Is Fish Oil Really Better For Your Health Than Flax Seed Oil?

There has been a lot of debate over whether flax seed oil is better than fish oil for your health or vice versa, and in my opinion the answer is that although both of them have lots of health benefits for you if you were to increase anything in your diet it should be fish oil. The reason being is simply down to the different types of fats that are found in their different types of Omega three.

The Omega three fatty acid found in flax seed oil is known as ALA fat. In oily fish there are two omega3 fats, they are EPA and DHA. You are probably already getting a lot of this ALA fat anyway, because more often than not when you see food on the supermarket shelves that says it contains omega3, then the omega3 it contains is more often than not this fat. Interestingly the ALA fat is actually the parent fat as well which to put simply means that it can turn into the other two fats within the body, unfortunately the amount that changes is such a low percentage that you have to eat mountains of the stuff to get any benefit from it.

So what makes the fish oil fats so important anyway?

There are lots of the health benefits to be had from the fats found in oily fish, and research has being going into them for the best part of 30 years now and even today they are still finding new benefits to be had from them. One of the first areas that was discovered was how it helps protect the heart; it does this by thinning the blood which in turn reduces the amount of plaque buildup and this is important because by reducing the buildup reduces the likelihood of clots forming which can obviously have devastating consequences. On top of that it also lowers triglyceride levels, boosts the amount of good cholesterol in the blood and also helps to regulate the heartbeat.

But it doesn't stop there, it is also now known that there is a lot of DHA fat in the brain, it in fact acts as a membrane around the cells which the neurons passes through to get from cell to cell. If we do not have enough DHA in our diets than the body substitutes it with DPA fats which are not as flexible and therefore the neurons cannot pass through properly. It is thought now that this can lead to conditions such as depression mood swings and ADHD in children.

In addition to this, it is also now been scientifically established that the DHA fat helps fight inflammation. Normally we would associate inflammation with conditions such as arthritis, however it is behind much more serious conditions than that such as aneurysms and strokes to name two. What researchers have found is that within the body the DHA fat turns into a new substance called Resolvin D2, this then reacts with inner lining of the blood vessel to create nitric oxide, and when this occurs it prevents inflammation from taking place.

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