THERE was a time when eggs were bad for you. Now they're good. Carrots were always good for you - is it supersonic eyesight or hairs on your chest that they give you? - but in excess apparently they can kill you.

If you absorb all the food advice around these days, you'll end up changing your shopping list as often as nutritionists change their minds.

But now we appear to have something on which scientists agree, something we can pop into our shopping trolleys safe in the knowledge that it will work wonders on both our bodies and minds.

It's not garlic, red wine or muesli - it's Omega 3. It may sound like a new Playstation game, but - here comes the science - it's the name given to a family of polyunsaturated fatty acids.

Oil-rich fish and supplements such as fish oil and cod liver oil are the richest and most readily available sources. Boffins claim it enhances or lubricates the paths between brain cells.

And recent tests in the North East on a group of coach potato schoolchildren appeared to confirm that this is indeed the stuff of brain power.

After regular doses of Omega 3, the chubby, sluggish youngsters were soon devouring Harry Potter and other literary gems in favour of the telly. Their brains went into overdrive.

Surely this could be the answer to boosting school test results. Feed the little darlings Omega 3 before they set off for school and - hey presto! - glowing SATS results.

Too good to be true? Well, to achieve the effects that Omega 3 had on those coach potato youngsters on a longer term basis you'd probably have to feed your kids doses of the stuff every day, and introduce lots more fish into their diet. And I don't mean those little fish-shaped things covered in breadcrumbs that you find on kiddie menus. They have probably never been near the sea.

I bet there aren't many children who eat fish that isn't wrapped in batter and swamped in ketchup to disguise the fishy taste.

Steamed fish or bony kippers don't feature much in today's childhood diets. Remember those scenes in Sixties film Spring And Port Wine when Susan George refuses to eat a plate of haddock and her father, played with menace by James Mason, insists that the same fish is put in front of her at the table day after day until she eats it?

I can't imagine parents putting their stroppy teens through a similar scenario at today's dining tables.

Or telling their seven-year-olds that they can't have chicken nuggets, it's smoked mackerel for tea tonight.

And can you imagine going back to the days of force-feeding cod liver oil to our young, like they did during the war? My dad has dark memories of having the foul-tasting stuff poured down his throat as a boy. His mother fed him a spoonful of malt straight afterwards to try and take the taste away, which sounds just as revolting.

You can get cod liver oil in nice little capsules now, but how many children actually take the stuff?

Fish oils may sound like a miracle but, for those parents dreaming of sending their bright sparks off to study among the Dreaming Spires, the reality is that, to children, fish is about as appealing as liver.

Updated: 10:07 Monday, October 13, 2003