# 5 Reasons Fish Oil Will Make You Stronger, Leaner & Healthier



## K1 (Mar 11, 2013)

by Charles Poliquin

*#1: Fish Oil Can Help You Lose Body Fat*
Fish oil can help you lose body fat for a number of reasons, some of which are well known, while others are just emerging. First, fish oil provides essential fats because it is made up of omega-3 fatty acids. Essential fats are those which the body can’t produce on its own—they must be eaten—and it must have them for optimal function.

Fish oil won’t turn into fat in the body. Instead, the body will favorably use the fat from fish oil to build the outside lipid (fat) layer that protects our cells. Any kind of fat can be used to do this—trans fats, omega-6 fats, whatever you eat—but your cells will function the best, and metabolism will be optimal if fish oil makes up the cell lipid layer because it improves the activity of insulin.

This allows for better insulin sensitivity, which is a principal factor in fat loss. If you have poor insulin sensitivity, you will have a very difficult time losing fat. The other benefit of fish oil is that it is anti-inflammatory, which will be explained in greater depth in #3.

You can see fish oil working its fat loss magic in a recent study that gave healthy subjects 4 grams of fish oil or the same dose of safflower oil (an omega-6 fat) for 6 weeks. The participants who took the fish oil significantly lost body fat and increased muscle mass—and they weren’t even exercising!

Of interest, the participants in this study had a decrease in their levels of the stress hormone cortisol after taking the fish oil. Cortisol is a catabolic hormone that degrades muscle, leads to fat gain, and makes you feel stressed out.

*#2: Fish Oil Can Help You Build Muscle: It’s Anabolic*
As mentioned in #1, since fish oil decreases cortisol it leads one to think that it is anabolic, and the happy news is that there’s research to back this idea up. For instance, a new study that was performed on aging rats showed that giving them fish oil for 8 weeks significantly increased protein synthesis and helped them increase muscle cross-sectional area.

Fish oil is anabolic for humans as well. A study that gave middle-age adults 4 grams of fish oil a day found that it increased protein synthesis, producing a significant muscle building effect. The mTOR pathway that produces muscle growth was enhanced by 30 percent, as was muscle cell membrane signaling—the same mechanism via which insulin health is improved also enhances muscle building. Muscle mass increased by 2 percent, however, due to the small study population, researchers didn’t measure changes in body composition.

In fact, the anabolic effects of omega-3s prompted the NCAA to ban the distribution by major colleges to scholarship athletes. The rationale was that omega-3s gave an unfair advantage to the more financially advantage institutions who could afford to give this supplement to athletes.

*#3: Fish Oil Will Decrease Inflammation, Enhancing Body Composition*
Inflammation in the body is horrible for health, but it also significantly impacts your ability to lose body fat and build muscle. I can’t overstress the importance of decreasing inflammation if you want to be lean!

Inflammation seems to be this word that has no meaning for the general population, and people just don’t seem to understand that “inflammation” equals disease, illness, delayed recovery from injury, and obesity. Did you know that fat tissue actually produces inflammation on its own, progressively increasing the inflammatory status in the body?

Fish oil has powerful anti-inflammatory properties, which is a principal reason it helps you lose fat. First, we saw in the study mentioned in number #1 that the people who took 4 grams/day of fish oil had lower cortisol at the end of the study. Anytime cortisol is unnecessarily elevated it causes inflammation and has a protein degrading effect that causes muscle and lean tissue loss.

The anti-inflammatory evidence of fish oil goes further: It is not just chronic inflammation that fish oil can prevent. It also decreases the acute inflammatory response to intense exercise. A recent study had young athletes take 3 grams of fish oil for 7 days and then perform very intense eccentric exercise to failure.

Results showed that compared to a placebo group, the fish oil group had much lower levels of inflammatory biomarkers, less muscle swelling, and less soreness and pain in response to the workout. Researchers suggest the fish oil helped with the elimination of waste products produced in response to energy metabolism during exercise, enhancing the anabolic properties in muscle tissue.

What it all comes down to is that getting the optimal percentage of your dietary fat from fish oil will convey these anti-inflammatory benefits: a) speed detoxification of stuff you don’t want in your body (waste products, inflammatory biomarkers), b) improve cellular health and the building of muscle, c) decrease hormones that cause inflammation, and d) help you be lean and feel better.

*#4: Take Fish To Improve Insulin Sensitivity And Metabolism*
Recall that fish oil improves insulin sensitivity because it gets incorporated into the cellular lipid layer, which allows the cell receptors to bind more easily with insulin. Once insulin is bound, its purpose is to shuttle glucose from dietary carbs into the muscles to be stored and used as energy later. If insulin can’t bind easily, it elevates cortisol, causes inflammation, and the overall result is that you get fat.

Insulin also plays a role in muscle building, which is the reason it is called an anabolic hormone. The good news is that by taking fish oil and limiting your carbohydrate intake, insulin will improve the muscle building process and it helps to load nutrients into the muscle like creatine and carnitine that are essential for physical performance and fat burning.

An example of the effect of fish oil on insulin sensitivity and body composition is seen in a recent study of women with type 2 diabetes who took either 1.5 or 2.5 grams of fish oil a day. After 30 days, both groups decreased body fat and shrunk their waistlines, while having significantly improved insulin sensitivity. Of interest in this study, the group on the low 1.5-gram dose experienced the greatest reduction in belly fat and improvement in insulin health, indicating that supplementation should be based on individual needs to pad omega-3 intake from the diet.

*#5: Get The Right Ratio of Fish Oil To Other Fats For Body Composition*
Hopefully, you agree that fish oil will help you build muscle and lose body fat. Studies have only tested relatively small doses of up to 4 grams a day, but anecdotal reports suggest more rapid fat loss from higher doses in the range of 1 to 1.5 grams of your body fat percentage a day. The idea behind this large dose—if you have 20 percent body fat, you should take 20 to 30 grams of fish oil daily—is that you are getting a large portion of your dietary fat from fish oil, which is logical because omega-3 fats are the healthiest.

Say your total fat intake is 60 grams a day, getting 20 to 30 grams divided between a fish oil supplement and however much is provided from organic meat and fish is common sense. There remains that other 30 grams of fat to account for, and it’s critical your intake be optimal if you want to reap the anti-inflammatory, muscle building, fat loss benefits already described. Here’s what you need to know:

• Get most of your omega-3s from fish oil—that means you are getting primarily EPA and DHA, with only a small intake of the third omega-3, alpha linolenic acid (ALA) that is provided by flax seed.

• The omega-6 fats are from plant rather than marine sources. They include olive oil, nuts, avocados, and the isolated vegetable oils—corn, soybean, canola, and the like. The Western diet is VERY high in omega-6 fats due to the overuse of isolated vegetable oils. Ideally, you want a balanced intake of omega-6 to omega-3 fat, while avoiding isolated vegetable oils completely.

• The isolated vegetable oils cause inflammation when you eat too much of them. The reason is that the body uses the same enzymes to convert the omega-3 and the omega-6 fats into a form that can be used by the body. Simply, if you eat too many omega-6 fats—studies estimate the average Western diet provides a ratio around 16:1 of omega-6 to omega-3 fats—there won’t be enough enzymes available to convert the omega-3s.

• Researchers estimate that large reductions in omega-6 intake decrease our need for omega-3s dramatically—by 90 percent in some cases—because they won’t be fighting for enzymes and the omega-3s won’t be needed to counteract the inflammation caused by the overabundance of omega-6 fat.

• Try a “whole diet” approach to get the complex nutrient and fat requirements for optimal body composition: Eat wild cold water fish, pasture raised, grass-fed beef, and wild meats. Supplement with high-quality fish oil that is in triglyceride form rather than ethyl ester because it has superior bioavailability. Round your fat intake out with nuts, olive oil, avocado, and coconut oil, with very limited intake of other organic oils. Avoid hydrogenated, trans fat, and processed foods.

• Avoid foods fortified with omega-3s because you don’t know the source or quality of the fat.

*References:*
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Jouris, K., McDaniel, J., Weiss, E. The Effect of Omega-3 Fatty Acid Supplementation on the Inflammatory Response to Eccentric Strength Exercise. Journal of Sports Science and Medicine. 2011. 10, 432-438.

Crochemore, I., et al. Omega-3 PUFA Supplementation Does Not Influence Body Composition, Insulin Resistance, and Lipemia in Women with Type 2 Diabetes and Obesity. Nutrition and Clinical Practice. 2012. 27(4), 554-561.

Kavanagh, K., Jones, K., Sawyer, J, Kelley, K., Carr, J., Wagner, J., Rudel, L. (2007-07-15). Trans Fat diet Induces Abdominal Obesity and Changes in Insulin Sensitivity in Monkeys. Obesity (Silver Spring). 2007. 15 (7), 1675–84.

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