Trust Your Omega 3 Senses – Why You Should Pick Odourless Omega 3 Fish Oil
Trust Your Omega 3 Senses – Why You Should Pick Odourless Omega 3 Fish Oil
Human beings are hard-wired with countless automatic safe-guards: we flinch reflexively at heat and cold, and are naturally vertiginous in childhood. But to misquote many an engineer, nature can be fool-proof, but never malice-proof.
Take fresh foods, for instance. Before we invented “best-before” and “display-before”, milk was sold without any hassle. Anyone aged three and over would take a sip and a sniff. If it’s stale or rancid, that’s the end of it. Now you see full-grown adults panicking in front of an open fridge, trying to divine what milk was supposed to taste like, cereal-box in hand.
We don’t trust our senses any more because unscrupulous vendors have trained us not to, just so we will throw out perfectly good food. But occasionally there is a more insidious aim: to make us eat something we would have normally thrown away.
Many health-conscious consumers, especially parents, might feel a bit put off by omega 3 fish oil. The unpalatable taste is bad enough, but frequently there’s a horrible surprise at the end: the fishy burp. So much for the price of health: you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.
This is a misconception deviously cultivated by malicious vendors. Let me explain why.
If you’ve ever smelled rancid fish, you’ll note its resemblance with the fishy burp. But fresh fish, especially if they are packed in cold or sealed packages, seldom really smell of anything. This is because rancidity is a by-product of oxidation. And if your soft-gel gives off the same smell, it means it has been oxidized.
Now, one of the main reasons we supplement our diet with fish and omega 3 products is for their abundant supply of anti-oxidants. Oxygen is a funny thing: our lives depend on it because it’s extraordinarily reactive. But this very property also brings us free radicals, which are the chemical equivalent of philandering bachelors.
They go around interacting with anything they can lay their hands upon, never settling down and thus ruin the delicate balance in healthy cells in the process. In this way free radicals contribute a lot to natural aging.
It’s too drastic to stop breathing in order to stop aging, so the next best thing is to combat free radicals by means of anti-oxidants. But if your fish oils are completely oxidized during production and transportation, they bring you very little benefits. Indeed, the capsule would then become a fertile breeding ground for bacteria.
So the next time you buy these capsules, do a simple test and pop one open. Ideally it should remind you of an ocean in the same way a freshly opened oyster does, instead of a fish market gutter in the tropics.
Be very cautious if you catch a whiff of lime or some herbal fragrance: you don’t need condiments for your omega 3 fish oil, so someone’s trying to cover up something. Check the Certificate of Analysis on the bottle or the website: both toxins and oxidation levels should be as low as possible.
