On the matter of omega 3 and fish oil

The benefits of fish oil with its omega 3 content abound. There is a worrying issue that it might promote prostate cancer. There seems to be considerable confusion as to whether tinned fish offers the omega 3 stated on the can.

If indeed, and it seems likely, that omega 3 oil is sensitive to heat then the chance of getting that substance undamaged from a can of fish is remote and it indeed may be the damaged omega 3 that is responsible for the cancer issue mentioned above.

The classical can of fish, tuna, salmon, sardines are cooked by sealing and pressure cooking. Boyle’s law means that temperatures are going to be well over the hundred Centigrade mark and this probably ensures that any omega 3 contained therein is destroyed, and what is more worrying, that the destroyed omega 3 may indeed be damaging to the immune system. The reason I say this is because heat changes the structure of pretty much all food products. The advent of heat being added to our food, i.e. the use of cooking in our food preparation, is very much a recent thing, probably around 12,000 years ago and then almost certainly just the cooking of a butchered animal they had caught and so as to make it easier to eat.

In anthropological terms 12,000 years is as nothing and the guts of humans and the needs of that organ and their bodies for specific food components was ‘set in stone’ tens of thousands, if not hundreds of ten of thousands of years before the use of fire for cooking.

The drift of this is therefore that our need of or for omega 3 and our bodys’ way of identifying it as good is similarly set in stone.

Cooked omega 3 therefore is not likely to be treated as something good for oneself , on the contrary it would be something the body might see it as something to get rid of. On that basis we should ignore the advertising that presses us to buy tinned fish for its omega 3 content.

Also the worrying prospect that it might promote cancer should now become a point of focus.

I eat raw sardines. Occasionally I cook them, more like warm them up, in rice bran oil. If I have a batch of sardines which are plump and have lots of fat around their guts I carefully strip this fat off and put it aside to cook with instead of the rice bran oil.

I accept that I might be wrong in that omega 3, as it presents in healthy fish, is good as long as it not cooked, but feel think that it is not as risky as taking products from the health shops where its preparation has involved heat or for that matter any manner of preservation and I would completely ignore getting it from tinned fish.