How to Choose the Best Fish Oil Soft Gels‏

How do you choose the best fish oil soft gels? Here are ten tips that will help you find the very best fish oil product.

1. Buy fish oil from online vendors, or if you buy it from a brick and mortar store, make sure they stock in a refrigerated case. Like any other kind of oil, fish oil can go bad if it's stored in heat and humidity. Rancid fish oil causes fishy burps and sometimes diarrhea. Online vendors turn over their stocks quickly, usually acting as link from the manufacturer direct to you, so their products don't have a chance to go bad.

2. Avoid products that list "marine liquids" as an ingredient. Another term for this is "fish juice." These protein-rich compounds go bad much faster than the omega-3 essential fatty acids you are looking for.

3. Make sure any product you buy has at least 500 mg of DHA plus EPA in every capsule. It's the DHA and EPA you're really looking for. If a 1,000 mg capsule contains at least 500 mg of the desired omega-3's, there's not enough room left for marine liquids, even if a manufacturer fails to list them.

4. Buy enteric coated fish oil capsules. An enteric coating keeps a capsule from opening in the stomach. Instead, it releases its contents in the small intestine, where they are actually absorbed. Especially when you take your fish oil between meals, the enteric coating makes sure that you get more of the essential fatty acids you need from the product by keeping them from being broken down by the acid in the stomach.

5. Don't buy a product just because it is listed as "lead-free" or "free of PCB's." In a recent study of the 40 most popular brands of fish oil in the USA, only one product had detectable levels of these contaminants, and it was a product for pets. You don't need to pay extra for basic, good product.

6. Don't pay extra for "pharmaceutical grade" fish oil products. There isn't any official standard that makes one product pharmaceutical grade and excludes another. The one omega-3 product that is only sold with a prescription, Lovaza, is actually less absorbable and provides fewer omega-3's that over-the-counter products that cost 50 times less.

7. No product is "tested in FDA-approved laboratories." The FDA does inspect and approve factories, but different agencies approve the laboratories that test fish oil, usually a state or province.

8. "Molecularly distilled" usually means the fish were chopped up and boiled in hexane to capture the oil, the hexane then allowed to evaporate and leave the fish oil behind. A trace of hexane inevitably gets into "molecularly distilled" omega-3's.

9. The cost of getting your daily dose of 1,000 mg of DHA and EPA together can cost anywhere from US $0.10 to US $1.50 if you buy fish oil, and up to US $10.00 a day if you buy a "pregnancy formula" made with microalgae--which will never contain the EPA needed to fight inflammation (only fish oil and krill oil contain EPA). Krill oil usually costs about 5 times as much as the nutritional equivalent in fish oil--and krill oil is not, as sometimes advertised, a vegan product. Tiny shrimp-like krill are animals, too.

10. Cod liver oil is a terrific source of vitamin A and vitamin D along with omega-3's, and all your need is one teaspoon a day. However, most people react with "yuck" when they take a daily swig of this potent oil. Fish oil, on the other hand, is tasteless and stays fresh in the bottle without spreading odor through your refrigerator. Fish oil is simply the most effective and least expensive way to get your daily omega-3's.

I, personally, take a twice-daily dose of what I consider to be the best fish oil soft gels on the market today.   Visit my web site, now, to learn more about this superior-quality supplement that I wholeheartedly, recommend.

What Are Omega Three Fatty Acids?‏

By now you have probably heard that omega three fatty acids are essential for good health. But what's special about a fatty acid being omega-3? And what does it mean for a chemical to be an omega three, anyway?

The -3 designation of the essential fatty acids in fish oil is nothing but a shorthand way chemists use for saying that the molecule can be activated at the the third carbon from one end. When our bodies slice and dice essential fats to make hormones, the itty bitty  -3 molecules get turned into hormones that regulate inflammation.  Additionally, the slightly larger -6 molecules get turned into hormones that cause inflammation, and the largest -7 and -9 molecules get turned into skin protectants and stored fat, respectively.

The important thing to remember is that the omega threes are what every cell in your body needs to keep inflammatory processes in check, and the omega-6's are what every cell in your body needs to generate the inflammation that activates the immune system or cleans up damage in neighboring tissues.

Both the "3" and "6" forms of essential fatty acids are essential for human health. Sometimes the omega-3's are referred to as "good" and the omega-6's are referred to as "bad," but that is only because our diets contain so much more omega-6 fat than omega-3 fat, about 20 times as much, actually. 

The oils used to fry foods and to make packaged foods are almost pure omega-6, inflammatory fat. Every time we eat a Hostess Twinkie or we chomp down on a bag of chips, we flood our systems with the fats that fuel inflammatory processes that keep us constantly just a little sick, and eventually make us very sick.

Even when we consume healthy plant oils like flaxseed oil, there is still so much omega-6 fat in the product that the net effect is keeping our bodies inflamed. Only highly concentrated sources of the inflammation-fighting omega-3 fatty aids like fish oil can reverse the effects of bad diets loaded with fried foods, fast foods, and snack foods that come in cellophane wrappers.

You don't really absolutely have to supplement your diet with fish oil. It would also work never to eat another potato chip or candy bar or fried chicken dinner ever again. Cutting out trips to Burger King, Long John Silver's, and McDonald's for the rest of your life would be necessary, too. But if you can't always eat the way you should, taking fish oil helps make up for the inflammation generated by your dietary indiscretions and helps reverse the diseases caused by chronic inflammation.

You should also be sure to choose a high quality supplement that has been processed to maintain optimum purity and freshness. If you'd like my well-researched recommendation for the fish oil with omega three fatty acids I take everyday, please visit my web site.