in children's ability to talk, but also in the behavior ability, focus and maintain eye contact. So these are all talking about Omega 3 and Omega 6, right? EFAS right. So anyways, back to the topic is that you see all of these things here, great signals on the Internet. What should you do? Well, my advice to you is like just, just try it, okay? And the reason why children become better at talking is not because of a magic supplement, okay? It really isn't. If it were, then you know, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now. And that's because it's been working for some people and improvements. Cannot there say improvements? But I don't know how much of an improvement there is. Right, there were. And my thought about this is that when a supplement works for a kid and which I can see with my own very eyes, their behavior is a lot better, right? They're able to focus as report was talking about that they are able to concentrate longer and therefore the quality of practice becomes better and therefore they can speak better. Okay? And why I'm talking about this is because a lot of times children on the spectrum or have a speech disorder, they're irritated, they have a different type of sensory profile, okay? And I can tell you firsthand myself that I also have sensitive sensory profiles even though I have no outstanding disorders. So everyone is different. And if there's something, there's some supplement that can help them with some like I, I've heard from adult ASD person who said some of the supplements will help them calm them down or mute some of those like sensory inputs. That's her words, not mine. Okay, so you can listen to her. It's not scientific research, but it, you know, it's different from everyone and everything. I am not giving you medical advice right here, okay? I just need to do a disclaimer real quick. At the end of the day you must try it. You know like fish oil is one of the, the safest ones. Everyone takes it. It's obviously beneficial to your sleep as a whole. There's loads of research on that. I use it myself. There's obviously other benefits about like fat loss, concentration, like anti inflammatory, all these things. And whether it helps with speech and language specifically is something that I am not, I'm not sure about. Okay? And the conclusion is go try it and try it for yourself. It's not that expensive. It's, you know, it's worth it. Okay, so that's it for this video. Let me know in the comment sections if I got anything wrong or if you want to ask me anything about this, okay? And that's it. And if you haven't, please go to agents of Speech.com checklist, grab list of tools and toys that I recommend you get when you start home therapy. All right, See you in the next one. Bye. Bye.
