Judging the Quality of Fish Oil

Unless you have about $500,000 worth of testing equipment in your kitchen, you are not ever going to be able to determine how purified an EPA/DHA concentrate is. The term “pharmaceutical grade” may be on a label but there is no standard definition of that term. The supplement industry can put anything on a label as long as they don’t promise to cure or prevent a particular disease. The key watch words are “buyer beware”.

So what is a buyer to do? There are three options. The first is the toothpick option. Pour a few teaspoons of your fish oil into a shot glass and place it in the freezer. If you have capsules, beak them in half and pour the contents into the shot glass. Come back five hours later and see if you can pass a toothpick through them. If the oil is frozen it is probably the sewer of the sea fish oil.

The second test is to smell and taste the liquid fish oil. This test is best done by a woman as women have 10 times the taste buds of men. If the taste is “fishy”, this is a strong indicator that significant oxidation of the EPA/DHA is already present. The fishy taste comes from the oxidative breakdown products of EPA/DHA.

Unfortunately these two simple tests alone still won’t tell you whether the product contains an unacceptable level of PCB’s or dioxins but it is a start. Remember that all fish are at the top of the sea food chain and are contaminated, as is their oil, so the manufacturing process is important.

The third option is to go to an independent third party web site to see if your fish oil meets the standards. The top web site for this is www.ifosprogram.com which is run by the University of Guelph in Canada. (IFOS is short for International Fish Oil Standards) They have the highest standards in the world. They test by each lot of a particular company’s fish oil. Other testing standards allow companies to test a lot every several years so you really don’t know the quality of the lot you might have purchased. This is the equivalent of thinking that every year of a wine vintage is the same.

Generally: If you have type 2 diabetes, are obese, have heart disease or are starting a diet you should be taking five grams per day and pay about $3.00 a day per dose. If you are in chronic pain you should take 7.5 g/day.

The unvarnished truth about nutritional supplements is that you need to take enough to make them effective. Most companies figure that people want to pay about  $5 to $15 per month so that is how much of a supplement they put in. If you don’t take enough you will not see the benefits. Remember that drugs do things to your cells, act quickly and have side effects. Whole food nutrition, including high quality fish oil, does things for your cells, acts slowly but has no side effects. What you put in your mouth either subsidizes your illness or subsidizes your health.

Here are some other criteria you might want to apply. Always look for 60% of the fatty acids consisting of EPA and DHA or higher. What we really need to know but are never listed on the label are PCB’s (less than 30 parts per billion, dioxins (less than one part per trillion), and total oxidation (less that 20meq/kg).

These are very stringent conditions and that is why very few fish oil supplements can meet them. 

Excerpted from  "Toxic Fats".  

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Tom Kociemba
623-533-4071
tom@kociemba.com
www.tkociembajuiceplus.com

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