Fresh Food, Fresh Fish Oil

This might come as a surprise, but fish oil is made from fish! Ok, so maybe that didn’t come as a completely new concept, but what is troublesome is that somewhere along the way, (between catching the fish and the lovely labelled and artfully marketed product found on the shelf of your health shop or pharmacy) that basic fact seems to get lost along the way.

Is Fresh Food Important To You?

Consumers are becoming savvier and starting to ask questions and become aware about where their food is sourced from, where and how it is grown and/or manufactured and the freshness of the finished product by the time it hits the supermarket shelves. The last thing you want is to get a brown wilted lettuce with a rotten tomato to make a salad for dinner! We know that eating that brown horrible lettuce would not only make us feel ill and would not be a good source of nutrients that our bodies need, so why have we not been asking this of our fish oil supplements? Would you be comfortable eating a rotten, antibiotic fed, chemically soaked fish or would you prefer a fresh caught fish that has low toxin levels and spend minimal amount of time from being caught to the time it was on your plate? Perhaps it is a little sad that we have now dissociated fish oil from the fish itself.

If we stopped looking at fish oil as a separate component of fish and saw it as ‘food’ I am sure that most people would be a little pickier with what they are ingesting. Just like eating that rotten fish would have negative health consequences, so would taking rancid oxidised fish oil.

Is Your Fish Oil Rancid?

The tell-tale signs of a rancid or ‘off’ fish oil capsule would primarily be the smell and the taste. If it has a strong ‘fishy’ odour or smells bad, discard it. Likewise if the liquid fish oil has more than a mild fresh taste, it should not be consumed. If you pierce a capsule, the oil should not have a strong odour or bad taste. If it does have these qualities and you are not game enough to taste it then why would you consume it at all?!

The proof is in the pudding, so to speak. Without going into the whizz bang manufacturing procedures, purity testing and extensive research papers on Nordic Naturals fish oil… the best way is to see and try the finished product. No fishy smell (not rancid, check!) great taste (compliance, check!) you actually get results (expectation vs reality, check!). Use all your senses when choosing the best fish oil with smell, taste, sight and perhaps the most important sense… your own common sense. Freshness and purity is not a luxury, it is a necessity.