How Can More Omega 3 Fatty Acids Dramatically Improve Your Health?

One of the most powerful movements in today's society is the recognition that we are all individually responsible for our own health. In today's climate of increasing rates of lifestyle disease many people are making personal decisions to improve their own health.

There's many things you can do to improve your health. Improving your diet and exercising regularly is probably one of the best. And today I wanted to talk about a personal decision that you could make right now to improve your health by a simple dietary change. Add some Omega 3 essential fatty acids to your diet every day.

Lets consider why adding Omega 3 fats to your diet each day can be such a game changer.

The Omega 3 fats are what are known as "essential" fatty acids. They are good fats, meaning that they are essential for the proper functioning of your body.

Not all fats are good for you, for example saturated fat is not good for you. Trans fat is not good for you. That the Omega 3 fats are.

There's a number of different Omega 3 fats. The 2 most important are DHA (Docosahexaenoic acid) and EPA (Eicosapentaenoic acid). There's others, but those two, and in particular DHA, are very important to good health.

The range of health conditions that can be possibly prevented or improved from an adequate intake of the Omega 3 fats include cardiovascular disease, and reducing your risk of dying from heart attack, some cancers, diabetes, problems with vision such as macular degeneration and plenty more.

DHA is the single most important fat in your brain, and research is showing that getting plenty of Omega 3 fats in the early years, including before birth, can help improve the development of mental function and cognitive ability as well as improve learning ability in infants and children.

And in older people it can also help reduce the risk of memory loss.

And that's just the start, there's a wide range of health conditions which may well benefit from the addition of some Omega 3 fats to the diet every day.

In the past most of us ate plenty of fish, however most of us now rarely find fish on our plate. We are more likely to find a burger or a pizza.

Fish is the principal source of DHA and EPA, and this change in our dietary patterns has meant that the amount of Omega 3 fats in our diet has dropped dramatically over the last century, and scientists are discovering that this has been a major factor in the development of a range of lifestyle diseases.

Of course it's always possible to improve this situation by eating fish. Unfortunately fish is becoming prohibitively expensive, and much fish, particularly those most of us prefer, like tuna, can be contaminated with small amounts of Mercury and PCBs, and worse.

The solution for many is to take fish oil supplements, which are small capsules filled with fish oil, and therefore good sources of Omega 3 fats. These are cost effective to take each day, and that's what I do.

And for this reason sales of fish oil supplements have exploded over the last 10 years, and there are many people searching for the best fish oil supplements.

Of course most people simply buy the cheapest, however the bad news is that it's not that simple. There are wide variations in the amount of the Omega 3 fatty acids found in different brands, and more significantly tests have shown some brands of fish oil capsules to be contaminated with PCBs, just like the fish.

So choosing your fish oil capsules is a serious business.

If all of this is news to you then you might like to investigate the health benefits of Omega3 fats a little further. And not just that, there's plenty of other decisions you can make to improve your health. Eat more fruit and vegetables and exercise more is one of them.

But adding a dose of Omega 3 fatty acids to your diet each day is also very important, just be careful how you choose your fish oil supplements.