The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.

Hello, I'm Kimberly King, and welcome to the mother's market radio show, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition. On today's show, it's a new year and time to check up on your heart, help learn the benefits of fish oil plus the difference in Omega acids and how to keep that ticker and tip top shape, plus later. We'll tell you what's going on around town. But first up, Garland window is an educator for Nordic Naturals. She began her studies in the verbal apprentice program at North Carolina herbal studies in Ashville. Later, she studied body and energy work at the Natural Health Institute in Nashville, Tennessee, and then broadened her scope in the ND program with Clayton college of natural health.

Drawing on her 23 years of experience, Jeroen continues to teach within her community, and we welcome her to the mother's market radio show. How are you?

I'm doing fantastic, how are you?

Great, thank you. Why don't you fill our audience in in a little bit of your mission and your work before we get to today's show topic... Absolutely, so I'm an educator with Nordic Naturals, but what brought me here was my own journey, I started out many years ago with some digestive issues and later developed some autoimmune issues, and it was really looking for my own answers that I discovered what a wealth... This industry really is... And then I began working in the industry and did a little bit of everything, I had my own demo company, I did retail, but educations where I've always been meant to be. And so now I'm finally here, and I love the fact that I get to talk to people about things that can help them feel better, just like it did for me.

Oh, I love that, I love that. You are living your passion.

Yes, today we're talking about fish oil and our heart, and so the heart is an important organ that works very hard, so... Can you kind of expand on that and talk about that? Absolutely, so our heart starts to beat at about four weeks of gestation each day in an adult's life, it beats at least 100000 times per day, it's also going to pump over the average lifetime, three million barrels of blood, the equivalent of that would be like three super tankers of blood that it's gonna push throughout a lifetime, so it's really important that we are supporting our heart, if our heart is not thriving, then we are not able to thrive, we have to make sure that it continues to work and continues to be strong and healthy for us to be strong and healthy.

Those are some amazing numbers, by the way, cardiovascular disease, it's a growing problem problem, so those statistics... Can you talk about the statistics of cardiovascular disease, and there's some sobering information about that the World Health Organization names cardiovascular disease as the number one cause of death globally, more people die from that than anything else, including younger people here in the United States. 35-735000 Americans, they have a heart attack each year, but what's worse than that is that over 70% of those are first heart attacks, those are new people coming in to finding out that they have cardiovascular disease, now, we have made strides in the last 20 years people are living longer with cardiovascular disease, but we still are seeing younger and younger people being diagnosed all the time. That is crazy. And you said sobering statistics, what are some of the risk factors from... Cardiovascular disease, yeah.

So high cholesterol is one a smoking... A lot of people are aware that diabetes, poor diet, lack of physical activity, high blood pressure is one that's pretty major, that is well known to be tightly linked to cardiovascular disease, and blood pressure's gotten quite a bit of press lately, they've really been looking at that to try to have a commitment, a better commitment to stemming the tide of new people coming in to being diagnosed with cardiovascular disease.

Can you talk about that a little bit about that press... So you're talking about the guidelines from a pressure... Yeah, so the American College of Cardiology, along with the American Heart Association, they recently lowered the guidelines for pre-hypertension for the last 15 years. The guidelines were 140 over 90, but now they're 130 over 80. and when I first read that, I sort of thought to myself, Okay, so they wanna get more people on medication, but when you really read what they listed, they talk about how important it is to start those lifestyle changes, and the reason they lowered the guidelines is because at 140 over 90, they were seeing really significant problems happening cardiovascular-wise at those numbers, so by lowering the guidelines, it actually gives people the opportunity to be able to make those lifestyle changes before they're at the really significant risk stage, so what would you recommend those lifestyle changes include... Well, medically, it's been well known to reduce sodium and to then increase your physical activity, those are things that have been around for a long time. Anyone who's dealt with high blood pressure knows that, but one interesting piece of research that I really liked, it was a med analysis, which simply means that it was an overview of many different controlled studies, and this was published in 2014 in the American Journal of hypertension, and what that showed is it showed that EPA and DHA were a really important lifestyle change, making sure that you got enough of that in your diet, and the reason for that is that they found that getting sufficient amounts of EPA and DHA in your diet had the same or greater impact on blood pressure than sodium restriction or the increased physical activity.

Wow, so tell me a little bit more about the dosages and the amount... How much should we be giving... Absolutely, so in the same study that we were just talking about, they actually were able to look, because it was a med analysis, they were able to look at many different studies, so they were able to see many different dosages being used and what the impact was for all of them... And one of the things that they found was that in any study that they were using less than 2000 milligrams per day of EPA and DHA combined, that they were only able to see a difference in the systolic pressure, which is the top number... That top number is important, but to really get the changes that you need in the body to bring down the risk of cardiovascular disease, you wanna change both numbers, and when they looked at 2000 milligrams a day or more of EPA and DHA, they actually found a change in both numbers, so over that 2000 milligram mark is what they called really that magic area that you begin to see what we're looking for in lifestyle changes and having an impact on high blood pressure. They also found that the average daily dose across all of these studies was about 3700 milligrams per day, so it was a rather high amount, but that was the average amount used in these studies.

Can you talk a little bit about... Okay, so we've talked about risk factors, a little bit about that lifestyle changes overall, so exercise and what about starting age groups, and let's talk a little bit about children and elderly, can there be too young to old or what age can we start doing... Absolutely, and the reason that I love talking about this is because Vishal, one of the real misconceptions about fish oil is that it's condition-specific, if I start having trouble with my knees, maybe I need fish oil, if my grandmother or my mother was diagnosed with dementia, then maybe I might need some fish... Well, and the question is great because we need fish, will I often like to say The way we need water, it's not the same thing, but our body uses these facts, we need them, they're necessary throughout our entire lives, and our body utilizes the fat, so they have to be replenished, so children in particular, pregnant women, very young children under three, they need high amounts of DHA, they need to make sure that they're getting that because the DHA is literally a building block for the brain, the eyes and the nervous system. So while you're building all of that, you need to have that particular fatty acid available, but throughout life, this is something that we need to make sure that we're getting in our diet, particularly in this country, because a fact that competes with space on the cells, with omega 3 is going to be Omega-6, and this is gonna come from things like vegetable oils, grains, many animal products, dairy products will have them, even avocado is high in omega 6. so even with a healthy diet, you still often wind up with way too much omega-6 and not near enough omega 3s, so this is the real root of why we need it throughout our lives, but if we're talking especially about cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, the biggest increase that they're seeing right now is in that 40-year-old range. So we're seeing more and more people in the 40-year-old range being diagnosed with cardiovascular disease, so specific to that, really, I would say much younger than people would imagine.

So where do we get the EPA and the DHA? So EPA and DHA is only going to come basically from marine sources, which would be the fish, the cold water, deep sea cold water fatty fish is your best source for that, but also from certain... Algae is not all algae, but certain Algiers will provide direct EPA and DHA as well.

Now, this is different from ALA, Alpha-linoleic acid, which is the plant form omega-3 that you get from flax in chia and some leafy greens.

Now, those are very healthy foods, the ALA that they give us is a very healthy form of Omega 3, but it's going to be a short chain Omega 3, and most people have a very difficult time converting that into EPA and DHA. In fact, that rate can be as low as one to 5%, that means that if you were trying to get, let's say, a 1000 milligrams of and DHA a day, it would take almost an entire 60-count bottle of flax oil soft gels for your body to convert ALA into that at that very low rate.

So is there something like in an average... So I'm looking for EPA, DHA, Omega 3, Omega-6. is that like the magic amount that I'm looking for for what you're looking for in a dietary perspective would be about two parts Omega-6 fat to one part of mega-3 fat in the diet that's considered ideal at this point, and that's coming out of all of the research... And that's something actually we'll talk about. A study that mentioned that as well with cardiovascular disease, it was an animal study, but they confirmed that about 21 omega-6 to omega-3 is ideally what we're looking for in the diet of however, in this country, most people are getting 20 to 10 now, so that is really at the heart of why fish oil is such an important thing to have in our diet, what types of lifestyle changes can people do to help their heart health... Absolutely, so the main things that are mentioned are going to be an increase in activity, one of the big markers for how the hardest functioning is called heart rate variability, heart rate variability is really nothing more than having a low resting heart rate and a high threshold for activity or... For raised heart rate, so the wider that range, the healthier the heart is, the smaller that range, the less healthy it is, so exercise, regular exercise is one of the main things that can really help with that.

Now, also support of the central nervous system is important because the central nervous system is involved in that electrical activity that really keeps the heart beating, so supporting the central nervous system and most of the fat that is in our central nervous system is going to come from the Omega-3 fatty acid, DHA.

And so it is important that we are always making sure that we support both the heart directly, but then also the central nervous system, things like inflammatory markers for cardiac inflammatory markers, there's a lot of research out there about that as well, and EPA and DHA being able to really support healthy cardiac inflammatory markers, and while we used to think that butter was the bad guy, we now understand that having a healthy inflammatory response is crucial to keeping a healthy heart, and this is very interesting information. Right now, we have to take a quick break, but more in just a moment, don't go away. We will be right back.

And welcome back to the mother's market radio show. And we wanna remind you that if you've missed any portion of today's show, you can find us on iTunes by searching mother's market or download the show from our website, mother's market dot com, click the link for radio and listen to the past shows. Plus download our Healthy Recipes and money savings coupons, all available at mother's market dot com. And now, back to our interview with health educator, jarl and Swindell, and we're discussing fish oil and how we can take care of our hearts with that fish oil. And you mentioned just a little bit ago, 3700 milligrams of the EPA and DHA. How do we go about getting that about... Well, it's not easy, especially if you're trying to get that from diet alone, you know, another comparison for trying to get that is if someone is trying to eat fish, and let's say that they're just trying to get a 1000 milligrams a day, which is far below the amounts that we've just talked about, it takes almost an entire can of sardines, if... Yes, and while I do try with sardines, I'm not able to eat an entire can every day, so it can be a little bit tough, but they also looked at some studies that were... Because this was a Gannet analysis, they were able to look at many different things, they did look at fish consumption, and what they saw in the studies that we're using strictly fish consumption is that they had some serious compliance issues, people did not want to eat the fish enough for that to support the full study, and there were three major complaints, one of them were bones, which I found interesting, I didn't realize that, but taste and smell were two major blocks to consuming enough fish to complete a study.

Now, this is where fish oil concentrates can really help, if you use a concentrated fish oil, you're gonna be able to get 100 to 2000 milligrams approximately per serving, and this is a really great way for people to be able to reach the kind of numbers that we just saw in that last study... Okay, so while you were talking about the taste and the smell, it can be an issue with Vision, you expand on that a little bit, it can... As a manufacturer of fish oil, taste and smell is always something that has to be considered, I was one of those people that had trouble taking fish will, I would get that kind of fishy repeat all day long after I would take it. And I tried to find ways to solve it, but I was so grateful when I began working for Nordic Naturals and I went through their training, that I was able to find out that that fish Ines is actually about the quality and the freshness of the oil that was not about my body's ability to deal with fish oil, as so many people think that it is.

So if you think about ordering fish at a restaurant, if they set the plate down in front of you and it's horribly fishy, you know that that fish was not fresh, because fresh fish is not fishy and neither is fresh fish oil.

So the taste and the smell is really going to let you know how fresh the oil is and how it's been handled during processing. What we do is we process the fish oil in an oxygen-free environment, this does allow us to use a small amount of heat so that we can make sure the oil is pure and safe, but then we're also able to create an oil that routinely falls well, below the international allowable standards for oxidation and oxidation is what gives the fish... That fish that fish oil, the fishy smell and taste that people don't want... Thank you for explaining that. That was actually really brilliant, so thank you for telling us all about that, you talked a little bit about a study or that study, and we wanna talk about now, can someone that doesn't need to use fish get enough of that from that... Is that the ALA studies?

It is, and the thing about that is, is again, I love flax, I love sea, they are sitting in the door of my refrigerator as we speak, I use them all the time. ALA is a very healthy fat, it is an omega-3 fat, but again, there are many things that can influence our ability to convert ALA into EPA and DHA, things like alcohol consumption, consuming too much saturated fat, consuming too much omega 6 fats, and even having a little too much insulin or insulin resistance happening in the body, all of these things contribute to our body's ability to convert or detract from our body's ability to convert, so it is important for people, especially that are looking for these higher amounts to get direct sources of EPA and DHA and the only two sources are going to be the fish, and then certain algae that do contain the EPA and the DHA.

What kinds of things influence how much fish oil a person might need, you know... Diet is probably the biggest player. We talked about how ideally, we want a 2 to 1, omega-6 to omega-3 intake, and most people in this country are 20 to 1, so that's really going to be the biggest influence and because they compete with each other and because you can get a lot of omega-6 fats, even in a healthy diet, I have sat down many times to a lunch of blue corn chips and a red pepper homes, and that's a great lunch, it's got good plant protein, lots of fiber, but it's very high in omega 6 fats, so it is important that we are able to balance that by getting more of the EPA and DHA in our body.

So in a study that was published last year in the American Journal of Physiology, they actually looked at omega 6 and omega-3 fats in the diets of mice, and there were a few things that they found about the balance that was really important.

One of them was balance between omega 6 and omega-3 fats, and keep in mind, this is that two-to-one balance, it was crucial to cardiac health, it had an influence on total body lean mass and cardiac inflammatory markers, so it's not just a matter of... Oh, I should do a little bit better. It's really a matter of getting those fats imbalance is the way for us to give our bodies what they need in order to support that Healthy Heart, and so thank you to for explaining that the balance of that, we're getting... We seem like we're getting such high amounts of the omega 6, but again, can you kind of expand on that about how else we do that and what that looks like?

Absolutely, so one of the major sources are going to be the vegetable oils, things like corn oil, cotton seed oil, canola oil, soy oil, and even if you don't purchase these bats, it's really important to understand that they're being used in the prepared foods industry quite a bit, a big reason for that is that they last longer, they don't tend to go rancid very fast, they're very stable, so they're used a lot in convenience foods, prepared foods, but even in restaurants, I've been in rather nice restaurants, I'm not real high-end, but I could moderate high end chain and ask them if their butter was just better and it was not, it was mixed with a vegetable oil, so when you're ordering butter, you're not just getting it by itself sometimes.

So it's really important that we understand that that is a major place that we're getting these omega-6 fats and reducing our consumption of those vegetable oils goes a long way toward creating the kind of balance that we know is gonna support the heart, but even with a healthy diet, even when you're doing that, it is important to understand those other sources, the nuts, beans, grains, eggs, and as I mentioned, the avocado, I am a huge fan of avocado, so I take an extra fish will now and again, just because I like to eat those a lot acting now, and we're in California, so the...

Where can we get zero, those omega-3 fats to shoot for for that 2-1 ratio, so it is a good idea to have things like the Chee of the flax and the leafy greens added into your diet. Again, I wanna make sure that I'm clear that these are very, very healthy foods, but your Marine-based sources are going to be that only way to get the EPA and the DHA, the deep sea cold water fish, things like cod and salmon. All of those are going to really help us get those important Omega-3 Fatty Acids that we need, but I recognize as does Nordic Naturals, that there are a lot of people out there that choose not to consume fish or other sorts of animal products or by-products, and that's the reason that we do offer an algae, both for adults in a soft cell, but also for infants, we have it in a liquid for infants as well, and I think that's really important to talk about, because I know a lot of parents are making choices about what their families are consuming as far as not eating any fish or animal by products, but it's really important that they understand that getting the actual EPA and DHA is still really crucial, so these algae products can provide that for them and their children.

That's a good point. And we talked a little bit about that before, but when I'm shopping now for fish oil... What do I need to know? Yeah, so this is really important. I spent, in my long career, my 23 years, I spent a lot of time in the retail store, and when people would come into the retail store and they would ask me for the cheapest, whatever it was, cheap is multivitamin. She is fish oil. I would always let them know that there's a few items that if they wanna shop on price, I'm okay with that, but there were a handful that I felt like were very important, that we go for quality, even when that costs a little bit extra, because cutting corners for something like fish oil actually lowers the quality, so when we're out looking for a fish oil, we don't want to just be looking for a product or a price, we wanna make sure that we're choosing a company, preferably a company who's doing the smart things in the right places, and some of those right places are gonna be the freshness that we talked about it, being able to manufacture in an oxygen-free environment, having a dedication to freshness right from the very beginning.

A good example of that are the fishing boats that on the fishing boats that we use, they have what's called a water catchment system that's on the boat, so when the fish come in, they are put directly back into Fresh sea water, and that allows them to be able to stay fresh up until we're able to get to processing, sustainability is very important to the more that we talk about the fish and being able to utilize them for fish oil, we wanna protect both the fish and the planet while we're doing that.

So sustainability is very important. transparency, there's a lot of things that can go wrong with fish will, you can have contaminants, you can have heavy metals, you can have improper processing, so making sure that the company you choose has full transparency... Investment in the process from start to finish. As I said, there's many things that can go wrong when you manufacture fish oil, so making sure that you have a company that's really managing the entire process is important, and you want a company who's creating a product that you can feel good giving to your own family, I give these products to my child, my neighbor's kids take these products, and so we like to make sure that they're not only meeting our needs, but they're meeting the needs of everyone who's looking for a product like this.

Thank you, this is great information, and we look forward to having you on again, but we really appreciate your knowledge and in the meantime, you can get more information on Garland and the website is Nordic Naturals dot com. Thank you so much for coming by. And then we look forward to your next visit. Thank you, I appreciate it.

Thanks for listening to the mother's market radio show, and for shopping at mother's market, the advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen.

Mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition,