How To Choose OMEGA-3 Supplements ( Buyer's Guide )

Omega-3 fats are essential for your heart health,  your brain health, your mood, anti-inflammation, and more. Whether it's doctors, or  functional medicine practitioners, health fanatics around the world, everyone agrees  we need more omega-3s in our diet. It's one of the most common supplements but it's also one of the  most expensive supplements.

If you're confused, you are not alone. There are over a thousand  brands, there are literally hundreds of millions of dollars spent every year on marketing, and  it kind of seems like they're all the same. But they're not the same at all.

This is a buyer's  guide to omega-3 fats. Let's take a look. If you're in-person in a store, here's what you want  to look for.

If you're online, you can look for the same thing, just zoom in with your mouse. The  first thing to look for is a dark bottle. This is an amber bottle, it doesn't matter if it's plastic  or glass, but it wants to be amber to not let the light in, or completely opaque.

What you'd like  to avoid are clear bottles. Doesn't matter if it's glass or plastic, if it's clear, don't buy it.  These oils are highly susceptible to light damage, heat damage, and also oxidative damage, so we want  to make sure that our oils are protected in a dark bottle.

The next thing to think about is your  source. You really just have three sources that you should consider if you're doing a pill form  supplement, and those are fish oil, krill oil, and algae oil. Fish come in all different sizes, we'll  talk more about that later, different concerns.

Krill are little crustaceans, they're little teeny  shrimp-like creatures, we'll talk about that. And algae is actually where all these omega-3s come  from in the first place. There are different cost, environmental, and ethical considerations, but  this is really what you're looking at.

The next thing that we need to look at, which is absolutely  crucial, is the cost-benefit analysis. If you walk into a pharmacy or an online store it seems like  the costs vary from $20 a bottle all the way up to $100 per bottle. But the reality is, the cost  differential is not really there.

The challenge with the nutritional supplement industry is,  because there's no standardization, it's possible that some main manufacturers will sell you a  big pill of oil with just a little bit of actual active EPA and DHA and other manufacturers will  sell you mostly EPA and DHA, with just a little bit of carrier oil. Here's how you calculate it.  Again, if you're in the store, pick up the bottle, flip it around and look at the nutritional label. 

If you're online, scroll with your mouse and here's what we're looking for. In this particular  supplement, for every two capsules I have 800 mg of EPA and I have 400 mg of DHA. This is actually  a really potent fish oil supplement, most of them are much, much weaker, half or even a third, some  would even be a quarter as weak.

Next, and maybe most importantly, you need to do a cost per dose  calculation. Whether you're in a store or online, you'll see a bottle that might cost $20, you'll  see another bottle that might cost $90. It seems like there's a huge disparity, but very often that  has to do with dosing.

Here's what we're looking for. When you combine the EPA and the DHA we  want at least 1 gram per day. With that in mind, here's how you do the calculation.

If you have a  bottle, pick it up, flip it around, and look at the nutritional facts label. If you're online,  scan your mouse and zoom in. Ignore all the astaxanthin, ignore all the vitamin E, just focus  on two numbers - EPA and DHA.

This particular bottle has 400 mg of EPA and 200 mg of DHA per  pill. So, the recommended dosage is two pills, that gets me to over one gram per day. I wrote  out the math for you, so it's a little simpler.

I combined the EPA and the DHA in two pills and that  gets me to 1. 2 g or 1,200 mg. So, two pills gets me an effective dose.

I mentioned this, that seems  really obvious, but a lot of supplements you might have to take four, six, or even eight pills to  get an effective dose. So, what looks like a cheap bottle is actually really expensive. What looks  like a convenient option, suddenly you're choking on pills.

This particular bottle has 200 pills,  which means it's a 50 day supply. I paid $49 for the bottle, which means roughly about a dollar  per day. Now, that doesn't sound like that much, a dollar per day, if you took it for a month.

But  many of us take something like this every day. Many of us live in a household with more than one  person. Maybe there's four people in your house, really quickly you could be talking about hundreds  of dollars a year or even a thousand plus dollars per year.

It's kind of an important decision.  You want to make sure you get it right, make sure you're investing your money and your ingestion  into something that's going to have value. To give you a reference range, on the low end maybe  you'd find something of good quality that would cost 50 cents per day, maybe on the high end  $1.

50 per day. Right around a dollar per day is pretty typical, hence the reason I'm making this  video. The next thing to look out for for are red flags.

On that same label, when you zoom in, you  want to look for something called ethyl esters. These omega-3 fats are bound up in phospholipids  or triglyceride forms. These are just different ways that they're created and the ethyl ester form  is not dangerous, it's not bad for you, it's very bioavailable.

The problem is, research has shown  that it's more prone to rancidity than other forms. Now, fortunately, most manufacturers have  stopped using this ethyl ester form, but you still need to check for it. It'll usually show up on the  label.

The next thing, and nobody checks for this, is you need to look at the expiration date. There  are a lot of old supplements sitting on the shelf, and as we repeatedly will talk about today, these  things are highly volatile, these polyunsaturated fats, with light, and oxygen, with heat,  with time, they go bad, they go rancid, and they kind of have the opposite effect. Instead  of being anti-inflammatory, they can actually flip and become inflammatory.

And some research has  suggested as much as 10% of the supplements that you'd buy online or in the shop are actually  rancid. So, check that expiration date. Which leads me to my next recommendation, which is  not so popular but important, is don't buy boutique brands.

When it comes to omega-3 fats,  there are no microbreweries of fish oils, there are no little manufacturers who are juicing fish  and squeezing out oil, it doesn't work like that. Whether it's fish oil, but especially with krill,  and absolutely with algae oil, there are not very many people manufacturing these things, which  means even though you see dozens of different brands, the source material, the actual oil, it's  often coming from the same companies. So really, what you want is the freshest you can possibly  find.

These little brands have low turnover, they're very likely to have old product. Now,  technically this is illegal, but it happens every day, even on big sites like Amazon, rancid, old,  expired supplements are being sold. It's in teeny, tiny print, so check.

Don't buy the boutique  brands, buy the ones that are selling the most. In a physical store, that would be the ones on  the front of the aisle, the ones that are clearly having the most turnover. Online, it's the ones  with the most reviews, the best seller status, you've seen them before.

It's really the way to go  when it comes to supplements. OK, now that we've got our high quality omega-3 in a dark bottle,  we've chosen our source, and everything is sorted, it's nice and fresh, buy a three-month supply,  don't buy anymore. If you buy a really long supply, again, it's likely to sit on your shelf  and go bad.

Now that that's all out of the way, let's take a deeper dive into selecting which type  of fish, or krill, or algae oil. Let's also take a look at some of the plant-based sources that can  also be interesting to explore for your omega-3 needs. Before we do that, my name is Lucas, I  hadn't introduced myself yet.

I'm a yoga teacher, I'm a nutritional coach. I actually owned  a nutritional supplement company for over 10 years and I worked with some of the larger  manufacturers in the US and Canada and we had an omega-3 line at one point. And I learned  a lot along the way, that's why I made this video.

I have no supplements to sell you, I'm  not going to recommend any brands, there are no affiliate links in this video. This is just  for educational purposes. I do have one ask.

If you find this video valuable, hit subscribe down  below and I also have one offer for you down in the description. I put a PDF link, it's totally  free, but it has references to everything we talked about in terms of selecting good omega-3  fats for you. OK, let's go a little deeper.

Fish oil is the most complex. Here's what's the  important thing to remember with fish oils, almost all of the research, whether it's cardiovascular  benefits, whether it's anti-inflammatory benefits, whether it's brain health benefits, almost  all of the research that's been done, medical, non-medical, all the above, almost all of it has  done been done with fish oil. Does that mean that these other options don't work?

No. Are there very  likely carryovers? Yes.

Are there very likely some differences? Also probably yes, but we don't  really know. So, the first thing is fish oil is the original omega-3, in terms of supplementation,  and so you should know that going into it.

There are also the most options. There's cod liver oil,  salmon oil, there is even things like squid oil and all kinds of other options. Your best choice  is to go smaller.

The problem, there's a bunch of problems with fish, but one of the big problems  is bioaccumulation of toxins. The pollutants, industrial pollutants, end up in our oceans,  which end up in our fish. The larger the fish, the more of the toxins.

So, something like cod or  shark oil is going to have way more toxins than something like sardines or anchovies. So, when you  choose fish oil, smaller fish like sardines and anchovies are always going to be a better choice,  so much so that I would discourage you from those big fish sources altogether. The kinds of toxins  that you would find would be things like mercury, and arsenic, and lead, PCBs, dioxin, and they're  pretty prevalent in those larger fish and they absolutely end up in fish oil supplements. 

Hopefully at a small enough quantity that they don't do damage, but it's definitely a cause for  concern. Now, the other cause for concern around fish oil are, well, the fish they're dying, our  oceans have been fished out, there are massive environmental concerns and population collapse  when it comes to different fish species. This is for sure a problem that's only getting worse  and so it could be argued that fish oil is not the most environmental or ethical source, but  again, there are other factors to consider.

Moving right along, we get to krill oil. Now, all  of these will get progressively more expensive, unfortunately. Krill, if you're unfamiliar, are  little shrimp-like crustaceans in very cold water, like in the Arctic.

And if we got rid of  domesticated animals, so dogs, and chickens, and pigs, and cows, krill would be the largest  biomass, so lump of living stuff, on the planet. That is to say there are a lot of krill, there's  tons of krill, they're at no risk of population collapse, at least right now it seems sustainable.  Who knows how long that will last.

They have a pretty simple nervous system, a lot of people  would suggest they don't feel pain, I'm not the person to decide that, you can decide that, but  there's a lot of krill for now. What there are not is a lot of manufacturers and so what that  means is krill oil is mostly coming from just a handful of different sources and the price is  pretty high. In terms of the omega-3 profile, it's pretty comparable to fish oil.

It's just going  to cost you more. But it could be argued that krill oil is more ethical and more sustainable. I  think that's a valid argument.

Moving right along, we get to algae oil. Now, many of you are  probably wondering why didn't we start with algae oil? Algae is often said to smell fishy, but  the reality is, fish smell algae-e.

Meaning the fishy smell that we've all come to know and hate  actually comes from algae. Fish eat algae, algae contains Omega-3s, and that's why the fish smell  the way they do. So, why not just go straight to the source?

Well, algae is considered sustainable,  they certainly don't have the ethical concerns, it's easier to harvest than it any of these animal  foods. The challenge is it's still very much an industry in its infancy and so there are very few  suppliers, it's very expensive, in some cases it might might be even twice as much as fish oil,  although that's changing. And the reality is, the profile is quite different between algae oil  and these other two.

What do I mean by that? Well, usually with fish oils and krill oils you have a  slightly higher EPA to DHA ratio. With algae oil the DHA is way higher than the EPA.

What does  that mean? We don't really know. Most people postulate that EPA is better for your body and  DHA is better for your brain, but there's still a lot of unknowns.

Is it likely that algae oil  has slightly different effects than krill and fish oil? Yes. Could it be better?

Maybe. Could  it be worse? Also maybe, but this is something to consider.

The challenge with algae oil is it's  very much like avocado oil. Avocado oil is great, I don't have it in my kitchen, I can't find it in  the grocery store, it often comes in tiny bottles, it's really expensive. I mostly use olive oil in  my kitchen, I don't have anything against avocado oil, it's just not readily available.

This is kind  of where algae oil sits on that spectrum. OK, so with all that said, then we think why do we need  all these oils anyway? Why this whole video?

Why all this expensive stuff? If I'm going to spend  a dollar a day just giving myself omega-3 fats, shouldn't I just eat omega-3s? And the  answer is you should try to do that as well.

If we were to turn back the clock 100  or, even better, 200 years, what we'd find is omega-3 fats in all kinds of food, including  land animals, including ruminant animals, like cows had a little bit of omega-3. Right  now, omega-3s are really depleted, we don't eat the same amount of sea animals and sea creatures  that we used to. Water-based animals, of course, have higher levels of omega-3 and if you look at  the way the population of the earth laid down, pretty much civilization formed around you know  the Nile river basin, the Mississippi basin, the coasts of the world, we probably had access  to a lot of fish, and a lot of crustaceans, and a lot of seaborn plants for a very long time that  we just don't have so much of right now.

However, we do have access to some things that you can  use. These are flaxseeds, also known as linseeds depending on where you live in the world, and  these are chia seeds. These are essentially superfoods and they are incredibly cheap, very,  very inexpensive, and nutrient dense.

They contain a whole lot of insoluble fiber and a decent  amount of soluble fiber, which is really great for clearing out your bowels. It's also great for your  lipid levels, managing cholesterol, triglyceride levels as well. And they contain omega-3 fats. 

However, they're in a different form, they're in ALA form, which is alpha linolic acid. And your  body needs to convert this ALA omega-3 into the DHA and EPA and your efficiency at converting this  is really dubious, it's unclear. Some people seem to do it really well, other people not so much,  and we don't have a really great way to know.

And probably, just this is not going to be enough,  but who knows? Maybe you're a power converter. So, what should you do?

I still think it makes sense  to include either or both of these in your diet because they're so great for you and because, for  sure, you'll get some of those anti-inflammatory, heart health, cardiovascular, brain health  benefits of the omega-3 fats and it's just such a cost-effective nutrient way to go, it's  really a win-win. Flaxseeds and chia seeds, just like these oils, are also unstable, which  means you want to store them when they are in the whole form in the freezer and then, after you  grind them, in the refrigerator. Here's how you use them.

Take your flaxseeds or your chia seeds  and put them in a blender dry and then pulse the blender. Don't let it go long or it'll get all  gooey, but pulse it until you have a powder, put the powder in a jar, put the lid on the  jar, put it in your refrigerator, and now you can sprinkle this on salads or smoothies. It  tastes really great, it's nutrient dense, and it's a great way to go.

Recently there's been a  bunch of online articles about the phytoestrogens in flaxseeds in particular, you don't need to  worry about that, there's a lot of confusion about xenoestrogens versus phytoestrogens.  Xenoestrogens, these are chemical compounds that are estrogen-like chemicals and they can  really screw up your hormones. Phytoestrogens, while it's not impossible that they screw up  your hormones, in many cases they're actually pro-hormone, they're actually really beneficial,  and so the confusion between xeno and phyto, phyto means plant, is why flaxseeds have gotten a lot  of bad press.

I don't think there's any reason, unless you speak with your doctor, that you  should be concerned. These are really amazing superfoods that you can get pretty much anywhere  in the world. This is your guide to omega-3 fats.

Probably everyone, whether you're eight years  old or 80 years old, needs more omega-3s in their diet. The good news is you have options, the bad  news is they're pretty expensive. My suggestion is choose really wisely, it's a lot of money, it's  a lot of time, but it doesn't have to be that difficult.

Hope you found this video helpful.  As I mentioned before, I'd really appreciate if you hit subscribe. Be sure to grab that PDF  in the description down below.

I have a program called YOGABODY Daily, if you're interested  in healthspan, and strength and flexibility, you can find all of that at yogabody. com. Thanks  for watching and I'll see you in the next video.