Essential Dietary Oils

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

The solitary tactic that can work in the long term, if you would like to lose weight, is to expend more calories than you take in. However, there is a lot of evidence to say that we require some oil and specifically some oils in our diet. This makes sense even on the most basic level, you have to have 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, if our diet gets out of balance. For instance, animal fats (such as saturated fats) have a blanket ‘bad’ reputation, but they provide our bodies with such important vitamins as A,D, E and K. Similarly fish oil supplies our bodies with Omega 3 essential fatty acids that it is impossible to get from land-based foodstuffs.

These vitamins and oils in their most available forms are derived from dead animals. In the case of the long-chain omega 3 essential fatty acids like EPA and DHA, you can just acquire 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 vital to all human life but even more so to finely-tuned sports people 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 interchangeable. You need both kinds. Short chain you can acquire from flaxseed oil and it also has omega 6 in it too, although it is thought by many that most individuals 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 good 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 variety of other vitamins and nutrients including vitamin D, which you could synthesize from the sunshine, if the ozone layer was not so depleted as to make going out perilous 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