For years now people have been talking about the benefits of taking fish oil supplements. Making sure you get the recommended amount of omega-3 fatty acids in your diet has been shown to have many benefits to your cardiovascular system. Besides thinning the blood, adding fish or fish oil supplements to your diet can lower a type of blood fat called triglycerides while increasing the proportion of HDL cholesterol in your blood. All of these factors work to keep your heart healthy and help to cut down the risk of heart attack.
Fish oil supplements usually come in capsule form and are made from the tissue of fish that are high in oil. Salmon, herring, tuna, mackerel and sardines are primarily used in the production of fish oil supplements. Because of the all-important omega-3 fatty acids (EPA and DHA), these supplements are believed to have a wide variety of health benefits ranging from keeping your heart healthy to fighting depression, schizophrenia and even bipolar disorder.
Besides being good for the heart, these omega-3 fatty acids help to reduce inflammation. Recent studies have shown that there is a high correlation between inflammation and many potentially life-threatening diseases. Increased levels of inflammation have been associated with a wide ranging category of diseases such as heart disease, psoriasis, cancer, diseases of the autoimmune symptoms and Alzheimers disease.
Studies have shown that consumption of fish oil influences the production of hormones called eicosanoids that are produced in the body. Eicosanoids are derived from fatty acids and can be either omega-3 (anti-inflammatory) or omega-6 (pro-inflammatory). It is important to maintain a balance between these two eicosanoids in your diet. Some serious health problems can occur if not enough omega-3 is included in our diet to counter the inflammation produced by omega-6. Cutting down on the production of the pro-inflammatory eicosanoids is the job of the fatty acids found in fish oil.
So why has this dietary imbalance taken place? Omega-6 can be found in many of the vegetable oils, seeds and dairy products we consume on a regular basis while omega-3 can only be found in oily fish. The American diet has changed drastically in the last century so that daily consumption of fish has been reduced to a small fraction of what it used to be. Consumption of foods containing omega-6, on the other hand, has increased substantially.
Many health researchers have concluded that this change in our diet has a striking correlation with the dramatic rise in the number of cases of heart disease, cancer and other inflammatory related diseases. Taking fish oil supplements has been shown to cut down on the risk of developing a significant number of health problems before they get started and, due to the extensive filtering employed in producing fish oil supplements, can even be healthier for you than eating fish due to the reduced presence of mercury and pesticides.
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