So, you are registered for the challenge and want to get ready — let’s talk about Fish Oil.
We all have seen the extra large bottle of Fish Oil on the shelf at Costco. Don’t Buy It!
$7 for a Gigantic bottle of fish oil would be awesome, but when it comes to Fish Oil, you get what you pay for.
All high quality, also referred to as ‘pharmaceutical grade’, producers of fish oil supplements have their products tested by IFOS to prove their quality. If a company doesn’t have their product tested, then most likely it’s not very good quality and you won’t receive all the benefits that Fish Oil has to offer!
Many companies misrepresent the amount of EPA/DHA in their products and currently there is no regulation of it.
What you should know about the benefits of Omega-3
Some things you may know about omega-3 already is that it is important for muscle and tissue recovery, but what you may not know is that it is critical for brain, heart, and cardiovascular health as well.
Omega-3 fatty acids are very powerful anti-inflammatory chemicals that help to maintain tissue and vascular health. While omega-6 is necessary in our diet, our omega-6 account is way over-funded. In an ideal world, the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 in our diet would be 1-1 or 1-2. This is how it would look if you were a hunter/gatherer, eating the meat and fat of range fed or wild animals and whatever fruit and vegetables you could find growing wild. The world that we currently occupy of highly processed food, a predominance of vegetable fats and industrially raised sources of meat has our ratios look more like 1:20 or 1:40 omega-3 to omega-6. Just so you know, this is bad. It is highly inflammatory and a major cause of heart disease as well as a host of other metabolic diseases.
There are many ways to rectify the situation. Cutting out the industrial middle-man in your food chain and buying grass-fed or honest-to-goodness free-range meats as well as reducing or eliminating your intake of vegetable oils is a start. The next step is supplementing with an omega-3 supplement. There are many sources, but there is no source better than fish oil. Flax oil will provide some omega-3, but in the form of ALA (alpha-linoleic acid). The trouble with that is, you want EPA (eicosapentaneoic acid) and DHA (docosahexanoeic acid). ALA can be converted in the body to EPA and DHA, but the efficiency is very poor. A decent vegetarian source is algae oil, but there is no comparison to the quantity that you will get from high quality fish oil. Eating plenty of cold water fish is also a good idea, but you’ll want to make sure that your fish is safe and from a good, healthy source before eating a whole bunch of it.
The next question is “how much?”
As a general rule, take at least 4000 mg of a combination of EPA and DHA — read the label carefully. The number on the front of the bottle may be how much fish oil there is and not how much EPA and DHA. If you really want to dial it in, visit the fish oil calculator to determine what dosage you want to take.
