Truth Or Consequences For Fish Oil

I am Dr. Dave Woynarowski. I have been studying, using, and reformulating fish oil for over a decade, both personally and in my clinical practice. The recent Proposition 65 lawsuit against ten of the better known omega 3 brands raised a lot of reader questions, and I want to address them in plain English.

What the Proposition 65 lawsuit was actually about

The suit was filed by a private consumer environmental group, not by the FDA. The issue was polychlorinated biphenyl content. The FDA has one safety threshold for PCB content in fish oil. California Proposition 65 sets a threshold roughly four times stricter. The named brands met the federal standard and missed the California one. That is the whole story.

Why two standards for the same compound? Because anyone can write a standard. PCBs are presumed carcinogenic at high enough exposure, but the body, primarily the liver, handles low levels routinely. The toxicology phrase that matters here is the dose makes the poison. I am all for the purest products on the market, but PCB content is not a binary like pregnancy or death. It is a range, and it is possible to push that range well below the California threshold with the right processing.

Why those specific brands got named

Probably because they are the largest, the most visible, and frankly the best selling. There is another reason that does not get discussed enough: many of them use the same raw oil source. If you took the production lots and matched them by manufacture date, I would not be surprised to find the oils all came from the same upstream supplier. We have been pitched by Chinese fish oil exporters claiming perfect purity. The track record on those claims is not good. A lower price point and a higher margin can pull a company toward a source it would not otherwise pick.

What pharmaceutical grade actually means

Critics of the term call it pure marketing. Honestly, they are sometimes right. Anybody can put pharmaceutical grade on a bottle, and many do. Here is what it should mean.

1. Molecular distillation that removes PCBs, dioxins, and heavy metals to parts per trillion levels of detection.
2. Lead and mercury under detection limits on a per lot certificate of analysis.
3. Label claim for EPA and DHA accurate to within a small percentage of the actual content, lot to lot. This is how a drug is tested, and a serious omega 3 should be tested the same way.

If a fish oil company will not show you the lot specific certificate of analysis, the term means nothing. If they will, you can check the numbers yourself.

Krill versus fish oil

I get this question constantly. Here is my position, after watching the krill story unfold for several years.

There are over 10,000 independent, non manufacturer sponsored studies on fish oil EPA and DHA going back decades, with new ones coming out steadily. Krill has a small number of studies, most of them industry funded, several from a single regional cluster of labs.

Krill is part of an ecosystem just like fish, and like fish it is subject to harvest pressure and environmental contamination, in this case organochlorine pesticides. I have not seen published purity panels on commercial krill at the level of a serious fish oil COA. Saying it is clean is not the same as showing it is clean.

I do think there is a smart place for krill in the supply chain. Adding krill to standard fish meal is a defensible way to keep farmed fish omega 3 levels high without leaning on wild fishery stocks. Krill as a finished consumer omega 3 product, though, gives you a fraction of the EPA and DHA per dollar that a good fish oil does, with far less human outcome data behind it. And no human population in history has lived on krill, so we will never see a population scale study the way we have for fish consuming populations.

What this means for you

If you are taking fish oil and want it to actually do something:

• Pick a brand that publishes a lot specific certificate of analysis with PCB, mercury, lead, and dioxin numbers.
• Check the EPA and DHA per serving, not the total fish oil per serving. Plenty of cheap products are 30 percent EPA plus DHA. A good concentrate runs 60 to 85 percent.
• Dose to your omega 3 index. The target most of the research clusters around is 8 percent or higher. The test is inexpensive and uses a finger prick.

Even the major cardiology and oncology organizations have come around on omega 3 over the last fifteen years. That is rare for an organization whose default position is to wait for the drug version. The fish oil story is not perfect, but it is the most carefully studied supplement we have, and the future for it is still bright.

— Doc