Do you take fish oil? (You just turned your nose up, didn’t you?) Up until last weekend, I would never have considered consuming fish oil, either. Who wants to walk around with fish breath all day, right? But at the Women’s Wellness Expo this past weekend in Irvine, sponsored by the Susan Samueli Center for Integrative Medicine (sscim.uci.edu/), I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Barry Sears speak. He’s the author of The Zone Diet (drsears.com). While I don’t want to get into all the nuances of this popular diet, which I don’t really understand anyway ( but plan to eventually), he made a convincing argument for the absolute necessity of taking 2.5 grams of Omega-3 fish oil every day of your life.

He said something that resounds in my memory: “The single greatest nutritional breakdown in America was when parents stopped giving their kids cod liver oil every day.” That is quite a powerful statement, particularly in a tech-savvy world that shuns “the old ways” in the name of progress and the advancement of our species. Maybe Grandma really had the secret sauce all along.

According to Dr. Sears, fish oil is a miracle food. It contains triglycerides that are rich in the Omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA, which are essential not only to healthy brain development and function, but most important, they help reduce silent inflammation, which Dr. Sears says is the underlying cause of almost every type of chronic disease, such as heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s. I pulled this eye-opening paragraph from his website (again, drsears.com):

“A new study published in the October issue of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine indicates that taking fish oil will lower the death rate from heart disease nearly seven times more than having automated external defibrillators in every home and public area in America. In fact, authors of the study wrote, taking fish oil is more than twice as effective as having a surgically implanted pacemaker in reducing the death rate. As I have always said, if there is one government subsidy program that makes sense, it would be giving free fish oil to anyone who wanted it.”

Dr. Sears also claims that fish oil helps curb depression, bi-polar disorders and schizophrenia. And it controls our violent impulses. In a recent study, there was a 25% reduction in violence among prisoners who were given fish oil as a dietary supplement.