Dear Friends,
If you’re interested in bolstering your heart and cardiovascular health, today, and in my next letter, I’m going to share 4 supplements that we believe are foundational for heart health and can give you the best bang for your supplement buck.
We start with omega-3s and specifically the key omega-3 fatty acids, EPA and DHA.
It’s been 50 years, since researchers first established the link between omega-3s and heart health – which started by looking at the diets of certain heart healthy cultures like the Japanese and indigenous people in the Greenland and Artic regions.
The common factor in these populations is they all consumed a lot of fish, which led to the link between heart health and omega-3s.
This was in the early 1970s and since there’s been an overwhelming amount of additional research supporting this finding and we now know there are numerous ways omega-3s can help heart health.
Omega-3s can help you maintain healthy triglyceride and blood pressure levels, support healthy blood flow, and help promote a healthy inflammation response in the body, which helps protect blood vessels from damage as we age, and more.
Since omega-3 blood levels tend to be below ideal levels for Americans, taking a good quality supplement is a good idea for most of us. While there are some other sources emerging like algae, fish oil is still the best and most efficient way to get adequate amounts of EPA and DHA daily.
5 Things to Look for in an Omega-3 Fish Oil Supplement
When choosing a good quality fish oil, there are 5 things to look for:
1. Potency – target around 1,000 mg of EPA and DHA (combined) in a serving.
2. Purity – should be virtually free of contaminants and heavy metals
3. Low Oxidation Risk – once omega-3s oxidize they lose their nutritional value, your fish oil should contain very little of the compounds that cause the oil to oxidize.
4. Sustainability – overfishing is a big concern, the oil should be sourced from fish sustainably harvested and upcycled (e.g. extracted from scraps)
5. Enhanced Absorption – the goal of this supplement is to increase blood levels of EPA and DHA, your fish oil should seek to maximize absorption and bioavailability.
We believe that TrueOmega-3 checks all these boxes. The fish oil is as pure as it gets with the right potency and offers industry leading levels of freshness (meaning a very low risk of oxidizing).
The fish are sourced from one of the best managed fisheries in the world – the Alaskan Bering Sea. Better yet, the oil is extracted from scraps leftover after the fish is fileted for use in the food supply.
No fish are harvested for supplement use – it’s an upcycled ingredient, the ultimate in sustainability.
As important, the special AquaCelle delivery system in TrueOmega-3 increases the amount of EPA and DHA in the bloodstream by up to 6.0x, and virtually eliminates fish burps and repeating.
We believe this makes TrueOmega-3 the ideal fish oil supplement.
Supplement #2 for Heart Health
Our 2nd supplement choice for heart health, is the active form of CoQ10 known as ubiquinol.
Ubiquinol is the only fat-soluble antioxidant that the body produces – so that alone tells us it must be pretty important to our health.
As an antioxidant, ubiquinol works in the fatty part of cells and cell membranes to protect the cell and mitochondria against free radical damage and oxidative stress.
As important, ubiquinol plays a crucial role in cellular energy production – and it helps fuel the pumping of blood, which is why it’s so valuable for heart health.
In addition to supporting healthy blood flow, this can help you maintain healthy blood pressure too.
As mentioned, ubiquinol is the active or reduced form of CoQ10, and about 90% of the CoQ10 our bodies use is ubiquinol. CoQ10 also exists in the oxidized form which is ubiquinone.
Our bodies can convert ubiquinone to ubiquinol, but two things happen after age 30.
First, the CoQ10 and ubiquinol that our bodies naturally produce declines, and this decline accelerates as we get into our 40s, 50s and beyond.
Second, the body’s ability to convert ubiquinone to the active ubiquinol it needs also declines as we get older.
This is why for most people we recommend a CoQ10 supplement made with the active ubiquinol form – so no conversion is needed.
Sounds straight forward, but that’s not what’s in most of the CoQ10 supplements you see for sale. Instead they have the oxidized ubiquinone form of CoQ10 that your body then needs to convert, which is less efficient if you’re over age 30.
In TrueCoQ10, NatureCity pairs the premier source of ubiquinol, Kaneka QH®️, with a special delivery system to enhance the amount of ubiquinol that gets into the bloodstream.
In a published study, this same ubiquinol formulation you get in TrueCoQ10 was found to be 4.3x better at increasing blood levels of ubiquinol and total CoQ10 than a regular CoQ10 supplement, on average. The participants in this study were middle aged adults taking a single 100mg serving.
The stabilization part of this system is also important to ensure the CoQ10 is still in the active form when you swallow the soft gel. If it oxidizes into ubiquinone, that defeats the purposes – and with TrueCoQ10, this extra precaution helps to ensure this doesn’t happen.
How much TrueCoQ10 should you take?
In general, to bring your CoQ10 levels to an optimal range, the maker of Kaneka QH®️ recommends you take 200mg of ubiquinol daily for the first two weeks and thereafter 50mg to 100mg daily is typically a good maintenance dose.
If you feel higher amounts help you more, you can continue with an increased dosage. We offer TrueCoQ10 in both 50mg and 100mg serving sizes (1 soft gel is a serving) for your convenience.
In part 2 of our heart supplement series, we’ll cover our 3rd and 4th supplement recommendations – so be sure to look for it next week.
Yours for Good Health,
Carl Pradelli
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