Omega 3 for vegans
I don’t know much about nutrition. I know why I’m fat, but that’s about it.
There are vegans who will tell you about food combining, daily intake requirements and even how many bananas to eat per day. I give you beer and fried things and expect you will look after the essential nutrients part yourself.
I’m breaking with this tradition to let you know that Sainsbury’s have started selling omega 3 tablets that are suitable for vegans. Hopefully somebody more in-the-know than I will jump into the comments to explain what benefits vegans can obtain from consuming these tablets containing linseed oil. I have a flimsy understanding that the essential fatty acid contained within the oil can help protect your heart and lower cholesterol levels.
The above statement is in no way based on scientific knowledge or understanding.
As an alternative, a bottle of cold pressed flax (linseed) oil is about a tenner from health food shops. A tablespoon on your dry breakfast cereal soaks in within 30 secs before you add your rice milk (etc). You don’t notice it. That said, flax oil contains no DHA (longer chain omega 3s), but you can get those from algal oil like NothingFishy capsules.
Seems a reasonably-priced back-up for situations like holidays where you can’t be sure of a balanced diet. The benefit of flax is that it’s got more omega 3 than 6 – veg*ns tend to skew towards eating too much 6 in relation to 3 because a lot of foods we tend to eat are naturally that way, e.g. sunflower oil.
I tend to cook with rapeseed oil as it has about the right balance, and throw some flaxseeds into the blender when I have a smoothie to even out all the other, more omega 6-heavy foods I eat. I’d rather eat ground flax-seeds than just the oil because then I’m getting the benefit of protein, fibre etc. but I understand some people don’t like the taste so supplements are probably a good option for them.
You don’t need to taste them. Just mix some in when making burgers, they make a great binder 🙂