You know about Omega 3 fats. Unless you've been under a rock the last few years it's pretty hard to ignore the flood of information from various sources about fish oil health benefits. Omega 3 fatty acids just have to be a part of your diet, but how do you get them?

It's a bit of a conundrum. Omega 3 fats come to us primarily from fish or other sea foods. They are found in some other sources, but clearly the major source of Omega 3 fatty acids that are an essential part of our diet is fish.

And not just any old fish, but fatty fish like Tuna and Mackeral. And there's some problems there. Firstly just look at the price of Tuna and other sea foods. I mean who can afford to eat it? It's so expensive that unless you're independently wealthy having 3 or so meals of Tuna a week is pretty much the road to bankruptcy.

And there's more problems. Eating fish can, apart from the benefits of the Omega3 fats, be bad for your health. Why? Because sadly our oceans are becoming more and more polluted by various contaminants that we do not want to be eating, like mercury and PCBs and heavy metals. And all of these accumulate in the flesh of fish at the top end of the food chain. Like Tuna and Mackeral. And as they are cumulative they aren't expelled from the fish, they accumulate in the flesh over time.

So when you eat the fish you are eating small amounts of mercury and other contaminants.

The good news though is that there are other ways of getting your Omega 3 fats. There are fish oil supplements available. Of course they also can suffer from the same problem of contamination, because they get their oil from fish, but Omega 3 tablets should be properly decontaminated so that these nasty contaminants are removed from the supplements.

There are well known processes to do this such as molecular distillation, and there are various standards that fish oil supplements should adhere to to demonstrate that they are extremely low in contaminants.

However of course like all these things there are better fish oil supplements and there are worse fish oil supplements. It pays to make sure that you're taking the good ones, mercury and PCBs can be pretty nasty.

Overall though, there is no doubt that you ought to be adding fish oil tablets to your breakfast. A daily supplement of Omega 3 fats can do wonders for your heart health as well as for a wide range of other health problems. The benefits of fish oil to health are now well known.

Just make sure you choose your fish oil tablets well.