The “Return” of Cod Liver Oil: But Is It Safe?
Rosalind Michahelles, March, 2007
Some of us are old enough to remember cod liver oil, to remember it floating to the top of the orange juice and then refusing to drink it at breakfast. But with the ascendancy of Dr. Benjamin Spock, starting in the ate 50’s, U.S. mothers no longer insisted their children gag down the noxious tasting dietary supplement. Dr. Spock felt that vaccinations made cod liver oil unnecessary (Sullivan, p.1). Children were relieved. Parents probably felt in that era of growing prosperity that such supplements were no longer necessary. After all, the Depression and the War were over.
Sadly, public health in the U.S. fifty years later has somehow gone amiss. Some researchers, who are busy trying to understand how obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are increasing despite remarkable achievements in medical technology, are touting fish oil, including cod liver oil, as a useful preventive measure. (Sears, pp.76-77) These oils abound in omega-3 fatty acids, essential to our diets as we do no produce them ourselves. Their importance derives from their helping to build the precursors for antiinflammation – another way of saying the healing process – which is step two in the immune response, step one being the defense when phagocytes (Harvard health Publication,p.8) attack the intruding virus, fungus, bacterium, or parasite. The typical U.S. diet has changed in the last century from one that balanced two essential fatty acids, omega-3 and omega-6, pretty evenly to one where omega-6 dominates by a factor of twenty or thirty-fold (Weil, p.4), because omega-6 comes from commonly used vegetable oil like soy, sunflower, safflower, and corn. Hence the effort to reintroduce sources of omega-3, because this imbalance might be contributing to the unfortunate changes in public health mentioned above.
But the public reads daily about contaminated seas, lakes, rivers, and oceans. Is fish oil safe? What about mercury, dioxins, PCBs and flame retardants? Is it worth balancing the omega-3s at the cost of some vaguely apprehended toxic poisoning? It is only somewhat reassuring that the federal government publishes contamination rates in classes of fish. (http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/admehg3.html) Other sources reassure the consumer that standards are very high for the testing of fish oil that is imported to the U.S. (Sullivan, Planck). Barry Sears offers a home test: put a small sample of your oil in the freezer for five hours, then pierce it with a toothpick. If unsuccessful, the oil is not pure. If successful, it’s OK, as fish oil should not freeze at that temperature, normally around -15 degreed Fahrenheit. He also recommends a visit to the website of the University of Guelph in Canada, the International Fish Oil Site (http://www.nutrasource.ca/ifos_new/index.cfm), which regularly checks and rates fish oils for purity.
A final note: clever manufacturers have found ways to flavor cod liver oil so consumers can opt for the cheaper bottle, not the capsules.
Bibliography1. Sears, Barry. The Anti-Inflammation Zone. Regan Books/Harper Collins,2005.2. Sullivan, Krispin, “Cod Liver Oil: The Number One Superfood,”http://www.westonaprice.org/basicnutrition/codliveroil.html, Posted 30June, 2002.3. “The Truth about Your Immune System: What you Need to Know,”Prepared by the editors of Harvard Health Publications in consultation withMichael Starnbach, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Microbiology andMolecular Genetics, Harvard Medical School, 2004.4. Weil,Andrew. “How Omega-3s Promote Mental Health” Dr. Andrew
Weil’s Self Healing, pp.4-5. October, 2006.
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