Contraindications of omega 3 supplements

Is it harmful to take omega 3?

The omega 3 are nutritional supplementsand have no toxicity. That is to say, these nutrients are found naturally in the food of the diet, therefore, their ingestion in the form of a supplement does not have a specific contraindication, just as the foods that contain it do not.

Omega 3 supplements are in the form of oil beads

Main problems of omega 3 supplements

The main problems that omega 3 supplements have are:

• They contain little amount of omega 3 , compared to food, which presents a nutritional and economic contraindication (more nutritious and cheap natural foods with omega 3).
• Many of them have already oxidized omega 3 : omega 3 is a type of fat very sensitive to oxidation, which deteriorates easily. It has been seen that many supplements spend so much time on store shelves, without being consumed, that most of their fats are oxidized. The laboratories avoid it by adding antioxidants ( vitamin E ) to the capsules, but also, sometimes these supplements spend almost a year on the shelf. Therefore, look carefully at the date of manufacture of the product!
• They contain a lot of mercury (only in the case of supplements of EPA, DHA or fish oils). This is because they are extracted from large fish, which bioaccumulate a lot of mercury . There are capsules free of heavy metals, but you have to look at the label.
• Before considering the use of supplements with omega 3, it is necessary that the diet is healthy and naturally rich in this component . A supplement can never compensate for poor diet, which is the body's main source of nutrition.

The possible contraindications for the ingestion of omega 3 supplements that contain a high high dose of these principles are listed below :

Why are foods better than supplements?

The fact of preferring to provide omega 3 in the form of rich foods, instead of in supplements , has nutritional and economic advantages.

The ground flax seeds are very rich in fiber, omega 3 and other nutrients

The foods rich in omega 3 contain other macro- and micronutrients that improve the assimilation of that component. For example, nuts contain a lot of omega 3, along with phytochemicals and vitamin E , which are antioxidants and protect that omega 3 from its deterioration and prevent oxidative stress.

In addition, in natural foods there are other beneficial components: following the example of walnuts, they provide fi ber and phytosterols that help to eliminate cholesterol and collaborate in the improvement of cardiovascular health.

In contrast, an omega 3 supplement provides only one nutrient, outside its food matrix, so its effect is less potent and less physiological .

* See a comparison between supplements and foods rich in omega 3in:

Do foods with omega 3 have contraindications?

Omega 3 fats are found in many natural foods and in vegetable oils . Eating foods with a lot of omega 3 does not present important contraindications, because in case of excess, the body would keep it in the form of body fat .

The main problem with the ingestion of a lot of omega 3 , which could be produced by the ingestion of flaxseed oilor by the ingestion of nut oil , is that these types of oils increase the formation of free radicals in the body (prooxidant). Omega 3 is a nutrient that deteriorates rapidly and should not be consumed in excess. The benefit is in the correct dose .

It should also be mentioned that when omega 3 is ingested through natural foods, for example, in some nuts , the food matrix contains phytochemicals, vitamin E and other natural antioxidants that help to preserve omega 3 better. That is, the omega 3 is better in the form of food than in oil .

What contraindications can omega 3 supplements have?

Some omega 3 supplements may have contraindications. These contraindications depend, basically, on the type of omega 3 they contain and on the quantity.

Depending on the type of omega 3, in the case of fish oil supplements , or supplements of omega 3 EPA and DHAthere are contraindications, although only when they have really high amounts of these principles, or high amounts that are ingested in a large amount .

Summary sheet on the recommendations and contraindications of supplements with omega 3

Side effects of omega 3 supplements

Omega 3 supplements are safe at the recommended doses. They have very few side effects and are well tolerated for most people.

Among the possible side effects are:

• Occasionally they may have a mild laxative effect or produce gastrointestinal reactions , a feeling of heaviness in the stomach, loose stools, etc. In these cases it is recommended to stop the treatment and consult with the professional.
• Problems can also occur due to fish reflux or bad taste in the mouth when capsules of fish oils or cod oil are consumed.

Different types of omega 3

To understand the difference and the dangers of the different omega 3 supplements , you have to explain briefly how and for what the body uses omega 3:

How omega 3 works

In the liver , omega 3 (linolenic acid) is converted into two substances called eicosanoids, which are called "EPA" and "DHA". These components are a type of omega 3 and act as potent blood fluidizers , are anti-inflammatory and produce vasodilation.

The body regulates the production of EPA and DHA from omega 3:

• If you take omega 3 supplements , the body can stop or slow down the manufacture of EPA or DHA.
• But if you take supplements that contain directly EPA and DHA (fish oils), substances that are already active, can not be regulated and exert their effect on the body. These supplements have advantages, but in excess, or poorly used, can produce adverse effects, such as potentiate or multiply the effect of anti-inflammatory drugs, anticoagulants .

Types of omega 3 supplements

The omega 3 supplements of plant origin do not contain EPA and DHA :

Omega 3 improves circulation by providing elasticity to blood vessels and fluidizing the blood

Animal-based omega 3 supplements do contain EPA and DHA ( cold-encapsulated and heavy-metal- free supplements are recommended ):

Hazards or problems with EPA and DHA fish oil

Unlike supplements of plant origin, supplements containing EPA and DHA are active substances with vasodilator, antithrombotic and blood-fluidifying properties. These properties are advantageous in certain cases, such as in people with diabetes , hypertension , arthritis , inflammatory diseases, etc. The EPA and DHA supplements are very effective and in some cases they can reduce the dose of medication .

But EPA and DHA act directly, with the disadvantage that they can enhance the action of heart medications , circulation, varicose veins , etc. In these cases do NOT take these supplements, you should consult with the doctor.

Omega 3 and vegetarianism
Healthy vegetarian people do not need fish oil supplements, but they are recommended to take foods rich in omega 3 every day. Click on the image for more information.

Contraindications of ALL omega 3 supplements

Supplements should be taken according to the doses or amounts indicated on the package . It is not recommended to exceed the recommended dose, unless your doctor tells you to.

Both fish oils and supplements of plant origin have the following contraindications:

• Pregnancy : Consult the doctor beforehand.
• Schizophrenia and epilepsy : Consult previously with the doctor. Especially when treated with epileptogenic drugs, such as phenothiazines.
• Heart failure : Consult your doctor beforehand. It can interfere with the medication.
• Medications : In case of taking anticoagulant drugs ( Sintrom ), heart medications, medication for circulation, or other types of medication, consult with the doctor before taking this supplement.
• Do not take omega 3 before or after surgery or surgical operations ( pre and post operative )

Attention! Before taking omega 3 supplements you should consult your doctor because they can interfere with some medications. The supplements are not better or replace a diet rich in omega 3.

More information on properties of fatty fish and omega 3 .

Other articles of interest

The material that works here is informative. In case of doubt, consult the doctor. 
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What is the Sun Made of and When will it Die?

by Natalie WolchoverJuly 05, 2018
from QuantaMagazine Website


 

The sun as it appeared in October 2017,

imaged by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.NASA / SDO / Seán Doran

If and when physicists are able

to pin down the metal content of the sun,

that number could upend much of what

we thought we knew about the

evolution and life span of stars.

Like any star in its prime, the Sun consists mainly of hydrogen atoms fusing two by two into helium, unleashing immense energy in the process.

But it's the sun's tiny concentration of heavier elements, which astronomers call metals, that controls its fate.

"Even a very small fraction of metals is sufficient to alter the behavior of a star completely," explained Sunny Vagnozzi, a physicist at Stockholm University in Sweden who studies the "metallicity" of the sun.

The more metallic a star, the more opaque it is (since metals absorb radiation), and how opaque it is in turn relates to its size, temperature, brightness, life span and other key properties.

"Metallicity basically also tells you how the star will die," Vagnozzi said.

But the sun's metallicity, beyond revealing its own story, also serves as a kind of yardstick for calibrating measurements of the metallicity of all other stars, and thus the ages, temperatures and other properties of stars, galaxies and everything else.

"If we change the solar yardstick, automatically it means that our understanding of the cosmos has to change," said Martin Asplund, an astrophysicist at Australian National University.

"So having an accurate knowledge of the solar chemical composition is extremely important."

Yet, ever more precise measurements of the sun's metallicity have raised more questions than they've answered.

Astronomers' inability to solve the mystery known variously as the solar metallicity, solar abundance, solar composition or solar modeling problem suggests there could be,

"something fundamentally wrong" with their understanding of the sun, and therefore of all stars, said Vagnozzi. "That would be huge."

Twenty years ago, astronomers thought they had the sun sorted.

Direct and indirect ways of inferring its metallicity both gauged the sun as approximately 1.8 percent metal - a happy convergence that led them to believe they understood not only the length of their solar yardstick but also how the sun works.

However, throughout the 2000s, increasingly precise spectroscopic measurements of sunlight - a direct probe of the sun's composition, since each element creates telltale absorption lines in the spectrum - indicated a far lower metallicity of just 1.3 percent.

Meanwhile, helio-seismology, the competing, indirect approach for inferring metallicity based on the way sound waves of different frequencies propagate through the sun's interior, still said 1.8 percent.

But if astronomers' theory of the sun, called the "standard solar model," is correct, spectroscopy and helio-seismology should agree.

That is, astronomers should be able to use the helio-seismological measurements to calculate the depth of an important boundary layer in the sun where radiation gives way to convection.

And this depth relates, according to the equations, to the sun's opacity, and therefore to its metallicity.

This sequence of calculations should predict the same value for the metallicity as spectroscopers measure directly from sunlight. It does not.

"This is a problem not only for solar physics, but by extension for astronomy as a whole," said Asplund, who led the team behind the precise spectroscopic measurements.

"Either astronomers do not understand how to measure elemental abundances of stars using spectroscopy, or our understanding of stars' interiors and how they oscillate is incomplete," he said.

"Either way, it has major ramifications, since stars are the fundamental probes of the cosmos, with stellar astrophysics providing much of the foundation for modern astronomy and cosmology."

Join David Kaplan on a virtual-reality tour showing how the sun, the Earth and the other planets came to be.Quanta Magazine and Chorus Films

After years of talking about what might be going wrong - including speculations about dark matter in the sun - the debate has reached,

"a bit of a stalemate," said Sarbani Basu, a solar astrophysicist at Yale University.

But there's hope.

Recently, a weak hint about the solar metallicity has come from fleeting particles emanating from the sun called solar neutrinos.

Different nuclear fusion reactions produce solar neutrinos of different energies, and so the particles carry information about the sun's composition.

At a conference last month in Heidelberg, Germany, the Borexino experiment based at Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory reported detections of solar neutrinos that marginally favor the higher, 1.8 percent estimate of the sun's metallicity.

If this high-metallicity estimate is indeed correct, this raises questions about what, exactly, went wrong with Martin Asplund and collaborators' spectroscopic measurements.

"If the problem is with spectroscopy, then we likely make similar errors when analyzing other stars," he said, which would impact interpretations of the chemical evolution of stars and galaxies like the Milky Way.

But Asplund stands by his 1.3 percent spectroscopic estimate.

He points to a 2015 study (A Higher-than-predicted Measurement of Iron Opacity at Solar Interior Temperatures) in Nature indicating that metals might increase opacity even more than previously thought in the high-pressure conditions of the sun's core.

Correcting for this difference in the standard solar model could bring the helio-seismological and neutrino estimates of metallicity down to 1.3 percent, he said.

In the coming years, the Borexino team expects to detect rare solar neutrinos produced in the CNO cycle, a fusion reaction in the sun in which carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms serve as catalysts for fusing hydrogen into helium.

"The CNO neutrinos are greatly affected by metallicity, so measuring these neutrinos could be definitive," said Andrea Pocar, a physicist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the Borexino collaboration.

If it turns out that the sun is, in fact, only 1.3 percent metal, this would mean the standard solar model really does have opacity wrong.

"This impacts essentially all of astronomy," Asplund said, "since an accurate understanding of stellar evolution underpins almost everything we do."

Estimated ages of stars and galaxies would have to be revised by as much as 10 to 15 percent.

Unfortunately for the sun itself (and future life on Earth), low-metallicity stars burn fuel faster than high-metallicity stars, so our sun would die about a billion years sooner than we thought...

Could Multiple Personality Disorder Explain Life, the Universe and Everything?

by Robby BermanJune 27, 2018
from BigThink Website

Spanish version

 

We're all one mind in "idealism."

(Credit: Alex Grey)

There's a reason they call it the "hard problem."

Consciousness:

Where is it? What is it?

No one single perspective seems to be able to answer all the questions we have about consciousness.

Now Bernardo Kastrup ¹ thinks he's found one. He calls his ontology 'idealism', and according to 'idealism,' all of us and all we perceive are manifestations of something very much like a cosmic-scale dissociative identity disorder (DID).

1 - Kastrup is a computer engineer specializing in A.I. and reconfigurable computing.

He suggests there's an all-encompassing universe-wide consciousness, it has multiple personalities, and we're them.

Kastrup's paper (The Universe in Consciousness) is an attempt to devise an explanation for consciousness that leaves no unanswered questions behind as other commonly held perspectives do, at least at our current level of scientific knowledge.

Physicalism and substance dualism

There are a seemingly endless array of ultimately unsatisfying isms thrown at the problem of consciousness.

If you've got some time, have a look at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Here, though, if only to explain what panpsychism, the basis of Kastrup's 'idealism', isn't, it'll be helpful to talk very briefly about two of the most popular ontologies to which it's a response.

Physicalism describes the belief that consciousness is a product of interaction between different types of physical matter.

For many, though, physicalism falls into a seemingly uncrossable chasm between strictly physical processes on one hand, and our "phenomenal experience" - the experience of experiencing - on the other.

One is chemical, electrical, mechanical, and the other is… something else. Physical processes may be able to explain how we know a roaring fire is hot, but not what warmth feels like to us.

In substance dualism, there's physical substance and immaterial substance, consciousness, and they're two separate domains.

This seems intuitively true to a lot of people - think body and soul - but if they are fundamentally different things,

• What means of exchange, or "language," could they possibly have in common, and how could they interact?
  
  
• How could a physical experience make our consciousness feel a certain way?
  
  
• How could a purely mental decision cause our body to take action?
  
  
• And where exactly could this happen?

Credit: Captblack76

Shutterstock

Take one dash of constitutive panpsychism

Kastrup's system is based on an ontology growing popular with some philosophers, and with some physicists, called constitutive panpsychism.

It's basically the idea that everything, all of the tiny subatomic particles that make up the universe's mass, have consciousness, a sense of what it's like to have an experience.

We have consciousness because it's everywhere. In this way, it's all there is.

If so, then, how do separate and mutually aware, interacting individuals arise?

One suggestion is that when enough of these conscious particles come together - there'd be countless numbers of them in each of our brains after all - a more complex, self-aware consciousness is created. Somehow...

This doesn't quite make sense, though:

It's as if you arranged all the various pieces of a car randomly in a pile and by virtue of sheer proximity, they self-combined into a Prius.

This is constitutive panpsychism's "combination" problem, as in how do all these separate glimmers of consciousness merge to create our individuated consciousnesses.

Another thing:

If conscious particles can join with others to create a larger, more complex consciousness together, does this mean the universe is itself one unimaginably large unified mind?

And if so, how can private, personal, concurrent but non-overlapping consciousnesses emerge from the universal consciousnesses, each one of which has its own personality and experiences?

This is the ontology's "recombination" problem, and it's what Kastrup's idealism attempts to solve.

Add one dollop of dissociative identity disorder

Here we leave, for a little bit, the realm of brain-bending consciousness talk for the world of mental disorders and fMRI scans.

Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is the current correct term for what used to be called multiple personality disorder. It's the mental condition in which a single person manifests multiple dissociated personalities, each of which is referred to as an "alter".

This hasn't always been a widely accepted phenomenon, but recent research has been validating.

Kastrup cites a 2014 study in which fMRI scans were performed on DID patients and actors re-creating DID symptoms.

Brain activity didn't look remotely the same in the scans, which, Kastrup notes, showed that,

"dissociation has an identifiable extrinsic appearance. In other words, there is something rather particular that dissociative processes look like."

Tyler Durden (no spoilers!)

of Fight Club (20th Century Fox)

Alters are self-contained and internally consistent in terms of memories.

They may even have different physical capabilities though they share the same body, as in the recently studied sighted woman who had blind alters.

Kastrup writes,

"Through EEGs, the doctors were able to ascertain that the brain activity normally associated with sight wasn't present while a blind alter was in control of the woman's body, even though her eyes were open.

When a sighted alter assumed control, the usual brain activity returned."

Just as interesting - and the real source of Kastrup's interest in the condition - is that there's evidence multiple alters can be active - conscious - at the same time, aware of each other, and competing for control of their body.

He cites a 2009 study of an alter named "Miss Beauchamp" which found,

"When she was not interacting with the world, she did not become dormant, but persisted and was active."

Other research (First Person Plural - Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of Mind) has seen, says Kastrup, that,

"alters,

'might intervene in the lives of others [that is, other alters], intentionally interfering with their interests and activities, or at least playing mischief on them.'

It thus appears that alters can not only be concurrently conscious, but that they can also vie for dominance with each other."

Credit: Photographee.eu

Shutterstock

Idealism - A universe with DID

Kastrup suggests that 'if' the entire universe 'is'one mind, the presence of dissociative personalities creating individual consciousnesses could answer questions that defeat otherontologies.

In this view, each of us is an alter, and just like conventional alters are, we can be aware of and interact with each other without mentally overlapping or seeing into each other's minds.

Kastrup proposes our individual experiences in the physical world aren't an issue because they're not what they seem.

In fact (he says), they're merely,

"patterns of self-excitation of cosmic consciousness."

That's to say there is no physical world, no steering wheel in front of you, rather,

"it is the variety and dynamics of excitations across the underlying 'medium' that lead to different experiential qualities."

This isn't as out-there as it may at first seem.

It was written before about cognitive scientists who suggest that the reality that surrounds us could be very different than what we think since what we see, hear, feel, etc, are merely internally generated representations that help us survive external stimuli.

In Kastrup's premise, it's not actual, physical things out there, but merely bursts of self-excitationcoming from elsewhere in the cosmic mind:

There is no out there out there...

This version of idealism, if true, resolves a bunch of issues that vex other perspectives, such as the hard problem, and the DID aspect handles the combination problem.

In fact, Kastrup lists in his paper five concerns his ontology must, and he feels does, satisfy:

1. Grounding experience in cosmic consciousness: how do myriad, ephemeral experiential qualities arise in one enduring cosmic consciousness?
    
2. The decombination problem: how do private phenomenal fields form within cosmic consciousness? Why can I not read your thoughts by simply shifting the focus of my attention?
    
3. Reducing perception: how can the revealed order of nature (the physical world we measure) be explained in terms of its concealed order (its underlying thoughts)? Why are the respective qualities so different?
    
4. Explaining the correlations between brain function and inner experience: if brain function does not constitute or generate phenomenality, why do they correlate so well?
    
5. Explaining a seemingly shared, autonomous world: if the world is imagined in consciousness, how can we all be imagining essentially the same world outside the control of our personal volition?

It's a very interesting argument.