For the past few years I have been very clear that I believed that everyone needed to supplement with fish oil or an equivalent omega-3 supplement. The research on our fatty acid profiles being out of line of normal, cardiovascular disease, and general dietary insufficiencies is what led me to this conclusion. I myself have been supplementing approximately 1 gram a day of omega-3s in a fish oil supplement myself for years.
Early in my career I believed it was possible to fulfill this need through diet, and today I am coming back around to this perspective. The fatty acid profile I now believe IS actually able to be normalized by simply reducing your Omega-6 fatty acid intake to a more natural level while taking care to consume a healthy amount of Omega-3s. Our food supply is chock full of omega-6s. Virtually any processed food will contain them. Seed oils primarily contribute to this. You CAN avoid them if you are cooking at home, from scratch, not using these vegetable oils. Instead use fruit oils like olive or avocado if you are feeling fancy, even lard, tallow, butter, or coconut oil can be used in cooking and not change your ratio. Obviously don’t overdo the saturated fats, a ballpark of 10% of your diet is a benchmark to not exceed in that department.
All this said, DO NOT neglect eating healthy long-chain omega-3s. Our main source is fish in the diet. 1 gram/day is the goal, that’s a combination of EPA & DHA. Because these are fats, if you eat something high, you can effectively roll that over to your next daily target. Some of the fish can last you several days! I don’t always eat fish every day or high level fish every 4 days. We eat fish maybe 2-3x/week here and sometimes it’s one that isn’t high in Omega-3s. That doesn’t mean its a bad fish, e.g. clams are excellent nutritionally, but not in the omega-3 department. How are you doing on this? Are you and your family eating 1 gram of long chain omega-3s? Here is a great chart from OSU:
The thing is I am eating 2 eggs most days. A high quality egg yolk has 0.8 g of long chain omega-3s according to OSU. Because we make almost EVERYTHING from scratch at my house and don’t even eat out once a month, I can confidently say that our diet is not overwhelmed by an excess of omega-6 fatty acids by cooking fats. Our beef is grass fed and finished, we also eat a fair amount of wild game. These have a different fatty acid profile than corn fed cattle, which also helps decrease the omega-6 amount. So, in our case I think the omega-3 supplements may be overboard.
I will finish our current bottle of fish oil and after that, we’re dropping it. I will be more mindful about cooking high level omega 3 fish more often and getting those high quality eggs regularly. Diet diversity and from scratch cooking for the win.
My new recommendation is to check in if your balance is off with your omega intake, if you’re avoiding omega 6 cooking oils and consuming an average of 1 g omega-3s/day in your diet-skip the extra fish oil. Keep taking that Vitamin D if you live north of Arizona, and a good food-based multivitamin/multimineral will do you good.
Dr. Sara Mays, D.C. 