Omega-3 Fish Oil Recommendation

Ravn said:

I ate them for a while and couldn't feel any difference whatsoever, but then again, I suppose we aren't able to *feel* the changes occurring in the cardiovascular system.

Then I learned that all the brands in Denmark are selling rancid oil. After that, no thanks. I eat quite a lot of herring and mackerel anyway.

Recently I took out my girlfriends dog with a walk, accompanied by my girlfriends sister. at one point, the dog got free from the leash and the community gate was open...I had to lunge at her(she was about 2-3ft away) and I missed. for the first time ever, running up hill, at full speed behind the dog without stopping, I tired out the labrador sized dog(she's small and 8yrs old.) it was an amazing feeling and I have never ran like that before. (about 300ft uphill at full speed.) it felt like my heart was exploding out of my chest and I had to sit. felt damn good.

edit: so like i said, if you get it from food, you dont need to use supplements. you can also do a 30-60day trial to see if you feel any change.

Funny, Keilani...the same thing happened to me many years ago in school. I was a volunteer at a center for street and abused dogs. Come walk and feed them and play with them. Anways, I'm walking the dog and he decides to pop a squat. I relax my grip a little and he bolts off. I did not catch him...

Some days later he reappeared in the center, I was not allowed to walk dogs anymore...it was almost as sad as my sardine poem.

Biren P. said:

Funny, Keilani...the same thing happened to me many years ago in school. I was a volunteer at a center for street and abused dogs. Come walk and feed them and play with them. Anways, I'm walking the dog and he decides to pop a squat. I relax my grip a little and he bolts off. I did not catch him...

Some days later he reappeared in the center, I was not allowed to walk dogs anymore...it was almost as sad as my sardine poem.

it was either catching the dog or....well she wasn't going to be stoked.   #thestakeswerehigh

 

I had to do it. 

My current favorite method of taking fish oil.

The essential fatty acids found in Fish oil (DHA AND EPA ) has proved most useful in maintaining brain health with its use as a treatment of some common mood disorders such as bipolar disorder. Other potential and advertised effects were joint and cardiovascular health. I doubt whether there is any benefit in takings pills over a fish based diet though.

James Hall said:

I doubt whether there is any benefit in takings pills over a fish based diet though.

Well, it's cheaper....

 

I find my joints tend to feel a little achy if I don't eat fish pills for a while.  But my diet is crap anyway.

MT Nordic said:

This is why I asked my question.  People often take supplements because they feel they're good for them, but they don't have a specific purpose in mind.  Fish oils have contributed to the overfishing of our seas, and they likely contain traces of mercury.  I'm not one to want to take drugs if there's not a really good reason to do so.  So far, the studies looking at outcomes, e.g. heart disease, have not been as optimistic as i would've liked.  I used to recommend fish oils in the past, but as the studies have caught up with what people are actually doing, the reasons to do so have become less and less.  I think we're always better off using our food as our drugs, and avoiding the need to take prepackaged morsels of specific nutrients.  If your diet is excluding nutrients you need, it's probably not a healthy diet.

Evidence for utility of supplements is very weak, and some (certain antioxidants) may even be harmful. There are no randomized controlled studies of eating fish vs fish oil supplements, but a high quality fish oil will be free of mercury. Sardines, being low on the food chain, are relatively lower in Mercury compared with say tuna or salmon.

 

The only two supplements I would consider at the current time are vit D if you're not out in the sun, and magnesium. But the jury is still out.

Bipocni said:

Well, it's cheaper....

 

I find my joints tend to feel a little achy if I don't eat fish pills for a while.  But my diet is crap anyway.

That is not good. Why isn't this prodding you to change your diet?

Joshua Naterman said:

That is not good. Why isn't this prodding you to change your diet?

Because it's hard....

Lol. Diet isn't that hard. The dish pictured above took me maybe 10 min. Just enough time to cook greens and eggs. I can sometimes even accomplish this in 5 min.

Sardines here

The french documentary 'Risks on a plate' was pretty scary, and told of very high concentrations of toxins in farmed Norwegian salmon. It might be a media scare, but the reporters did put the salmon through mass spectrometry and found roughly a ten-fold increase of toxins over various other common industrial foods.

 

http://theforeigner.no/pages/news/toxic-norwegian-farmed-salmon-poisons-french-food-relations/

Ravn said:

The french documentary 'Risks on a plate' was pretty scary, and told of very high concentrations of toxins in farmed Norwegian salmon. It might be a media scare, but the reporters did put the salmon through mass spectrometry and found roughly a ten-fold increase of toxins over various other common industrial foods.

http://theforeigner.no/pages/news/toxic-norwegian-farmed-salmon-poisons-french-food-relations/

This is exactly why I only way wild caught fish.

I recall Robb Wolf and Chris Kresser saying in some of their podcasts that wild caught fish is superior to fish oil supplement as the risk of oil going rancid is pretty high, and then it's worth absolutely nothing.

A Danish survey showed that all of the fish oil brands on the Danish market were rancid at the point of purchase. Yikes!

A Danish survey showed that all of the fish oil brands on the Danish market were rancid at the point of purchase. Yikes!

Well, guess I'll stick to the herring in Danish waters then!

Pickled herring FTW!

I take Green pastures fermented. Herbalist friends of mine recommend Jarrow DHA and get good results with that. The majority of people get way too much Omega 6 nowadays, unless they're eating grassfed/ pastured animal products and wild fish and keeping vegetable oil intake low. Its not a case of one or the other, but of restoring a balance. 

Symptoms of needing EFAs in general include: 

chicken skin (bumpy)

dry skin and mucosa

dandruff

easily broken nails

cracked skin on heels or fingertips

skin eruptions that look like poison oak

atopic dermatitis

skin inflammation in general

chronic earwax problems

allergies

poor wound healing

 

Personally I take them because they help with skin issues; I don't see the point in taking an extra supplement if there isn't an overt deficiency or marked inflammation that they help reduce, and for the majority of people I think just eating more fatty wild fish and omega 3 rich meat would work just as well and probably provide more nutrients *and* be cheaper in the long run too. 

Ravn said:

Pickled herring FTW!

Had it just not been for the massive amounts of sugar!

Bipocni: I know it seems hard at first. I suggest considering a step-by-step approach. Take 1 step every few weeks, or each month, so you don't get overwhelmed.

 

Naterman's First Four Steps (Copyright Joshua Naterman, 2014 )

 

1) Start eating at least a fist-sized pile of veggies at each meal. Try to switch it up some.

2) Increase veggie intake to be around half of your plate at half or more of your meals each day.

3) Start implementing the Rainbow Technique: take the colors of the rainbow and make a color schedule for the week.

Monday: Green and yellow; Tuesday: Red and blue; Wednesday: Green and orange; Thursday: purple and green; Friday: purple and red; and so on. You'll notice that you got the entire rainbow already.

 

4) knock out all added sugars and artificial sweeteners

 

At this point, going 1 point per month, you will have taken 4 months to have improved your diet to the point where you will feel substantially better, and it won't be a huge burden to do this.

 

You can also try doing everything at once, but if that seems too hard then try my step-by-step approach.

 

Note: I put #4 last, even though this is extremely important, because I find that this is where people struggle the most. Experiencing several successes in a row helps boost confidence by showing people that they CAN, in fact, successfully change their diets. Succeeding in other steps builds the habit of success, and will make tackling a more difficult goal a realistic proposition.

 

Also, by this point people will already feel a lot better and may be craving fewer sweets. Both of these things help, because feeling better develops confidence that continuing to achieve the point-by-point goals will continue to make them feel even better. I assume that it is pretty obvious that if you crave sweets less, you won't have as much trouble setting them aside.

 

Having said that, feel free to shuffle the steps as needed to suit your own individual preference.

You might decide to drop the added sugars and sweeteners in March, and then add a handful of veggies to each plate in April... or just forget the handful and go straight to the half-plate option. Then in May or June you could tackle the Rainbow Technique, and you'll end up being pretty darn solid in the diet department!

 

 

 

Remember, not all things that are worth doing will be easy! There are times when we all have to remind ourselves that the direction we take does not have to be a majority decision... there are many times when 80% of me doesn't want to study, but the 20% that knows it is important still makes the final call. I am not a democracy: What needs to happen will happen, regardless of how I feel about it. 

 

That mental approach might not work for everyone, but it works for me so I'm sharing it

 

*** Edited to fix Bipocni's name!

Bissen said:

Had it just not been for the massive amounts of sugar!

Just eat them pwo. Fixed. Next case, your honour

Edit: that's actually quite a bit of sugar. Still, it's better than PCB and Dioxin I suppose.

Getting your omega-3 fatty acids is a good idea, but it is best to get them from real food sources. Research indicates that cardioprotective benefits are much stronger from wild-caught fish than from an identical amount of the same omega-3 fatty acids in capsule form.

 

You don't want to get too many, as that can carry its own risks, but if you're eating fish a few times a week and getting grassfed beef while avoiding packaged foods then you've got pretty much nothing to worry about.

 

Using fatty acid profiles of the foods you eat to guide your omega-3 consumption is a good idea. You want to go 1:1 with the omega-3 vs. omega-6 ratio, so if you got 6g of omega-6 fatty acids with a meal it might not be a terrible idea to counter that with 6g of fresh omega-3. Realistically though, you should not eat whatever has that much omega-6... I don't know if you can find something like in raw, fresh foods. You tend to have to resort to packaged food or corn/safflower oil, etc. to find such a large dose. 

 

As an example, even a pound of cooked grain-fed beef has just under 1 gram of omega-6 per serving. The problem is that it has less than 100mg of omega-3, so just one gram of omega-3 is enough to compensate for a whole pound of grain-fed beef. You need them to compete for the common receptor in real time to maximize benefits, so around 300-500mg of omega-3 with a 5-8 oz serving of beef will do the trick. 

Ravn said:

Just eat them pwo. Fixed. Next case, your honour

Edit: that's actually quite a bit of sugar. Still, it's better than PCB and Dioxin I suppose.

Sticking to the fish my dad, brother and in-law catch themselves 

 

Josh, really nice list!

Joshua Naterman said:

.....I am not a democracy......

I just found my new signature!