You Get What You Pay For

By now most people understand that omega 3 fish oil is useful. New studies keep landing, the major medical organizations have come around, and the fish oil aisle has expanded to fill an entire shelf at the warehouse store. What does not get asked often enough is where the oil in your bottle actually comes from.

The Proposition 65 wake up call

A few years ago, California Proposition 65 testing found PCB contamination in fish oil products from thirteen major distributors. The story made the news, the brands settled, and most people moved on. The interesting question is why all thirteen failed in the same way at the same time.

The answer is supply chain consolidation. A meaningful share of the fish oil consumed in the United States comes from a small number of upstream raw oil producers, then gets reblended, encapsulated, and rebranded by the consumer brands you actually buy. If the same upstream lot has a problem, every downstream brand using that lot has the same problem. That is exactly what happened. The thirteen brands were not making thirteen different decisions. They were sharing a few decisions.

The China question

At the time of those failures, estimates put the share of fish oil entering the US supply chain from Chinese sources at roughly 20 percent. There were good reasons to look at that pipeline carefully.

Two events made the case. In 2008, a contaminated heparin ingredient from a Chinese supplier was linked to 149 deaths in the United States. In 2007, dogs and cats died after eating pet food made with wheat gluten from China that contained melamine. Independent inspection of Chinese pharmaceutical and supplement raw material facilities has historically been limited. Most are not members of the major global quality organizations. Chinese fish oil exports were estimated at four billion capsules a year. Much of that volume ended up in the lowest cost retail products in Western markets.

To be clear, sourcing from China is not automatically a problem. Sourcing from any opaque supply chain that does not publish lot specific testing is the problem. The Chinese case is the most striking example.

What a clean fish oil supply chain looks like

The serious omega 3 brands in the United States typically source from Norway, Iceland, or other North Atlantic and South Pacific waters where the raw fish are caught into well regulated systems. The raw oil is then processed at facilities that publish their testing standards, perform molecular distillation to remove PCBs and heavy metals, and produce a certificate of analysis for each lot. The COA travels with the finished product.

The questions to ask are simple.

1. Where is the fish caught and which species. Anchovy, sardine, mackerel, and pollock are the most common, and each has its own contaminant profile.
2. Where is the oil processed. The processing facility is where purity is actually achieved or not.
3. Does the brand publish a lot specific certificate of analysis on request. If yes, you can verify the numbers. If no, the rest of the marketing language is decoration.

Why the warehouse store fish oil is so cheap

If you can buy a 200 softgel bottle of fish oil at the warehouse store for under $10, the math forces a few conclusions. The raw oil source is the cheapest available. The EPA and DHA concentration is low, often under 30 percent of the listed total fish oil. The testing standard is the minimum allowed under federal law, which is not the same as the standard a clinical grade product is held to. None of that makes the product unsafe. It does mean you are buying a different product than a clinical concentrate.

For someone in their 50s or 60s trying to actually move an omega 3 index from 4 to 8, the cheap product will not get you there at any reasonable capsule count. You need higher EPA and DHA per softgel, and you need to know what you are taking is what is on the label.

What to do

• Ask the brand for a lot specific certificate of analysis. If they will not provide it, move on.
• Check the EPA and DHA per serving, not the total fish oil per serving.
• Run an omega 3 index test. It is a finger prick, runs about the cost of a movie ticket, and tells you whether your current dose is doing anything.
• If your index is below 8, increase the dose or switch to a more concentrated product.

You can buy fish oil at any price point. You cannot buy results at any price point. Spending matters less than knowing what you are spending on.

— Doc