Flaxseed vs Fish Oil - Which Is Better?

Flax seed versus fish oill I'm gonna tell you the difference

stay tuned hey I'm Dr. Sten Ekberg with wellness for life and if you would like

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that you don't miss anything when we talk about flax and fish oil

we're really talking about omega-3 oils and there's two major sources one is of

course flax which is the vegetable source it gives us ala which is

alpha-linolenic acid and the animal source of fish source gives us EPA or

DHA so here's what's actually happening in the body you eat the vegetable source

the ala known as alpha linolenic acid and it gets converted into a couple of

intermediaries that we don't concern ourselves with but eventually it becomes

epa or eicosa-penta-noic acid which is an anti-inflammatory that's why it's so

beneficial for most degenerative condition especially heart disease and

this EPA eventually gets converted into DHA or

docosahexaenoic acid which is an even longer 6-fold unsaturated fatty acid and

this is especially useful for cell membranes and we have tons of those in

the cortex of the brain and in the eye the cortex is as much as 15 to 20

percent DHA and the retina is as much as 30 to 60 percent DHA by weight so you

would think then that if I just get enough of the flax oil then the body can

make all of the stuff that it needs well unfortunately it's not quite that simple

because there's something called a rate limiting step this step here this

conversion only happens if we have enough of an enzyme called Delta six

desaturates so the conversion happens somewhere between

1% and 10% of the time so if you eat flaxseed as little as 1% could get

converted into the stuff that you really need so eating flax isn't enough ideally

you could convert as much as 10% if you're super super healthy so what are

some of the factors well this enzyme is inhibited by stress

and by sugar and by grains so all of the things that are abundant in our modern

life has the tendency to turn off this conversion so if you're super super

healthy then you could probably get away with eating flax oil and converting as

much as you need into epa and DHA for most of the population they're probably

closer to the 1% conversion and they're going to be severely deficient in epa

and DHA and the best source is fish oil so my best recommendation would be to

eat the flaxseed because it's super cheap it is a fantastic whole food it

gives us protein it gives us healthy fat even if we can't convert it all the way

to EPA and DHA it's still a healthy fat and it gives us a tremendous amount of

fiber to keep the bowel moving and then you take the fish oil as a supplement to

give you the EPA and the DHA that your body is desperately deficient in so you

eat flaxseed for the food purpose and you take the fish oil as a supplement I

hope you enjoyed this video we'll have more videos coming so if you let us know

what you'd like to know more about we'll be more than happy to try to answer

those questions either in the comment section or in the form of another video

thank you so much