As a young boy, I remember watching an episode of The Three Stooges in which Moe slapped Shemp in the head with a big fish. Larry chimed in and said, “Fish is great brain food.” Needless to say, science has been slow in keeping up with the wisdom of the folk medicine from my grandparent’s generation. Only recently has fish oil taken center stage. These Omega 3 fats are currently the darling of alternative medicine. Big Pharma has even created a prescription version (because real fish wasn’t good enough?) called Lovaza which, as all drugs do, comes complete with a list of side effects.
Omega 3 fats are important
structural elements of human anatomy as the cell walls are comprised of these
fats. Larry was right; they are found in abundance and densely rich in the brain.
As such, they help decrease the symptoms of depression and anxiety. Omega 3
oils help with brain fog and memory. Fish oil is also “heart healthy” as these
oils reduce the likelihood of heart attack and stroke, lower
blood pressure, reduce triglycerides, and slow the development of plaque in the
arteries. Omega 3 oils reduce inflammation and can help with arthritis pain. They
help heal psoriasis. The king of fish oils, cod liver oil, (more about this
later) has vitamins A, D, E, and K which are vital to the immune system and
bone health.
It’s recommended that you eat oily
fish such as herring, salmon, mackerel, sardines and fresh tuna at least twice
a week. Are you following those guidelines? If so, is your fish cooked or in a
raw state such as sushi? Omega 3-fish oil is a very heat and oxygen sensitive. Canned
tuna is too processed and the nutritive quality of the oils has been destroyed.
Using excessive heat to cook or to extract the oil for supplements creates denatures
the oil and free radicals. Humans are the only animal on earth that cooks its
food. Bears, seals, sharks, and other wildlife eat fish raw. So what’s a person
to do? My best recommendation is to eat more sushi. If you are going to cook
your fish, I recommend baking it to a medium rare.
Omega 3s can be found in
plant/vegan sources such walnuts, organic canola oil (conventional canola oil
is tainted with GMOs), pumpkin, chia and flax seeds, But these oils are called
ALA. It is the DHA/EPA oils found exclusively in oily fish and marine algae that
have been shown to produce the health benefits listed above. Our body can
convert ALA to DHA, however, research clearly indicates that the conversion is
extremely limited.
Another option worth
investigating is taking a supplement. Here I highly recommend fermented cod
liver oil from www.greenpasture.org over a standard fish oil supplement. You
will be hard pressed to find a fish oil or another cod liver oil supplement
that has not been heated, polished, deodorized, bleached, filtered, genetically
altered, separated with caustic lye, and basically processed to the nth degree.
If there are vitamins added to these products, they are certainly
fractionalized, isolated, lifeless, inert molecules and not naturally occurring
whole vitamin complexes. These synthetic vitamins come with their own list of
health warnings and have been noted to create toxicity. MSG can be in some
brands of fish oil but secretly hidden on the ingredient label under “natural
flavors.”
Green Pasture uses cold
processing and fermentation to protect the naturally occurring healthy fats in
their cod liver oil products. This oil is much more nutrient dense than
industrialized fish oil. Fermented CLO contains the naturally occurring fat-soluble vitamins: A, D,
E and K2 that are so scarce in modern diets. CoQ10 and various quinones (known
for anti-tumor, anti-microbial, and anti-cardiovascular disease
properties) are found in Green Pasture CLO as well.
Green Pasture fermented cod liver
oil comes in liquid, capsule, and gel. My family uses the liquid Oslo Orange
flavor. For my 10 and 6 year old children, I mix 1 ml of the fermented CLO with
6 ounces of Odwalla Smoothie Juice (mango). This thick juice holds the oil in suspension
and hides the taste of the oil nearly completely. This is a very doable method
to get small children to comply with their daily dose of cod liver oil. I recommend 2 ml for teenagers, 3 ml for adults,
and 5 ml for adults who need therapeutic dosages.
No matter how much marketing the
salesman does, he/she cannot escape the fact that the fish oils from other
companies are over-processed and denatured. This includes the more popular
brand names. I can easily discern which supplement companies are worthy of my
dollar. I look at their multivitamin ingredients list on the label. If I see
synthetic vitamins listed instead of whole food sources, then I can conclude
that all their other products are guilty by association; this company does not
understand the basic concept of nutrition and therefor does not use the utmost
care in processing their product. They
most assuredly will be guilty of some of the processing tactics mentioned
above.
So what are you waiting for? Get
yourself some Cod Liver Oil from Green Pasture and give your body what it needs
to keep you healthy!
