In spite of the alternative of the Atkins diet, most people who go on a diet take the advice of reducing their fat consumption in order to reduce their bulk, which is fat. However, there is not a great deal of evidence to support the theory that reducing the intake of fat will reduce how much fat you amass on your body.
The only strategy that can work in the long term, if you would like to lose weight, is to use up more calories than you take in. However, there is a lot of proof to say that we require some oil and in particular some oils in our diet. This makes sense even on the most simple level, you need some oil (read ‘fat’) in order to oil your joints.
It therefore makes sense that athletes and individuals who have a strenuous job also require oil in some amount. However, it does not follow that eating just any oil or fat will be decent enough. There are beneficial fats and ‘bad’ fats, although we even need some of the bad fats. The concerns arise when we eat too much bat fat and not enough useful fat.
In other words, if our diet gets out of balance. For example, animal fats (such as saturated fats) have a blanket ‘bad’ reputation, but they supply our bodies with such vital vitamins as A,D, E and K. Likewise fish oil supplies our bodies with Omega 3 essential fatty acids that it is impossible to get from land-based foodstuffs.
These vitamins and oils in their most available forms come from dead animals. In the case of the long-chain omega 3 essential fatty acids like EPA and DHA, you can just get them from sea creatures, although you can derive the short-chain omega 3’s from some land-based sources.
These vitamins and essential oils are crucial to all human life but even more so to finely-tuned sports individuals who need to be able to utilize all their physical and mental powers in order to get to the top of their professions.
Omega 3 essential fatty acids come in two broad types, long-chain and short-chain varieties but they are not interchangeable. You require both sorts. Short chain you can acquire from flaxseed oil and it also has omega 6 in it too, although it is considered by many that most people eat far too much omega 6 as it is present in all vegetable cooking oils.
Oily fish delivers the long-chain omega 3’s, so cod liver oil is a good source of these. These omega 3’s are literally ‘brain food’ and it is the reason why parents have been saying for hundreds of years that fish is brain food, although they certainly would not have known the exact reason why.
Cod liver oil also provides a variety of other vitamins and nutrients including vitamin D, which you could synthesize from the sunshine, if the ozone layer was not so depleted as to make going out perilous and we didn’t nearly all work indoors.
Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on several topics, and is now concerned with pure omega 3. If you want to know more, please go to our web site at Omega 6 9