Fish Don’t Make Fish Oils!

By Dr. Udo Erasmus

That’s right. Fish don’t make fish oils. How do we know that?

When salmon farming began in North America, farmers discovered that without fish oil in their diet, farmed salmon did not contain salmon oil in their tissues. They also found out that salmon could not turn vegetable, seed, and nut oils into fish oils. Research shows that carnivorous fish (75% of the fish we eat) including salmon cannot convert ALA into EPA and DHA. Plant-eating (vegetarian) fish are able do this conversion.

If salmon don’t make salmon oil, who does?

They get their ‘fish oil’ from the foods they eat. When we trace these supplement oils back to their origin, we find that the oils we call ‘fish oils’ are actually made by plants at the bottom of the food chain. One-celled red-brown algae make fish oils. Fish oils are actually plant-based products.

Something eats these red-brown algae. Something eats what ate the algae. Something else eats that. Little fish eat that. Big fish eat little fish. Whales and seals eat big fish. Polar bears eat seals. We nibble on all parts of the food chain. And that is how supplement oils, made by lowly, humble, one-celled plants, find their way into all parts of the entire food chain.

In the ocean, red-brown algae only contain about 4% of their weight as supplement omega 3s: DHA, DPA, and EPA. We cannot press oil out of these microscopically small plants, simply because there’s not enough oil in them to squeeze. There would have to be at least 15% oil to make squeezing possible.

What to do?
Tanks are a controlled environment that is free of PCBs, dioxins, and pesticides. That solves one of the major objections to using fish oils. We can super-feed these algae so that they contain 50% oil. We can then remove the oil without doing damage to it, which gets us unrefined supplement oil.

That solves the second objection to using fish oils. We can grow red-brown algae in tanks. We do not deplete fish stocks. Our method is sustainable.
If we need more, we just build more tanks to grow them in. This solves the third (sustainability) objection to using fish oils.
This is the basis for Udo’s products – to provide quality nutrition in harmony with nature!

• Udo’s Oil 3 6 9 Blend is the foundation oil.
• Udo’s Oil DHA 3 6 9 Blend is a combination of foundation and supplement oils.

Our standards for foundation oil include:

• Made with health (undamaged) rather than shelf life (damaged) in mind.
• Made from organically grown seeds free of pesticides and industrial toxins.
• No harsh chemicals and high heat are used, preventing damage to the sensitive molecules.
• Rich in omega 3s, which are highly sensitive and too low in most people’s food supply and intake.
• Omega 3 and 6, both essential, are in the most effective balance.
• Both omega 3 and omega 6 essential foundation oils are made under protection from light, oxygen, and heat to keep them intact, in their natural state, and undamaged.
• Packaged in glass, because plastic can leach into oils even more rapidly than into water.

Our standards for supplement oil include:

• The algal oils we use are of the same high standards that we set for foundation oils.
• Both foundation and supplement oils are free of pesticides, PCBs, and dioxins.
• We use supplement oils that are undamaged by processing.