Plaque is the stuff of coronary heart disease. It is CONTROLLABLE, it is STOPPABLE, it is REVERSIBLE.
But you must be equipped with the right information on diet, nutritional supplements, and hopefully the avoidance of medication.
This is the blog that accompanies the 
Ultra-purified, pharmaceutical grade, molecularly distilled. Over-the-counter vs. prescription. Gelcap, liquid, emulsion.
There’s a mind-boggling variety of choices in fish oil today. A visit to any health food store, or any “big box” store for that matter, will yield at least several, if not dozens, of choices, all with varying and often extravagant claims of purity and potency.
So what’s the real story?
Given the analyses conducted over the years, along with my experience with dozens of different preparations, I believe that several conclusions can be reached about fish oil:
Fish oil is free of contamination with mercury, dioxin, PCBs, or furans. To my knowledge, only one fish oil preparation has been found to have a slight excess of PCBs. (This is different from cod liver oil that has been found by one source to have a slight excess of PCBs.)
Oxidative breakdown products differ among the various brands. Consumer Lab (http://www.consumerlab.org/), for instance, has found that several widely available brands of fish oil contained excessive oxidative breakdown products (TOTOX). You can perform you own simple test of oxidative breakdown products: Sniff it. Your fish oil should pass the “sniff test.” High quality fish oil should smell non-fishy to lightly fishy. Rancid fish oil with excessive quantities of oxidative breakdown products will smell nasty fishy.
FDA approval does not necessarily mean greater potency, purity, or effectiveness. It just means that somebody assembled the hundreds of millions of dollars to obtain FDA approval, followed by lots of marketing savvy to squash the competition.
This means that there are a number of excellent fish oil products available. My favorites are the liquid fish oils from Pharmax, Nordic Naturals, and Barleans. Capsules from Carlson, PharmaNutrients, and Fisol have also performed consistently. The “big box” capsules from Sam’s Club and Costco have also performed well and are wonderfully affordable.
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In declaring EPA and DHA to be safe, the FDA neglected to evaluate their antithyroid, immunosuppressive, lipid peroxidative (Song et al., 2000), light sensitizing, and antimitochondrial effects, their depression of glucose oxidation (Delarue et al., 2003), and their contribution to metastatic cancer (Klieveri, et al., 2000), lipofuscinosis and liver damage, among other problems.
Dr. Davis,
Should Vitamin D gelcaps have an odor? I've been taking a generic drugstore brand and they always have an unpleasant smell, but I assumed they were supposed to.
Thanks!
@arnoud – phospholipid-bound Omega-3 appear to get incorporated into membranes 1.5 to 2X more than triglyceride or ethyl ester Omega-3. But Neptune researchers have not explained why krill oil reduces LDL more than Lovaza.
@Geoffrey Levens – just about every food product has small amounts of PCBs. Yes, fish oil too. Cod and Shark liver oils typically have much higher levels. More on fish oil and PCBs here.
Retroconversion of DHA to EPA is not very efficient. Roughly 10% of DHA gets converted to EPA. EPA to DHA far less efficient. Several metabolic factors affect these conversions. Bruce Holub at Univ Guelph has done great work on this. Check out PMID: 9507234 and 9076673.
@John – Several brands have 700 – 900 mg Omega-3 per pill, like Lovaza.
A few have 20-30% more Omega-3 than Lovaza:
Minami Nutrition CardiO3
OmegaVia
Ocean Blue Professional
RenewLife come to mind.
These all have over 1000 mg Omega-3 per pill.
Next-gen fish oil (pipeline) drugs like Epanova and AMR101 are mostly EPA – so worth looking into high EPA OTC formulas for a fraction of the price.
$2000 per month doesn't seem so bad. For the three of us, two adults and one 18yr old, we pay $2600 per month. But my wife had cancer twice: Hodgkins Lymphoma 24 years ago and breast cancer six years ago. Before doing anything that might be dangerous, I remind myself of the $1500 deductable.
kevin
dr. davis
i did some research and to answer my own question on fish oil…
for those without heart disease (like me) 1 gram of fish oil is sufficient and should be taken with 4 grams of saturated fat otherwise fish oil slips through the intestines undigested. 4 grams of saturated fat is used for making the liver start bile production.
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original question
dr. davis
i can't smell anything rancid in my distilled fish oil with orange flavour but its so weird its too heavy barely digests and stays as if stuck in the chest. feels horrible.
not sure what to make of it.
It is good; however the oil came from the liver. It can contain too much Vitamin A and it could be dangerous if u overdose. I suggest sticking with eating a variety of fish.
ah great info…….i live in the UK and I usually take different supplements, plz cud u tell me what should i look for while buying the fish oil….tnx in advance