Every one of your roughly 30 trillion cells is wrapped in a thin membrane made largely of fat. Which fats end up there depends, quite literally, on what you eat. The long-chain omega-3s, EPA and DHA, are built right into those membranes, and DHA is especially concentrated in your brain and the retina of your eyes.

That membrane is not just a wall. It decides how flexible a cell is, how well it receives hormonal signals, and which messengers it produces when it is under stress. Change the fats, and over time you change the conversation your cells are having.

Omega-6 and omega-3 are both essential: your body cannot make them, so they have to come from food. The problem is not omega-6 itself, it is the balance. Our ancestors ate them in a ratio of roughly 1:1 to 4:1. In a modern Western diet, rich in seed oils and processed food, that ratio often climbs to 15:1 or even 20:1.¹

Why does that matter? From omega-6 linoleic acid, your body makes arachidonic acid, the starting point for messengers that switch inflammation on. From EPA and DHA, it makes messengers that help switch it off again, the so-called resolvins and protectins.² Inflammation in itself is healthy and necessary. But when the scale tips that far towards omega-6, the “off switch” has very little to work with.

This is the part nobody tells you: omega-3 is not a quick fix. A red blood cell lives about 120 days, which is why the omega-3 index in your blood takes three to four months to truly reflect what you have been taking.³ Your fat tissue turns over even more slowly: its fatty acid profile reflects what you have eaten over the past one to two years.⁴

So you are not changing a number on a lab report in a week. You are slowly rebuilding the structure of your body, cell by cell. That is exactly why consistency matters more than any single dose.

Omega-3s are beautiful, and fragile. Those same flexible double bonds that make them so valuable also make them oxidise easily, through heat, light and air. And an oxidised oil is not just less useful: in lab and animal studies, its breakdown products can stress the very cells you were trying to support. Research on human health is still limited, but I would rather not find out.

Analyses of supplements on the shelf found that a large share of fish oil capsules exceeded the recommended limits for oxidation.⁵ And here is the catch with capsules: you cannot smell or taste whether the oil inside is fresh. The gelatine hides it.

Eqology’s oil comes from fresh, wild Arctic cod, caught sustainably and processed quickly. Then comes the part I love most: it is blended with organic, cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil. Olive oil is naturally rich in polyphenols, antioxidants that help protect the delicate omega-3s from oxidation, so the oil stays remarkably fresh. The omega-3s are in their natural triglyceride form, the way they occur in fish.

And you can taste it. It is liquid, it is fresh, and it tastes of lemon, not of fish. That, to me, is the honest test of any fish oil. They also offer a simple at-home blood test, so you can see your own omega-6 to omega-3 balance before you start and again a few months later. No guessing, just your own numbers.