How to Pick Good Fish Oils
After reading my previous post, I realized I should probably take a quick minute and let you all know how to pick out good fish oils. There’s a ton of products out there and a lot of them are total crap, so I’ll give you the inside scoop on how to choose wisely when it comes to adding these vital supplements.
There’s two basic things you need to consider: filtering and dosage.
Filtering, means just that. Our oceans are horribly, horribly polluted, and since fish live there, they suck all that garbage into their bodies, which then gets embedded into their tissues. Since fish oil is essentially just a concentrated fish product, if you take a whole bunch of fish and squish them down into oil, you concentrate those toxin in the oil as well. Toxins like mercury, dioxin, and no doubt all manner of nightmarish poisons we haven’t even discovered yet.
Anywho, the point is, you don’t want that toxic yuck in you. So, you have to buy fish oils that are filtered. Somewhere on the bottle it should say “molecularly distilled”, “filtered”, something along those lines. Don’t buy any fish oils that aren’t filtered. I mean it. Walk away. Set the cheap fish oil down, and walk away. It’s not worth it.
After you make sure your fish oil is filtered, now it’s time to check quality, which has to do with proper dosage. The active ingredients of fish oil are EPA and DHA, two chemicals you don’t have to remember… they’ll be the only things listed on the label. Add the amounts of these two babies up, and that’s how much fish oil you’re really getting per dose.
I say “really getting”, because often the company making the oil will say something like 1,000 mg of fish oil! while in reality, if you add up the EPA and DHA, it’s only 250 mg. The rest is some sort of un-named fish yuck that won’t do you any good. The best you’re probably going to find is about 50% purity. So, the label may say 1,000 mg of fish oils, but you’re really getting about 500 mg of active ingredients.
How much should you take? I usually suggest somewhere around 1,000 mg of EPA and DHA total for general health maintenance… you know, you’re pretty healthy, have a pretty good diet, don’t have any major health issues you want to take fish oils to help you out with. For more active problems, I usually ramp it up to 3 or even 6 grams per day, at least until those issues resolve, and then back down to more of a maintenance dose.
As I mentioned in the previous blog, I take 3 grams a day, but then, I’m Healthy Andy.
Hope this info help you out!