Essential Dietary Oils

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

The only 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 great deal of proof to say that we require some oil and in particular some oils in our diet. This makes sense even on the most basic level, you need some oil (read 'fat') in order to lubricate your joints.

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

In other words, if our diet gets out of kilter. 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 acquire from land-based foodstuffs.

These vitamins and oils in their most accessible forms are derived from dead animals. In the case of the long-chain omega 3 essential fatty acids like EPA and DHA, you can only get them from sea creatures, although you can get 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 have to be able to utilize all their physical and mental powers in order to get to the top of their sports.

Omega 3 essential fatty acids come in two broad kinds, long-chain and short-chain varieties but they are not interchangeable. You need both kinds. Short chain you can get from flaxseed oil and it also has omega 6 in it too, although it is thought by some that most people eat 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 exact 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 depleted as to make going out perilous and we didn't nearly all have jobs indoors.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a number of topics, and is now concerned with pure omega 3. If you want to know more, please visit our web site at Omega 6 9