A new popular product on the market is krill oil, a source of Omega-3 fatty acids similar to but different than fish oils.  So, not surprisingly, since I carry fish oil supplements in my product line, I often get the question “Krill oil vs fish oil… which is better?”

First off, in case you’re wondering, “What the hey is a krill?”, it’s a tiny shrimp-like animal that swims around in the ocean by the bazillion.  It sits at the bottom of the food chain and is food for all kinds of larger fish, including whales, who scoop them up by the bucketful and glup them down come feeding time.  Like fish, they too contain Omega-3 fatty acids, so the reasoning goes, if we squeeze fish to get Omega-3s, why not share the love with krill and squeeze them for the same reason?

This is a krill. Handsome devil, eh?

So now, we have companies popping up telling us that krill oil is the newer, better way to go, while the rest of us wonder what to think.  The short answer?  Fish oil still wins the day.  Now let’s get a little deeper into the how and why.

Remember that we’re taking fish oil for the two big active ingredients… EPA and DHA.  So the first question is, does krill oil contain EPA and DHA?  You bet it does.  And, the quality of the EPA and DHA, milligram per milligram, is just as good as fish oil.  Studies have shown that an equal amount of EPA and DHA from krill oil shows up in the bloodstream just the same as it does from fish oil.

Here’s the thing.  The actual amount of EPA and DHA in krill oil is very, very small compared to fish oil.  If you’ve seen my video and post on how to pick quality fish oils, you know that quality and purity of fish oils is determined by the percentage of actual active ingredients in the fish oil.  A 1000 mg capsule may only have 300 mg of EPA and DHA total… that’s only 30%, which is typical for standard commercial grade fish oils.  Pharmaceutical grade or high-end fish oil is usually 50% pure.  My Healthy Andy brand fish oils are 70% pure, cough cough shameless plug cough cough, but hey, let’s not dwell on that just now.

Krill oil, on the other hand, only has about 10% EPA and DHA.  So while the active ingredients in krill oil are okay, you just don’t get much of them.  You’d have to eat a handful of krill oil capsules to match a more reasonable dose of fish oil.

So that’s the main reason to stick to fish oils.  You just get more bang for the buck (or milligram) with fish oils.  There’s another reason that I think is quite relevant too, that has more to do with logic than evidence (by the way, not the same thing). 

Here it is.  We eat fish.  We don’t eat krill.

That’s it.  Sort of simple, but relevant.  I’d rather get my Omega-3s from a source that is a natural food source.  Just like grass.  Cows eat grass, and we eat cows, but we don’t eat grass, so I don’t want to squeeze grass to try to get something out of it.

So to sum up, when it comes to krill oil vs fish oil, the clear choice is still fish oil.  While krill oil is a mediocre source of Omega-3 fatty acids, fish oils are still a far superior choice.  Fish oil provides more EPA and DHA, and is a more natural source (in that we eat fish) of Omega-3s. 

Remember to check out the video on how to pick fish oils that I mentioned above, and compare your brand’s purity to my own Healthy Andy fish oils.  Stay healthy!

Live Longer with Green Tea, Study Shows

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that drinking green tea can help you live longer.  Many studies in the past have examined the specific health benefits of either green tea, or the active antioxidants in green tea, but this study examined the actual consumption of tea and compared it to mortality rates in Japanese adults.

Plyometric Chest Exercises

If you’re looking to push through a plateau in your training, or just try something extra challenging in your chest workout, try one of these plyometric chest exercises that I’ve been doing lately (and having a real love/hate relationship with).  Be forewarned, though… they’re pretty intense.

What’s A Plyometric Chest Exercise?

Plyometrics is a term for a particular type of exercise favoring fast, explosive movements.  The idea is to train the muscles to produce a lot of speed and power as quickly as possible.  While this is related to raw strength, this isn’t necessarily the same thing.

As an example, someone who can jump really high might not be able to squat a huge amount of weight.  But, they can explosively accelerate their body very quickly and thereby launch themselves into the air with greater speed than an Olympic weight-lifter might be able to.

These fast, explosive movements have obvious benefits for athletes, since many athletic events require speed and explosive power more than anything else (well, aside from coordination).  Aside from speed and power, plyometrics also encourages the neurological connections between the mind and the muscle, potentially leading to quicker reaction times.

Plyometric Chest Exercise #1

So let’s apply these principles to a chest workout.  For our first plyometric chest exercise, we’re going to go old school and dig out a good old-fashioned body weight exercise: the push up. But not just any push-up.  We’re going to do explosive or, as they’re sometimes called, “Marine Corps” pushups.

It looks just like a regular push-up, but instead of simply pressing yourself up into a plank position, you’re going to lower yourself down and then spring yourself up into the air as fast and high as you can so that your hands clear the ground by several inches.  As you land, lower yourself back down, and then spring back up into the air, as many times as you can.

Once you get the hang of this, you should be able to launch yourself high enough that you can clap your hands before you lower yourself back down.  Even if you’re used to doing push-ups, don’t be surprised if you find plyometric pushups to be a surprising challenge.  You’re using a different set of fast-twitch muscle fibers to do these explosive movements versus a slower, more controlled push-up movement.

The great thing about this exercise, of course, is that it’s free.  You just need a stretch of ground that you can do this on, and the will to actually do it consistently.  For our next exercise, we’ll need a piece of equipment.

Plyometric Chest Exercise #2

For this exercise, we’re going to essentially do the same thing as in #1, but with a little twist: we’re going to do it on a Bosu ball.  For those of you unfamiliar with a Bosu ball, it’s basically half of an exercise ball with a firm plastic disc as a base.  Most people use it by standing on the base with the ball part on the ground, using it as a wobble board to make various exercises more difficult.

We’re going to do the same thing, but we’re not doing to stand on it.  Instead, grab either end of the disc part of the Bosu ball with both hands, and get into the plank position.  Since the ball part is on the ground, you’re already going to be wobbling a little bit.  If you’ve never done this before, you’re going to want to do a few regular push ups on the Bosu like this just to get used to it.

Once you’re ready, lower yourself down, and like before, launch yourself up into the air as quickly as possible so your hands (still gripping the Bosu) clear the ground.  As you go up into the air, bend your arms slightly to draw the Bosu up into the air.  As you come down, the Bosu will compress beneath you a bit.  Launch yourself back up, as many times as you can.

I actually find using the Bosu to do plyometric pushups is a lot easier on my hands and wrists than otherwise, because the Bosu will give a little rather than just landing back down on concrete or a hardwood floor.  But the instability created by the Bosu definitely ramps up the difficulty level.

Give it a try, and be ready for some soreness the next day!  As a general rule of thumb, it’s best not to do plyometric movements for any body part more than three times a week, so that your body can fully recover.

Stay healthy!

Bad Study On Fish Oils Wrong, Misleading

“Fish Oil May Not Prevent Depression, Says Study”, says the headline on a leading news website, even though the study isn’t about taking fish oil. Lies and misrepresentations tend to make me froth at the mouth in furious anger, so I just can’t let this go unanswered.

The latest in a long tradition of crappy science mixed with crappy journalism, this MSNBC article summarizes the results of a poorly-designed study which leaps to incorrect conclusions, and in the process, misleads the reader even more by interchanging the words “fish” and “fish oil”. Well, let’s see if Healthy Andy can’t untangle this mess for you.

First off, the study is question was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and was based off of a large nutritional survey that followed over 50,000 nurses over ten years. To sum up, the researchers checked to see who was eating fish, compared that to who ended up getting depressed, and found no correlation. Then, they declared that EPA and DHA, the main active ingredients in fish oil, have no effect on preventing depression.

Hang on, buster. Not so fast.

Let’s start by correcting the journalist who wrote that misleading headline. This study did NOT study the effect of taking fish oils. It studied the effect of eating fish. It’s not the same thing.

Does it sound like I’m splitting hairs? Here’s why there’s a difference: dosage. Eating fish obviously will provide EPA and DHA from the oils naturally present in the fish. However, it’s nowhere near as much as you get by taking a fish oil supplement.

In fact, dosage is the big reason why this entire study and subsequent news article should be kicked in the head and shown the door. If you eat some high Omega-3 fish every day, you MIGHT end up with a gram or two of EPA and DHA. And while that’s the dosage range I recommend for people without any problems to use as a basic health maintenance dose, if you look at the dosage used to actually treat depression, that’s a whole other story.

If you want to actually treat depression or similar mood disorders, you need to think bigger than a gram or two a day.  Try more like nine or ten grams a day of EPA and DHA.

So, not surprisingly, if you only give someone about one tenth the required dose to make a certain change in the body, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO SEE ANY CHANGE.

Plus, how much fish were these women eating?  What counts as “eating fish”?  Do shellfish count?  Farm-raised fish (which has very little Omega-3)? Did they calculate out the EPA and DHA content of the fish?  That would be pretty hard to do in this case, seeing as how they are relying on a recall survey (“what did you eat yesterday?”), and people really suck at estimating portion size.  Did these women eat fish every day?  Every other day?  How much and what kind (since different varieties of fish have differing Omega-3 contents)?

The bottom line is, the researchers really can’t tell how much EPA and DHA these people were ingesting on a regular basis.  Which means, they really can’t reach any conclusions about anything.

At best… at BEST… if you ignore the  fact that the researchers couldn’t accurately estimate Omega-3 intake, this study suggests that it’s hard to eat enough fish to improve mental health.  Which, I could’ve told you before, simply by looking at the dosage used to treat depression (nine to ten grams daily… you’re talking several pounds of high-quality fish here).  But to use a headline stating that fish OIL doesn’t have any effect on depression, is just plain wrong and misleading.

In fact, fish oil does seem to have a positive effect on depression.  You just have to take a sufficient dosage.  So shut your face, MSNBC, and do your homework before you go writing headlines.

What The Hey’s A Burpee?

It may sound like a gastrointestinal complaint, but in reality, a burpee is one of the oldest old-school bodyweight exercises out there.  Nobody’s really 100% sure where it came from or who invented it (there’s plenty of theories floating around out there), but the only thing that matter is, the burpee is a easy, free exercise pretty much anybody can do.

Like most bodyweight exercises, the burpee is really quite safe.  If you can jump up in the air and do a push-up without hurting yourself, you can do burpees.  In fact, that’s pretty much all a burpee is; a squat jump combined with a push-up.

Just What Is A Burpee?

Here’s how the exercise is performed.  Stand normally with your feet at shoulder width.  Bend your knees to squat straight down until you can put both hands flat on the ground next to your feet.

After that, shoot your legs backward so that now you’re in the push-up position with your arms straight (also called the plank position).  Lower yourself down into a pushup, then push yourself back up to a plank.

Draw your legs back underneath you so they are next to your hands again, and jump up into the air.  That’s one repetition.

The burpee is designed to be done for many repetitions, like a push-up or crunch.  Of course, you can try to make it harder by doing all kinds of crazy variations, like adding a pull-up.  In that variant, you end the burpee by jumping up to a pull-up bar, doing a pull-up, and then dropping down to a standing position on each rep.

Or, you could alter the push-up by making it a more explosive push-up, the kind where you spring up high enough into the air so you can clap your hands.  Really, you can alter the burpee however you like to make it suit you more effectively.

Here’s a video of a very fit women doing a modified burpee as part of a circuit training routine:

Can’t do a push-up yet?  You can modify the burpee as follows.  After you lower yourself into the plank position, take a half-second and rest your knees on the ground.  This will make the push-up easier to do until you build up enough strength in your arms to handle a “proper” push-up.

Who Should Do Burpees?

Simply put, anyone and everyone can and should mix some burpees into their exercise program.  It’s a great, simple, all-around full body exercise.  Multi-joint exercises, in general, are fantastic for rapid weight loss and building up functional strength and agility.  And, as I mentioned, they’re pretty mild to do… that is, for one repetition.  Start doing a bunch of burpees in a row, and you’ll quickly see how challenging they can really become.

The biggest advantages of the burpee exercise is that you don’t need any equipment whatsoever, and really, not much space at all.  Actually, the main space requirements are that you won’t hit your head on anything as you jump up into the air!  So for people who travel a lot, or can’t get to a gym, the burpee is a great exercise to help them either get or stay in shape.

Also, as I mentioned, since they’re pretty easy to do, burpees are great for beginners who aren’t quite ready (either physically or emotionally) to join a gym.  But make no mistake, advanced athletes should mix burpees into their routine as well from time to time.

Stay healthy!