Is your fish oil dangerous?

We’re often asked why we haven’t expanded our product line to include items like fish oil. The truth is that we exhaustively research each and every ingredient that we put into 3Fu3l, and we’re currently investigating numerous others. But why bother investigating something like fish oil, when everyone knows that it’s a great natural supplement? Because “everyone knows…” isn’t a good enough answer for us. So when we started to dig into the most current data on fish oil, specifically on the manufacturing end, we saw that 1. it’s not as simple as putting some fish oil in a bottle 2. we needed to do more research. Now, we’re not telling anyone to stop (or start) taking fish oil (yet)…we’re simply going to shed some light on the truth behind fish oil on the current market.

Ask yourself two questions before reading any farther:

1. Do you know if your fish oil has oxidized (yet…because it will eventually)?
2. How do you know (hint: it can’t always be detected by smell or “fish burps”)?

If you’re like most consumers, you don’t know the answer to either of those questions, and honestly, there are a lot of fish oils on the market that have dangerously high levels of oxidation – and we’re not talking about dangerous like “make you sick,” we’re talking dangerous like “harden your arteries”. Think we’re exaggerating? Keep reading.

Unlike most other supplements, fish oil can quickly oxidize  (go rancid) and become dangerous to ingest. The fish that produce the highest levels of the oil you’ll find on the supplement market are, primarily, found in cold water. As a result, their oil can easily go rancid. Back in 2005, The United Nations University oversaw a project where fish oil was bottled and refrigerated, and how quickly it should be consumed. They reccomended consuming within 36 days (after 41 it had oxidized to an unacceptable degree), but suggested that lower temperature storage (but still above freezing) and less frequent opening of the bottle (allowing in oxygen) could extend the maximum allowable time to 60-90 days.

A 2012 study that examined conjugated diene levels (used to identify the early stages of rancidity) in 59 commercial fish oil supplements (bought in South Africa) found that  44% (right off the shelf, just purchased!) were unacceptably high (≤ 20 μmol/g ).

Obviously there’s something going on here, and a lot of fish oil supplements are going bad. So before we’d even consider putting our name on it, we’d first need to figure out why this is happening, and how to avoid it.

Roughly half of the fish oil supplements in that study (which looked at 2012, but included 2009 data seperately) didn’t meet label claims for EPA:

And EPA levels versus claims weren’t much better:

In 2007,  Consumer Reports examined 29 brands of fish oil (sold in the United States), and four of them did not meet industry standards for oxidation, while five failed to meet Omega-3 claims.  In 2011, label claims were accurate on all 15 brands they examined, but quality control issues lingered for several. Our research has led us to realize that there is a lot of poorly manufactured fish oil on the market, and some of it (the oxidized stuff) is actually quite dangerous, and can lead to the hardening of arteries (among other things). These problems with the current fish oil market can be due to any number of factors: handling issues, storage issues, using low quality fish oil, seasonal differences in EPA/DHA concentrations, and many more. Concerns with the current fish oil market, and figuring out a way to insure that anything we release is of the highest quality (and safety), are just a few of the reasons we’re investigating fish oil at the moment – and don’t worry, we’ll keep you updated with whatever we find, good or bad. We may never release a fish oil, but we still want to keep you safe and informed.