What an amazing Super Bowl game! I am so proud to be a Pittsburger! Why are the Steelers the best football team in the land?
Is it Mike Tomlin’s coaching? The motivation to be the first team to win six Super Bowls? The brilliance of Big Ben? Maybe. It also could have been Dr. Michael Gross’s fish oil!
Yes, the Steelers have been swallowing fish oil as part of a two-year study appearing in the new journal Sports Health: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach. Why fish oil? Because it is an anti-inflammatory agent that hastens healing, and has been shown to improve attention, reaction time and cognitive processing.
For the past ten years or so, doctors have been using fish oil successfully with children diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and autism. Drs. Doris Rapp and Billie Sahley were pioneers in using fish oil. The Defeat Autism Now! protocol recommends a fish oil as a foundational supplement in the biomedical approach to autism.
Dr. Andrew Stoll, a Harvard psychiatrist who was looking for an alternative to medications for his patients with depression and bipolar disorder discovered that fish oil raised and evened out their moods naturally, and without undesirable side effects. He wrote about it in his book The Omega-3 Connection.
Fish oils are essential fatty acids or EFAs. They are a crucial part of the structure of the nervous system, which is 60-70% fat. EFAs must be ingested, as the body cannot produce them. Unfortunately, the standard American diet is low in EFAs. Furthermore, non-essential fatty acids, such as the hydrogenated vegetable oils used to make margarine, and to fry fast food are high in trans-fatty acids. These “bad fats” may affect neuronal fluidity by virtue of different chemical structure compared to the biologically preferred cis fatty acids, and can interfere with an individual’s ability to make use of the marginal amounts of EFAs consumed.
High quality EFAs are mercury-free. Safe ones usually come from Norway. Reliable brands are Carlsons, Nordic Naturals and Spectrum. They offer many delivery systems from capsules to oils (yes, Grandma was correct in forcing the cod liver oil!) and even pudding-like pastes that taste like a creamsicle from Coromega.
Maybe it’s time for you and all aspiring young quarterbacks to rethink fat.
For more information on fish oils for autism spectrum disorders, read my new book, EnVISIONing a Bright Future.
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