Fish Oil - Two Reasons Why Taking A Supplement Is Better Than Eating Fish

Pure fish oil is one of the best natural supplements one can buy. Its benefits on our health can be staggering! So, why is taking concentrated fish oil often better than eating fish? It seems counterintuitive, but there are two key reasons: purity and cost.

1. Purity: Hundreds of years ago, we could obtain our essential omegas from our diet. Our rivers, lakes and oceans were clean and free of contaminants. Today, with all of humanity's industrial pollution and with our waterways contaminated with heavy metals, industrial waste and other toxins, many studies have shown that the fish in our food supply are highly contaminated with these toxins, particularly mercury (a severe neurotoxin which lodges itself in our tissues). Toxins are absorbed by algae, which are then eaten by the shrimps, mussels and other small sea creatures. These are in turn eaten by fish. So, as we go higher up in the food chain, there is a greater concentration of chemicals in our food, in this case the fish that contain the essential fats that our bodies need.

2. Cost: The most important ingredients in fish, DHA and EPA are only present in fatty fish, like salmon, tuna, sardines and mackerel. So, in order to get enough fatty acids from our diet, we have to eat several portions of these fish every week, and they have to be fresh, which can get expensive. Alternatively, we can easily get the omega-3 oils we need with top-quality supplements for under $20 USD per month.

So, do we eat more fish or do we use supplements to get our omega-3 fatty acids? My personal solution, and it is working very well, is to eat fish from the southern hemisphere and the open ocean as much as possible, to avoid fish caught near major industrial nations and to take several grams of supplemental omega-3 fish capsules every day.

In choosing the right brand, make sure you choose a high-quality molecularly distilled supplement. It is often a much better choice than attempting to eat the amount of fish or bodies were made to eat, and certainly better than some cheaper, but not-so-good fish oils on the market.

It is very important that we make sure that the fish oil we buy is made with the fish from clean seas and is molecularly distilled. The distilling process removes most or all of the contaminants, leaving us with a pure, clean source of omega-3 fats.

So if you're not getting enough fresh, clean fish in your diet, you may well be deficient in fatty acids and should probably be taking a fish oil supplement.