Omega-3 Fatty Acids - what are you feeding your kids?

I do a lot of cycling, in fact I’ve got a cycling coach that pushes me and makes sure I’m biking to my limits.  All the biking I do is endurance biking - long distances.  And that means not only do I need to train, I need to recover.  (stay with me here, I’m going somewhere).

So I’m down at my local health food shop getting stocked up on power/energy bars for my long bike rides and me and the clerk get talking about endurance athletes.  She claims that a lot of the long distance folks that shop at her store use some type of Omega 3 fatty acids supplement.  Basically, fish oil.

These omega 3 fatty acids are a modern, and actual, miracle drug.  Except they’re not a drug, they’re just a type of food supplement.  We get a some of it through our foods, but not enough these days.

This stuff has been proven (actually proven) to have a long list of benefits.  Helps you think better, makes you brighter.  Helps athletes recover.  And on and on.  In fact, here’s an example from wikipedia:

where 132 children, between the ages of seven and twelve years old, with poor learning, participated in a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blinded interventional trial. A total of 104 children completed the trial. For the first fifteen weeks of this study, the children were given polyunsaturated fatty acids (n−3 and n−6, 3000 mg a day), polyunsaturated fatty acids plus multi-vitamins and minerals or placebo. After fifteen weeks, all groups crossed over to the polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) plus vitamins and mineral supplement. Parents were asked to rate their children’s condition after fifteen and thirty weeks. After thirty weeks, parental ratings of behavior improved significantly in nine out of fourteen scales

And it helps with cholesterol, and helps guard against cancer and heart attacks, and on and on and on.  Why are you and your children not taking this again?  We are.

There’s a variety of sources for this, the most common ones are:

1. Fish oil
2. meat

Fish oil - you probably remember the old old days with talks of cod liver oil.  That’s basically what we’re talking about here, just in a nice tablet form.

Fish don’t create these acids on their own.  They get it from the algae that they eat.  By eating fish (and fish oil) you’re basically getting the omega 3 fatty acids from the algae, but concentrated through the fish.

In terms of meat, unfortunately most of our beef is grain/corn fed these days.  That produces meat with low amounts of omega 3 fatty acids.  So once again we turn to the fish alternative.

Now, as an active fisherman, I know there’s immediately an issue with eating lots of fish and fish products - heavy metals.  Fish are also aggregators of all those heavy metals.  In fact, most provincial fishing guidelines provide specific recommendations on the maximum amount of fish you should eat.  The larger the fish, the less you should eat.  Anything over 4 feet, don’t touch.  Even if it’s pulled from a nice northern Canadian lake.  And pregnant women and children need to be even more sensitive.

So how to get around that? Enter Krill oil vs. fish oil (see for example KrillOil.com).  Krill are tiny shrimp like critters that feed directly on the algae.  The claim (apparently as yet unproven) is that they don’t accumulate heavy metals like fish do.  So bingo, all the benefits of Omega 3 fatty acids, without the concerns of fish oil.

One way or another, you and your children should be reaping the benefits of omega 3 fatty acids - it’s easy these days with supplements in gel cap form (it’s what we do here).  Whether you use fish oil or krill oil will depend on your beliefs and preferences, but use it you should!

Posted by Dad.