Without omega-3 fatty acid supplements, I would be unable to help most of my heart patients, including those with heart failure, and those who have had a heart attack or stroke. Yet a major medical study has so empathetically proven (according to medicine) that omega-3’s do not help heart disease patients, that they call it the fall of omega-3 and made it one of their major game changers for 2012.
How could I have such different findings about omega-3’s than major medical studies? It’s simple. Actually, their study did come to the correct conclusion. They said that eating foods high in omega-3’s (like salmon) is good for you heart (just like grandma used to say). And this is true. But they say that taking fish oil capsules does not help at all. And when you take the fish oil capsule they used, this also true.
Not Just Any Fish Oil
Yet again this study proves what we have always said. Your body can only use supplements made from whole foods—in their raw state, processed minimally, unadulterated, and with all their myriad of natural nutrients intact as only nature provides. In the study, a 1 gram capsule of standard high-processed fish oil was tested against a placebo. And it failed, just as I would have predicted.
For starters, 1 gram is only 1/5 of a teaspoon! Are they kidding? And even this 1 gram of fish oil was highly processed, heated, deodorized, stripped of most of its naturally-occurring vitamins and nutrients, and no longer a whole, natural food complex. Quite frankly, 1 gram of even great oil would not do too much good. But 1 gram of poor quality oil did nothing. There is no mystery—it simply proves my point. Synthesized, fractionated, industrially processed supplements are useless. They just look good and can be made cheaply.
In this case, medical researchers actually had it right—even though their conclusion was wrong. They said that foods rich in omega-3’s are good for your heart, but typical store-brought fish oil is useless. Unfortunately, they do not know about real supplements, real fish oil, and real fish liver oils that are whole foods rich in omega-3’s and, by that definition, good for your heart.
When you take inferior fish, press out the oil, heat it to over 500 degrees, deodorize it, clarify it, remove all the natural vitamins A and D, replace these with cheap synthetic version, bottle it, and charge $50 for it, you are ripping off the public. These products warrant the AP headline that reads, “Fish Oil Not a Magic Heart Pill”.
But what if medical researchers instead took the same subjects and gave each of them 2-4 grams of real fish of cod liver oil. And I mean the real thing, with all its thousands of naturally-occurring nutritional complexes known and unknown, its high omega-3 content, and it’s almost mystical and nature-balanced vitamins A, D, F and K2. The AP head line about the study read: , “Fish Oil Not a Magic Heart Pill”. But don’t hold your breath. This is not going to happen.
It’s All about Processing
I speak frequently about what I call industrial processing. Most industrially-processed supplements have lost their ability to actually help you. This is often the case with fish oil. Just some of the things done to the fish and fish oil include steam cooking with extreme heat; screening and pressing to press out the liquid; separating, which separates the water from fish oil; more heat with evaporators, steam dryers, indirect hot air dryers and direct fired hot air dryers; grinding; adding antioxidants (often synthetic); deodorizing, flavoring; and if toxins are in the oil, further filtering and detoxifying.
If I am looking for omega-3 fatty acids that contain their whole vitamins A, D and F complexes, this is not the kind of oil the kind of oil I would eat. Yet this is what most people because it looks great and lasts a long time on the shelf. It is also most often the kind of oil used for testing on patients.
