Does Taking Fish Oil Tablets Help Prevent Bowel Cancer?

By Peter Bertonach

Fish oil tablets contain 2 essential fatty acids called DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid), which are otherwise known as omega 3 essential fatty acids. Over the last 40 years many studies have established the benefits of Omega3 fats to many areas of our health including our heart health. Studies have also shown a link between fish oil and breast cancer prevention and fish oil and prostate cancer prevention. However there are now studies which also show that increasing your intake of fish oil may help to prevent bowel cancer.

A study in Scotland on the benefits of increasing your intake of Omega3 fats found that more DHA and EPA in your diet can help to reduce your risk of colorectal cancer by up to around 40 percent. The study specifically noted that increasing intakes of DHA and EPA achieved this result, but that increasing the intake of ALA (alpha-linolenic acid), a plant-based Omega 3 fat, did not produce the same result.

Clear evidence was that those who ate more fish had a lower risk of colon cancer and that those who ate less fish had a higher risk of colon cancer.

A study in the Netherlands combined the results of a range of other studies on the link between Omega 3 and bowel cancer.-- studies were compared and the conclusion was that there was a clear relationship between eating more fish and lowering the risk of colon cancer. In fact the researchers concluded that eating one meal of fish per week reduced the risk of bowel cancer by around 4 percent, and that each fish meal rediced the risk of colon cancer by another 4 percent.

The average levels of fish intake of people in the US is way below that which would achieve these significant results in helping to prevent bowel cancer.

Of course increasing your intake of fish or fish oil is only a part of an overall strategy to help prevent colon cancer, but it is also now firmly established that increasing your intake of Omega3 fats is also important to a wide range of other health considerations and can have significant heart health benefits.

So how do you go about increasing your intake of fish oil containing Omega 3 fatty acids? Fish is getting more expensive by the day and it is also known that fish is generally contaminated with heavy metals, PCBs and pesticides and the FDA tells us not to eat too much fish for this reason. So getting more fish in our diet is risky and expensive.

But the best way to get more fish oil into your diet is by way of fish oil tablets. These contain DHA and EPA, and are very cost-effective when compared to eating fish, and can be taken daily. And the best fish oil tablets have no contaminants.

However not all all fish oil supplements are as good as others, and you need to be careful comparing one with another because there are wide variations in the amounts of the active ingredients found in the different brands. You cannot directly compare the price of fish oil tablets alone.

So it would seem that along with a range of other health benefits including heart health benefits increasing our intake of fish oil by way of taking fish oil tablets daily can be part of an overall strategy to stay healthy and in particular to help prevent bowel cancer.

I have known this for some time and take fish oil tablets every day. To find out which ones visit my website. - 30193

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