Essential Dietary Oils

Despite the alternative of the Atkins diet, most individuals who diet take the advice of decreasing their fat intake in order to reduce their bulk, which is fat. However, there is not a lot of evidence to support the theory that reducing the intake of fat will reduce how much fat you amass on your body.

The only strategy that can work in the long term, if you would like to lose weight, is to use up more calories than you take in. However, there is a lot of proof to say that we require some oil and in particular some oils in our diet. This makes sense even on the most simple level, you need some oil (read ‘fat’) in order to oil your joints.

It therefore makes sense that athletes and people who have a tiring job also need oil in some amount. However, it does not follow that eating just any oil or fat will be decent enough. There are good fats and ‘bad’ fats, although we even require some of the bad fats. The worries arise when we eat too much bat fat and not enough good fat.

In other words, when our diet gets out of kilter. For instance, animal fats (such as saturated fats) have a blanket ‘bad’ reputation, but they supply our bodies with such important vitamins as A,D, E and K. Likewise fish oil supplies our bodies with Omega 3 essential fatty acids that it is impossible to get from land-based foods.

These vitamins and oils in their most available forms come from dead animals. In the case of the long-chain omega 3 essential fatty acids like EPA and DHA, you can just get them from sea creatures, although you can derive the short-chain omega 3’s from some land-based sources.

These vitamins and essential oils are crucial to all human life but even more so to finely-tuned sports individuals who need to be able to utilize all their physical and mental powers in order to get to the top of their professions.

Omega 3 essential fatty acids come in two broad types, long-chain and short-chain varieties but they are not identical. You need both sorts. Short chain you can acquire from flaxseed oil and it also has omega 6 in it too, although it is considered by many that most people consume far too much omega 6 as it is present in all vegetable cooking oils.

Oily fish delivers the long-chain omega 3’s, so cod liver oil is a decent source of these. These omega 3’s are literally ‘brain food’ and it is the reason why parents have been saying for hundreds of years that fish is brain food, although they certainly would not have known the precise reason why.

Cod liver oil also provides a spectrum of other vitamins and nutrients including vitamin D, which you could synthesize from the sunshine, if the ozone layer was not so thin as to make going out dangerous and we didn’t nearly all work indoors.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on several subjects, and is now concerned with pure omega 3. If you want to know more, please go to our site at Omega 6 9