Is Cod Liver Oil Good or Bad?

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Is Cod Liver Oil Good or Bad? This is JJ Virgin four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Mary Beth asked a question during my Super Immune Secrets Masterclass. Is cod liver oil good or bad? I'm always hearing both opinions. Well, Mary Beth, I've had a lot of experience with fish oil. I'll be right back with the answer.

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All right, so when my son was in the hospital, my son Grant was the victim of a hit and run, left for dead in the street, and was in the hospital in a coma with severe traumatic brain injury. And one of the things that I started doing quickly was giving him fish oil and quickly raising that up to a higher dose, 10 to 20 grams of fish oil a day, and is one of the things I credit for bringing him back to 110%. And in fact, I ran into Dr. Sanjay Gupta in a green room when I was taping Access Hollywood, and he was telling me stories about how they were resuscitating children who had oxygen deficit from drowning, et cetera, using fish oil. So there's a lot of really good information out there about fish oil for brain recovery. Now, fish oil is good for a lot of different reasons. Brain recovery is one of them. But we'll talk about some of the different benefits. But first of all, I want to go a little bit higher up because I'm not sure if you're asking about cod liver oil specifically, I'm going to assume, or fish oil in general. So we're going to first unpack. You know, why you'd want to take fish oil, fish oil versus plant omega 3s, what the benefits are, and then what to look for. All right, so fish oils contain omega 3s and specifically these ones called EPA and DHA. This is very different than plant sources of omega 3s, which tend to have ALA primarily, and then you have to convert to the other ones, which our buddy does not do well. So ideally, you are eating clean wild fish, emphasize small ones. But most likely you're also going to want to supplement with a clean fish oil supplement. We'll talk about why that is and what to look for so that you can get the doses that will help you and what fish oil helps you with. Well, EPA. And again, remember, omega 3s from fish contain both EPA and DHA. EPA is beneficial for supporting a healthy brain, balanced emotion, good mood, skin health, and helping maintain normal cholesterol levels and also modulating the inflammatory response. And DHA helps support proper brain development and function, visual acuity, maintenance of normal triglyceride levels and blood pressure, eye development, and helps support a healthy pregnancy. So they work together, super important. And nature put them together, I guess, for a reason. And generally what I have people doing is taking 2 grams of a high quality fish oil a day. Ideally, you're getting fish in a couple times a week, but you'd really be wanting to do fish, you know, probably five, six times a week. If you didn't need to supplement as much, that's when you could lower it down a bit. So how do you know what you should be looking for? Well, the first thing you want to look for in a fish oil is you want to make sure that the fish oil is fresh. So what happens is when the fish is caught, it should be processed within hours. Because remember, this is raw fish oil. You want to make sure it's processed within hours. One of the challenges with, with Omega 3s is that they can oxidize easily. So you want to make sure that it's processed quickly but also minimally processed. And that while they're doing that, they are molecularly distilling it. That removes that fishy odor and that fishy taste that they'll, they're filtrating it to remove the PCBs, the chlorinated organopollutants and heavy metals. And they're doing it through cold extraction. Again, you don't want to get this to oxidize, right? So cold extraction so that you can refine the EPA and DHA fatty acids. And that is from sustainable wild fish because remember, toxins store in the fat. Now, there's one other thing to look at, and it is the type of form it is in, and the type I recommend is triglyceride form. So when you get this in a triglyceride form, this is the same way that the fish oil occurs in fish. And so it's the form that's most easily recognized and absorbed by the body. So this is what I look for. And then I'm going to give you a couple other things that I look for as well. I also look for a product that has some antioxidants in it, especially like using maybe some annattoteca trienol, something that's going to help it from oxidizing if it's exposed to air. And then I also look for, if you're doing capsules, something has a little lipase so that it will help you not have the fishy burps. If you do find that you're someone who, when you take fish oil, you have fishy burps, there's a couple things to look at. You can bite into a fish oil capsule and you can tell if it's rancid. So that's not fun. But also if you're one of those people that tends to burp up fats. You might want to consider some fat digestive enzymes, something like lipase to help there. So again, the big thing is you want to look at number one. I think fish oil is one of those supplements that should be on your essential list. It's something that I take every single day. Dosing is generally 1 to 2 grams. If you eat a lot of fish then you could go down to one, but I find most people are not eating enough of clean, wild, sustainable fish to do that. The reason you want to do to fish over plant plants. Great. But fish is going to give you the doses of EPA and DHA you're looking at. And then this is where you want to spend the money and get a high quality one. Because if you're getting fish oil that hasn't been processed correctly, hasn't been distilled and purified, you could be making a good thing bad. All right, thanks for the question. This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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