hello everyone welcome to another season of relax with jim i'm jim kaylor and i'm a licensed professional counselor in private practice here in peters township what i want to do this season is to continue to bring you interesting topics about health and wellness and we're starting the season off with a bang one of my favorite topics in the whole world is fish oil and natural anti inflammatory and i am so blessed to have jeffrey both with us today who is a certified physician assistant and he and his associate dr joseph morrow have done extensive research in the area  asking that question it's really gaining popularity and interest over the last several years especially fish oil is an essential fatty acids which means the body doesn't produce it so it has to be consumed from the foods we eat and so for that reason a lot of people are deficient because they're not eating the proper foods the most concentrated omega three fatty acids are found in fish oil itself but as you know most people don't eat fresh the fish  it's expensive number one and when you deep fry it you can lose all the health benefits of it so our diet is mostly with a lot of corn oil and other meats and fats that are not essential so it's good for us because we need it  our body and there's a lot of body systems that require it well i know i take a teaspoon of liquid fish oil every day that's great i really enjoy it what should people look for in fish oil i know so many people go to the grocery store or the big box stores or the mart stores and i'm always hesitate when they say that because i don't know that that's the best place to get fish oil right well  that was a great question because that was the same question that dr maroon and i had number of years ago were in neurosurgery and people ask a wise nurse surgeons involved in a major three fatty acids or fish oil and it goes back to the fact that you know we see a lot of patients with pain and a lot of that pain is caused by inflammation inflammation is the root of a lot of pain syndromes especially arthritic pain as you know and a mega three fatty acids act as natural anti inflammator so we tell our patients go ahead and take fish oil and they come back and they say why burp from it i have problems with it it smells bad and so you really have to look at the quality of fish oil because it's a good idea but if you take you don't feel well then you're not going to continue to take it so the trick is or the idea is to make sure it's a pharmaceutical grade fish oil and it's made in an oxygen free environment fish oil is a polyunsaturated fatty acid which basically means it's very sensitive to light and air so oxygen tends oxidize it and makes that fishy smell so if you open a bottle fish oil or even better yet if you go to the market and smell a fish it smells fishy that's mean it's becoming bad and basically it's because it's exposed there will the same thing with fish oil production if it's made in an environment that has a lot of oxygen then it can become rancid sits on the shelf for a long time or he does on it like of to son of a loading do for a couple hours or days with high heat that also start to become rancid the problem is the bad taste and bad smell is bad but the problem is that actually can change the fish oil chemically and form these what peroxides are basically oxidized toxic products so not only is it bad in the smell in the senses but it's also bad for you so you want to make sure you get a high quality fish oil made in an auction free environment kept out of  sunlight and these are the keys so you sometimes you know discount stores don't provide that kind of quality i was going to say how would someone know that that is the highest quality now i get my fish oil i'm going to be meaning gina snyder later on great i feel better you know it's helping my arthritic pain it's helping different conditions that we have as far as the patients but yet it's causing us to burp so we looked at thirty different products and came up with a number of products that had been basically took research took the research of looking which ones are made in nitrogen environment which depletes the oxygen from it which one is high purity micro distilled meaning getting all the lead mercury and p c b is out of th that's what we did and we we ended up looking at a product from nordic naturals which is made in norway and it has those qualities there are a number of others out there that have that but it does take some research and if you do open a bottle fish oil and smells like fish  you're almost saying yourself that's not the right thing for me so these are these are some of the things that we did to try to investigate what is best product and said and you both did that investigation so you could lead all of us in the right direction right what led us to ventura write a book oil and i could tell you that we've learned a heck of a hot about fish oil over fifteen hundred references are in that book and basically you know we talked earlier about the benefits official being essential fatty acid but the fact is our every cell in our body has a mega threes that fat in the lining of every cell membrane so it's very important for ourselves whether it's our skin cells or our heart cells our blood vessel cells to have a certain amount of mega three and especially the brain because the brain has about forty percent of it is made out of the ha which is one of the ingredients in a mega three so if you don't have adequate especially in children you can be depleted there are studies now that show that children are depleted in a mega three may not have the same i q's as those that are having high levels of it so it's a big big emphasis on on that product as far as brain health great i know if i don't take my fish oil every morning then i go to work and i go what is my name and where do i live because my brain is a sponge and it soaks it up and i really need it in this day of multitasking and having to do test several things at one time boy this will really help and i know that the crew took a shot of this book but i just wanted to emphasize it again dr morrone ingests book fish oil the natural anti inflammatories this is such a wonderful book thank you so everybody go to amazon dot com or would this be at the usual bookstores or it's sometimes at bookstores online mostly at this point we put it out about two years ago ok and one of the things that we did you know we're scientist basically a nursery we don't come from an alternative medicine background so we sort out approved ourself that this was what it says it was so our patients to we end up doing a study with our patients and we looked at over two hundred fifty of our patients and found out that sixty percent that we had given fish oil were able to completely stop taking on strudels and pain pills for back and neck pain that we gave it to us that leads me to a really important question that i been bugging me for a long time which is why don't more physicians physician assistants nurses recommend fish oil to their patients well i think i think it's changing one of the issues is that traditional medicine which is our background does not stress alternative treatments and so that's just basically an ignorance as far as training but what's happening is there are certain products fish oil for example  ten some other antioxidants certainly buy them and see they're becoming part of an accurate or of health care providers now as a matter of fact one of the recent cardio american cardiology association journals dedicated a whole article to  journal rather to make it three fatty acids and there are treatments for arrhythmias hypertension elevated triglycerides in fact there is a prescription fish oil available to treat elevated triglycerides how wonderful so i think it's getting part of the conversation now ok it isn't as foreign although dr murray has a great story when he first learned about fish oil he would scrub next to it cardiothoracic surgeon and he would talk about different things and then he would mention the  cardiothoracic surgeon do you put your patients on a mega three fatty acids and he said what do you talk about a mega three fatty acids and in europe it's paramount them our practice not to put someone on a mega three fatty acids after a heart attack or bypass surgery so i think the that the change in attitude is becoming more mainstream especially with the mega three there's a number of like i said we looked at over fifteen hundred peer reviewed journal articles on a magazine three and really the science of the  jama has articles you know new england journal of medicine it's really taken out of any kind of back waters for science so everyone you heard from jeff post right here so you can start the conversation if your physician or physician's assistant or nurse practitioner does not bring the topic up bring it up with them that's where you want to go talk to them about this what would be the proper dosage for a child i know i take one teaspoon which i guess is what about a thousand milligrams of all this maybe three thousand i'm not even sure but what would be the distance for a child it's another great question john the confusion lies really in the manufacturers and how they package fish oil the vast majority of them are in capsule form because people remember back to their grandmothers that they had to take a cod liver oil teaspoon and you know they all gagged and so on so most people don't want to take the liquid because they're fearful but a good fish oil products does not have that bad taste but anyway as far as capsules if you look at a bottle almost all of them will say a thousand milligrams per capsule the trick is to turn the bottle around and actually look at the end greetings the main ingredients that we have to think about is e p a and the ha so they're the active ingredients if you will in fish oil so it's very important turn the bottle around and look at that if you look at many of the discount store fish oils they'll have one hundred eighty milligrams of b p a in one hundred twenty milligrams of d h despite saying there's one thousand milligrams in the bottle and the fact is the rest is just other fatty fillers so it is important to turn the bottle around and when so when i talk to you about dosage i really want to talk to you about the amount of e p a and d h a warning so that really in our practice for example in the study that we did we used about two grams of e p a and d h a for our patients with less and again they come in all kind of you can sprinkle in on the salad for a child if they don't want to taste it you can put them in their certain capsules now that can crush in the mouth so they don't have to worry about swallowing it but there's a for very small children there's a scale based on weight how much to take but in general that those for children probably between five and ten or twelve is about half the adult lives so that's typical that you can use again there may be some side effects with stools and getting started on it but in general it's very well tolerated i don't think we're quite close to taking a break yet but i guess the cruzan let me know when that happens so when i take my liquid fish oil what i do is i have the bottle in my teaspoon and then either a glass of juice or some cereal or some whole grain toast and then it doesn't taste bad it has like a lemon a flavor afterwards but then i just take a sip of juice or a bite of toast and whatever flavors in my mouth has totally gone so just to let you know that if you do opt for the liquid form of ultimate omega from nordic naturals or any other of the really high grade fish oils it really doesn't taste bad at all and as jeff was saying if it tastes bad it's not high quality so then you want to take it back and get your money back and go where there is high quality i think we're going to be taking a break shortly and then gina snyder is going to join join us with a variety of options that parents can consider for their children as well as it is well as for themselves so what just take this break and get jean up here with us and then you can be w available at sunny hi everyone welcome back gina snyder has joined us and she is the owner of sunny branch health food store in peter's township and she brought several as you can see the table has changed she's brought several different varieties of nordic naturals fish oil gina can you talk to us about what all these bottles are thank you yes these are just different formulas that nordic natural naturals has come up with and they are geared towards different ages different there's pets here there's different for different conditions that people might be looking for to ok and there's different forms to there's a someone you can either go to jeff's and dr moreau website which is jeff what is that website again enter information solutions inflammation solutions dot com right so you can do that or if you want to walk into the best best health food store in the tri state area you can go to sunnybrook health food store and you have a variety last row on the left half way down a top shelf middle nordic naturals fish oil is and we've got wow sixteen ounce bottle of this can be confusing for a lot of people so if we were to pick one to start with i mean there's a i may go with vitamin d three jeff where would you recommend we start as far if somebody new to fish oil well i think one of the things i wanted to mention is that there was a recent study that shows the vast majority of americans perhaps ninety percent or more are deficient in a mega three fatty acids so this is a baseline that we're walking around with because of our diet primarily or lack of mega threes in our diet so that even a baseline level any amount of a mega three we get is going to help raise that certainly a food sources are one of the best place to start fish obviously we talked about seafood is also an excellent place the only problem is the government tells us not the too much fish because as lead mercury in the seabees in it so and especially is warning with children and also pregnant women as far as that so but food is an excellent source of mega three so we have to remember that but when it gets the supplements  want to start basically with a low dose of mega three fatty acid about one to two grams is what we generally recommend and then in the book we go through some of the doses relative to certain conditions that maybe have been found to be helpful so that can help you know there's a wide variety out here but it can help delineate what did those be the only contraindications i know because i'm not a physician and i tell people that they need to check with the first mission is if someone is on blood thinners or obviously if they have any allergy to our gene you just don't want to risk it but definitely if you're on blood thinners or have any medical condition really that you're going to start on a mega three fatty acids you should talk to your physician not in that it would alter how you treat you other than a blood thinner it may but just so they know what you're taking and have a good idea that also some surgical procedures they do ask that you be off a mega three fatty acids before the surgical procedure so these are some things again you want to discuss with us and i know that in my practice as a counsellor i'm always encouraging my clients to take fish oil because and you have the research in your book but it's so helpful to be on large doses of fish oil if you have major depression or anxiety because it really helps to make the process of recovery a lot easier when you take this in addition to either instead of or working with your doctor in addition to whatever anti depressant medication you might be currently taking so this is one of the areas that i'm really excited about is it's so helpful for anxiety and depression as well and there have been clinical studies to support this we outline a number of those in the book and it's both as you said it in some people have kate is a treatment in of itself and others uses synergism with other anti depressants to be able to cut down the dose so there's a lot of literature on that that's available now and has clinically been successful so the results are in every one fish oil is wonderful to take when the you enjoy fresh seafood of course my personal favorite is salmon or whether you want to add to it with any of these supplements gene if you were to pick out a bottle for children what would you suggest go into sunny bridge they would be happy to guide you to whatever would be helpful but say here is nordic naturals children's d h a so this is very helpful for the learning process so there are a lot of options but i think the purpose what i wanted to do today was explain have jeff here to explain the science behind the fish oil and what to look for how to purchase it so if you go to somewhere that doesn't carry a high quality fish oil you're really just wasting your money so if i hear someone say oh it's too expensive i'll say yes but you're what are you getting for your money if you're not getting a high quality you might just you might just as well throw your money away because it's not going to be helpful for you anyway but i want to thank both both of my guests today jeffrey both thank you so very much for coming in gina work thank you so much for being on the show i hope that this information has been helpful for everyone i hope that you will consider adding fish oil to your health care regime and talking about fish oil with your health care provider and i encourage you to continue to watch relax with joan this season to see what else i'm going to come up with but i guarantee you it's going to be interesting so thank you so much for watching and have a great day