Why Your Fish Oil Supplements are Probably Illegal In Canada And The UK!
Canada has extremely strict health supplement standards, so naturally they have strong requirements for fish oil supplements. In fact, Canada has banned the sale of most US fish oil products there! Canada is not alone in banning these inferior omega-3 fish oils; Denmark and Sweden have also prohibited them, and the UK & Norway are close behind. Why? The answer has to do with how bioavailable the omega 3 fatty acids are, or how easily your body absorbs them and makes use of them. The explanation may be more scientific than you care for, but I will make it easy to understand.
The reason fish oil pills are so beneficial for your health is because they contain omega-3 fats. Omega-3s are fats that actually good for the body — in fact, they’re a key part of optimal health. Naturally, Omega-3 fatty acids that exist in fish are in the form of triglycerides. This means every molecule has 3 omega-3 fatty acids bound to an alcohol base, glycerol. These certainly are not the type of triglycerides that your physician looks at your blood work for, so don’t worry.
It has become necessary to purify fish oil due to all the pollution in the oceans that affects fish. Many fish oil manufacturers purify their fish oils using a process called molecular distillation. However, the fish oil that first came as a triglyceride is then converted into ethyl ester (or EE), a new unnatural molecule. The alcohol base in the triglyceride (TG), glycerol, becomes replaced with a molecule of ethanol.
What is the concern? The alcohol base used is not so significant, right? Actually, there is a world of difference that has caused a great deal of countries to prohibit it being sold! It turns out that EE-based fish oils are vastly more difficult for our body to absorb and digest in comparison to the more natural TG-based fish oil. In fact, research studies demonstrated that TG fish oil possesses a 300% higher absorption rate, implicating EE fish oil as being only 1/3 as effective as TG! But that isn’t where the shortcomings end. When contrasted with Triglyceride (TG) omega-3, ethyl ester (EE) omega-3 are absorbed up to 50 times more slowly! For these reasons, EE fish oil is actually illegal in Canada and the other countries mentioned. However, they are entirely legal for sale in the United States.
This appears to resemble a catch 22. If we desire to avoid the toxic poisons in omega-3 supplements, it appears that we must settle for a hardly-absorbed fish oil that our bodies have a hard time consuming, right? Try once more! EE can actually be converted back into TG, and this is how purified fish oils are sold in Canada. You might be wondering: If TG omega-3 products are so much better than their EE counterparts, why do fish oil producers in the USA only create EE products? Increased cost, of course! Converting EE fish oils into TG adds about 30% more to the cost of producing fish oil, and since US fish oil consumers don’t know the difference, the manufacturers don’t bother with the additional cost.
Furthermore, very few of them actually reveal that their fish oils are ethyl esters, so it’s extremely hard to tell what they contain. Because most fish oil supplements are EE in the United States, you can safely assume that a supplement is EE unless the product indications that it’s a TG. There are two fish oil brands available for purchase in the US that I can recommend because they’re both TG-based and certified by the International Fish Oil Standards program; they are Nordic Naturals and See Yourself Well.
Trigylceride-based omega-3s are far superior to the majority of omega-3 products being sold, according to some pretty convincing research. If you want to be sure that you’re taking the best omega-3 product for your health, make sure yours is a TG-based oil.
Brittany M. Wallace is a health and nutrition expert who has been studying the benefits of omega 3 fish oil for nearly 10 years. You can learn all about the benefits of fish oil supplements by visiting her site.
