Does Taking Fish Oil Tablets Help Prevent Bowel Cancer?
There are 2 important essential fatty acids that we need in our diet called DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid), and these are found in fish oil and in fish oil tablets. These are called omega 3 essential fatty acids and over the last 4 decades there are many studies which have established the health benefits of increasing our intake of omega 3 fatty acids. These benefits include heart health benefits, prostate cancer prevention and breast cancer prevention, and now extend to helping to prevent bowel cancer.
A study in Scotland on the benefits of increasing your intake of Omega3 fats found that more DHA and EPA in your diet can help to reduce your risk of colorectal cancer by up to around 40 percent. The study specifically noted that increasing intakes of DHA and EPA achieved this result, but that increasing the intake of ALA (alpha-linolenic acid), a plant-based Omega 3 fat, did not produce the same result.
Clear evidence was that those who ate more fish had a lower risk of colon cancer and that those who ate less fish had a higher risk of colon cancer.
A Dutch study also established, by comparing the results of– other studies, that one meal of fish every week reduced your risk of bowel cancer by an estimated 4 percent. Therefore if you eat 2 meals of fish each week your risk of bowel cancer reduces by around 8 percent.
We eat too little fish in the US, and in particular we eat too little fish to achieve these results in helping to prevent colon cancer.
Of course increasing your intake of fish or fish oil is only a part of an overall strategy to help prevent colon cancer, but it is also now firmly established that increasing your intake of Omega3 fats is also important to a wide range of other health considerations and can have significant heart health benefits.
The next question is how to achieve these benefits. In the US we don’t generally eat a lot of fish. Fish is extremely expensive and it is only certain types of fish that have high levels of DHA and EPA. Combine that with the fact that most of the fish we eat is contaminated to a degree with mercury and other nasty toxins, and that the FDA advise discretion when eating fish for this reason, and it is fair to say that increasing our intake of fish substantially and weekly will be too expensive and can have other problems.
But the best way to get more fish oil into your diet is by way of fish oil tablets. These contain DHA and EPA, and are very cost-effective when compared to eating fish, and can be taken daily. And the best fish oil tablets have no contaminants.
Unfortunately there is a wide variation in the quality of the different brands of fish oil tablets, and in particular the quantities of the important ingredients DHA and EPA, the best fish oil tablets having 2 to 3 times more DHA and EPA than average omega 3 tablets.
It seems clear from the research that increasing your intake of omega 3 fatty acids is a big part of staying healthy, including in helping to prevent bowel cancer. And as we are all eating too little fish we should all be considering daily supplementation with fish oil tablets.
For this reason sales of fish oil tablets are increasing faster than any other supplement in history, and I have taken daily fish oil tablets for a long time. To find out which Omega 3 supplements are my choice visit my website.
Want to know more about the health benefits of Fish Oil? Or how to find the Best Fish Oil Tablets? Visit Peter’s Website Healthy Omega 3 Fish Oil.