Thursday, July 28, 2011

Where to get your Omega-3s

Maybe you don't know why you want to get your regular Omega-3 fatty acids. We need them for our heart health, healthy blood pressure and blood flow, vision health, support for enhanced mood, our good brain health (I want to keep my memory!), and to minimize inflammation. It's part of the "anti-inflammatory diet" and most doctors who pay attention to prevention and wellness tell their patients to take at least these top two suggestions: multivitamin and their omega-3.

Keeping your inflammation risks down also helps with healthy skin and healthy gums/dental health as well as keeping a healthy weight. Imagine your body as a busy ecosystem: if your body is busy putting out lots of wildfires (sending its resources to fight inflammation), it can't focus on growing healthy forests (healthy cells and tissue), right?

Unless you really focus on it, you cannot assume you're getting enough from your regular food, so it's good to have a high-quality supplement to keep up your levels.

These are the best ways to get your omega-3 via the healthier and less polluted fish:
* wild-caught Alaskan salmon (the best prices are in the freezer section at Trader Joe's and at the asian markets)
* small fish such as herring and sardines (I like the canned "smoked herring" from Trader Joe's)
* black cod (the best tasting cod I have picked up are from the Asian markets).
If you are in LA, Von's supermarket has $5-Fridays where there are select frozen meats and seafoods on sale. Getting your Omega-3s can be affordable if you shop around (and check out my suggestions above).

Please limit your consumption of farmed salmon. If the restaurant does not say wild, it is most likely the common cheaper farmed salmon, and you don't want it! There have been reports on how sick these farmed salmon are from being fed corn and other kinds of drugs. Limit your consumption of large predatory fish because they are likely to have higher levels of toxic mercury and contaminants. Also, we get plenty of omega-6 in our diets so we don't need to eat fish like tilapia that have high levels of omega-6. We need to be sure that we have the correct omega-3 to 6 ratios, and as we are chronically short on omega-3, why not keep it simple and just focus on getting more omega-3 in our nutrition?

Good luck with focusing on getting your omega-3, and please send any cool recipes or ideas my way!