Fight Your Risk for Heart Disease - Take Your Fish Oil!

It all started in about the late 1970's, several studies that investigated certain aspects of a population revealed that the Inuit people, a people whose diet consisted largely of fish, had a much lower incidence of heart attack.

For reasons that are not specifically known, fish oil, according to the author of one study titled "From Inuit to implementation: omega-3 fatty acids come of age," "seems to be able to stabilize myocardial membranes electrically, resulting in reduced susceptibility to ventricular dysrhythmias, thereby reducing the risk of sudden death." So, the omega-3's from fish oil stabilize the electrical impulses that cause the heart to beat and this reduces the risk of a heart attack. Another theory suggests that fish oils help to navigate cholesterol levels to healthier levels therefore causing an indirect effect on the implications of heart disease. Even more, another theory says that fish oils have an antithrombotic effect, which means that they cause less blood clots to form within the body - along the same lines as this, it is known that fish oil does have anti-inflammatory effects.

In the most famous study, known as the GISSI, 11,324 patients that had survived a recent heart attack less than 3 months ago were monitored and shown to have, after 3.5 years, a 45% decrease in risk of sudden death due to cardiac reasons and a reduction of 20% in all-cause death in the group that was assigned an omega-3 supplement of 850 mg per day. In fact, the authors of this study noted that the effect of omega-3s became evident at the 4 month mark.

In another study, by Harper CR and Jacobson TA at the Emory University of Medicine, the authors investigated six trials/studies that tested the effects fish oil. The authors found that the supplementation of fish oil caused a statistically significant reduction in the amount of heart attacks that occurred that were fatal. However, they also found that the number of nonfatal heart attacks was not statistically significantly reduced. The study was titled "Usefulness of omega-3 fatty acids and the prevention of coronary heart disease."

So, exercise, eat right, and take your fish oils and you're heart will love you in addition to allowing you to live longer. Although many people may simply "not worry about the long run" as to how their life goes- not only can fish oil increase your lifespan -it can also increase the quality of your life.