Fish Oil Pills: Another Scam?

Is the Fish Oil Industry “Fishy?”

Would you take a salmon filet out of your freezer, put it on the counter to thaw, and come back two years later to eat it?

That’s what you are doing when you take the fish-oil supplements that most functional medicine doctors prescribe.

The product has been in the supply chain for a very long time. Before the ingredients were put together, the raw materials themselves may have sat in the supply line for months or a year.

The manufacturer just has to put them in the final product by the day before they expire. Then their own “clock” on their expiration date begins. The expiration dates aren’t based on anything particularly scientific.

(I know this from making my own products for many years and navigating the rules. Because I absolutely refuse to sell people products that have no possibility of helping them, the above is why we are often sold out of our 15-strain probiotic, prebiotic and digestive enzyme blend, PreZymePro. We make it in small batches, because I’ve twice tested 20 competitor products and found 80-90% of them with no living probiotics. We encourage the users of our product to test it, or any other probiotic, for whether it “cultures” 1/4 cup of room-temperature milk, in 20 minutes.)

But nothing goes bad faster than OILS.

One of my wakeup calls about “fish oil” was when I went to Expo West, one of the 10 biggest trade shows in the world, where I have gone many times, to see what’s new in the world of “healthy food” and products.

There is an entire aisle at that expo, every year, of companies who sell the deodorizing / masking chemicals to the fish-oil companies.

To cover up the taste of rancidity, so that you don’t burp and taste it, and perhaps quit buying it.

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Two major meta-analyses of the research on fish oil supplements conclude that there is no benefit to cardiovascular health. (And may, in fact, increase the risk of prostate cancer.)

A 2012 meta analysis evaluated 1,007 studies and came to this conclusion:

Supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids did not reduce the risk of overall cardiovascular events, all-cause mortality, sudden cardiac death, myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure, or transient ischemic attack and stroke.

This meta-study has been out there for 9 years, and your FMD is still selling it to you? Why? We’ll get to that in a second (though the answer is rather obvious).

Then there’s the fact that the fish oil is actually just a lousy throwaway product that originated from some guys around a boardroom table figuring out how to make the operation more profitable!

It’s very similar to how whey protein came to market (a throwaway product of dairy manufacturing, to squeeze out higher profits)--

–the fish-oil industry came to be, from the fish industry finding another product to earn higher profits. The fish oil you’re taking is likely nothing better than an industrial byproduct of processing fish.

If you think that someone caught a salmon and squeezed the oil out of it, and threw the rest away–that’s not what that product is, at all.

It has lots of ingredients, and you wouldn’t recognize and couldn’t pronounce some of them, and it was a waste product before it became a pill your functional-medicine practitioner told you to take, and makes bank on.

But functional medicine doctors sell it, despite the jury being “in” for many years–because “recurring revenue” is the most powerful income stream for them. Where you keep coming back to buy more every two months.

Verify this by asking your FMD what he knows about the way that fish oil is extracted and what else is in it, and how it was manufactured. Heck, ask your doctor what the meta-analyses say about fish oil!

Don’t take my word for this, find out for yourself, preferably face to face:

Your doctor is unlikely to know anything meaningful about the product he puts his labels on. (Or he just buys bottles of it wholesale, and sells it to you retail.)

Once you’ve read this article, you’ll have intelligent questions to ask.

The supplement industry has been very successful at creating extensive product lines where they print your doctor’s label, put it on the bottle for him, and ship to him.

Many companies will let small solo practices order 6 bottles at a time.

He is generally not investigating anything about the product, besides the cost, and what the marketing department tells him.

So, listen to whatever he says to you, about the product, and see if it sounds like legitimate information, or “marketing-speak.”

I don’t have a doctor, as I don’t have health issues requiring medical intervention and am not particularly interested in their methods of “help.”

But I do have a nurse practitioner who runs my hormone labs every year.

She sells Vitamin D and fish oil–and fish oil is prescribed to virtually everyone.

If you set a high threshold for what you need, in “essential fatty acids,” then everyone’s deficient, right?

Think about the 100% to 200% markup a practitioner gets, selling supplements. She might sell you 6 bottles of it, in a year–year after year.

Now compare that to the revenue of your $200 annual visit with her–which is highly limited, to trading time for dollars.

You don’t have to have a math degree, to know that selling supplements for $50 that you bought for $20, is highly lucrative. Far more so than your 30-minute visit with her once a year.

(You realize a bunch of FMD’s and a bunch of health/wellness colleagues will hate me for this article, right? One canceled me years ago, and called me to demand that I “support the supplement industry.”

I was a bridesmaid at her wedding, and she never talked to me again, after my first article on fish oil. And “protein isolates” in a bag–she didn’t like that either.)

I have been unable to get my own practitioner to show any interest in the research on “Vitamin D,” which I also wrote about recently.

(Another scam that probably makes your FMD several thousand dollars a month, and it was a lot of work for her as well. She had to talk each patient into their “need” for it, for many years, to achieve that recurring revenue stream.)

That’s my simple explanation for why doctors sell them, despite their zero benefit to heart health, which is what they sold us on, in the first place.

So now massive waterways’ ecosystems have been decimated, from the billion-dollar fish-oil industry, but heart disease hasn’t decreased at all. It has only increased.

You can observe the trends yourself. On a basic logic level, you can ask around, do some web searching, and see that we now have 20 to 30 years of observation of the impact of mass fish-oil pill consumption by the public–

–with no improvement in cardiovascular health, to show for it.

Before I figured this racket out, many years ago, I took fish oil and my essential fatty acids biomarker went DOWN, the following year, after taking fish oil.

(It never really made sense to me, to take an oil which I knew to go rancid quickly, so I can’t say I was too zealous about taking it regularly, but I took it sometimes.)

I had perfect biomarkers for cardiovascular health, and always have–so why am I prescribed fish-oil pills by every practitioner I’ve gone to?

(Including the clinic in Switzerland I used to run retreats at, for 10 years. If you don’t want rancid fish oil, they’ll talk you into some high-EFA rancid plant-based supplement.)

There’s also the fact that people love the idea that taking pills will make them healthy. People WANT to do the easiest thing, as the fast track to health.

It’s exponentially harder to get people to give up toxic addictions, change their diet, and exercise every day.

Which are the cornerstones of what leads to good health, proven by volumes of research.

One study here and there can be manipulated and curated, to show you some marginal benefit to your health, of taking fish oil.

But what a meta analysis is–is researchers collecting hundreds or thousands of studies on the same topic, and evaluating them. This is a much more powerful tool in assessing whether what you’re taking has any real value.

And literally thousands of studies have been done on fish oil. So it’s the perfect kind of topic to perform meta analyses on.

It’s a valuable tool for any healthcare practitioner’s business, to show a “deficiency” in lab results–and almost all patients want to “take something” to address the deficiency.

Those who can afford it will leave a first visit with an FMD with $1,500 in Hopium pills. Fake sunshine pills, rancid fish oil, and some synthetic isolated single “nutrients” they’re told they are deficient in. The more the better!

Can’t you just feel yourself getting well, the more pills you take? Oh, what’s that you say? You don’t? You took the whole $1,500 of Hopium, and you still have the health issues?

Hm, maybe we revisit the approach, then.

I’m not saying no supplements are useful. I’m pointing out that many of them don’t live up to the claims, and fish oil and “Vitamin D” might be the top two contenders for #1 among the “fishy” supplements.

There really is no substitute for eating a whole-foods, mostly plant-based diet. If you want to know more about how to make it easy, leaving out all the bunny trails and focusing on just what moves the needle…

…you can watch my free videos on the 12 Steps I took in my own transition off the Standard American Diet, to a whole-food plant-based (WFPB) diet half my life ago.

I enjoy my food now every bit as much as I did when my lunch every day, at the cafeteria of the company where I worked, was a Special Burger and fries. With extra “fry sauce” (a Utah specialty) and a Diet Coke.

I didn’t know any better, at the time, and I just started acclimating to life with 21 illnesses. That year of not exercising, and eating nothing but crap, started a long slide into years of illness.

I’ve certainly tried lots of supplements, but what made the BIG difference for me were (a) bringing my toxic load down, by detoxing, and (b) changing to a whole-foods, plant-based diet.

If you think you need more essential fatty acids, consider adding a scoop of organic, sprouted flaxseed to your smoothie. It has a delicious, nutty flavor, and we’ve tested it for rancidity two years later, with no rancidity. (If it’s rancid, you’ll taste it!)

Or, for even more diversity and nutrition, organic sprouted broccoli, chia, and flax seeds, in TriOmega.

Not only do I still love my food just as much, but I’ve enjoyed over a quarter of a century without symptoms, drugs, or disease states. I highly recommend it.

Thank you for your support of this blog, and our mission to educate you about the clear and effective path back to good health. Sometimes we have links in our content that benefit us.

Resources:

A deeper dive I published in 2019, into the toxic chemicals in fish oil supplements, and more about what the studies show about no benefit to cardiovascular health, and possible cancer risk:

https://greensmoothiegirl.com/is-fish-oil-good/

Meta analyses and research showing the lack of efficacy of fish oil against cardiovascular disease:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22493407/

https://www.cochrane.org/news/new-cochrane-health-evidence-challenges-belief-omega-3-supplements-reduce-risk-heart-disease

https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/12/health/salmon-cancer-time/index.html