Supplement Detective

By Curtis Alexander, Pharm.D.
America’s Natural Pharmacist

Summary: You can use fish oil for weight loss.  However, beware that many claims regarding fish oil pills and weight loss have been taken out of context.  The exact mechanism behind fish oil and weight loss is still debatable.  You may need to adjust your dose of fish oil upwards to achieve some of the weight loss benefits.

Q: Is fish oil really something that can help me lose weight?

A: Let me start by saying this – it does appear that taking fish oil can help you lose weight.  But, there is a lot of misinformation and reaches out there about how much fish oil can help and how it goes about helping you.

For example, there are claims that fish oil pills cause weight loss by killing adipose (fat) cells.  Technically, this has proven to be true in a study published in the Journal of Nutrition.  But, if you read the fine print this study was conducted in vitro – i.e., in glass or a test tube.  This wasn’t a study conducted in actual human beings.

I’m not saying it can’t do that in real life, but for someone to make the jump from an in vitro study to saying it ‘absolutely works’ in humans (in vivo) is a big jump.  And irresponsible.

Fish Oil Pills and Weight Loss – What You Need to Know

Aside from some of the wild claims taken out of context I’m comfortable in saying that fish oil does have weight loss benefits.  It won’t do the job all on it’s own – but, if you are eating naturally it’s certainly going to supplement your weight loss efforts.

Here are the proven basics that it’s going to be helpful for you to know:

1. As I mentioned above, in a test tube, fish oil does cause apoptosis (programmed cell death) in certain fat cells.
2. Some of the claims I read said that you had to focus on the DHA (Docosahexaenoic Acid) content of your fish oil.  While this was the case in the study above where they looked at DHA killing fat cells – the other studies linking fish oil to weight loss included both components of fish oil: EPA (Eicosapentaenoic Acid) and DHA.  A quality fish oil should contain both parts.
3. The dosages of fish oil used in the studies varied.  So there is no specific dosing recommendation.  Typical dosage recommendations that I’ve seen generally fall around 1,000mg a day of fish oil (EPA and DHA).  If I were to make an educated case I would say you’d want to talk to your doctor about upping that a bit to the 1,500mg to 2,000mg a day dose for weight loss.  At least for the first few months as this was the general dosage range that appeared to show positive results.
4. The studies that I looked at (in humans) were placebo controlled – which is good.  It means that one group was taking a ’sugar’ pill which eliminates bias in the study and is really the ‘gold standard’ of any well-designed study.
5. On the downside – the studies were also small.  So the weight loss benefit of fish oil hasn’t been proven on a massive scale yet.  But I’ve seen enough to believe that it will benefit you in that regard.
6. When I started researching this I was encouraged because I saw another claim that fish oil benefited weight loss by improving insulin sensitivity.  This would have been huge.  But, after digging a little more it was clear that this isn’t the case.  In fact, one study clearly stated that there was no improvement in insulin senitivity in their study.
7. Cholesterol markers (triglycerides, VLDL (very low density lipoproteins) were much improved after months on fish oil.

In Conclusion

All in all, I definitely think that fish oil could benefit weight loss efforts.  However, there are also some bogus claims out there about how it actually does it.  So, beware of what you believe.  You may need to take a little higher dose than what’s on your bottle and this is something you should talk to your doctor about first as their are side effects to fish oil.

Also, you need to make sure that the first thing you do is change how you eat.  Focus on eliminating processed foods (immediately improving your omega3:omega 6 ratio), eat natural foods like meats, nuts, fruits and vegetables and exercise (although, contrary to popular opinion, don’t get carried away.  Too much exercise too often will actually set you back).