Tests find many popular omega 3 supplements are rancid

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-09-popular-omega-supplements-rancid.html

by clumsysmurf • 3 years ago

97 82 3 years ago

medicalxpress.com

s0rce• 3 years ago

Olive oil is also frequently rancid. I frequently find packaged nuts and trail mix routinely rancid.

zactato• 3 years ago

Sesame oil is the worst. It has a shelf-life of a week or two.

adasdasdas• 3 years ago

What kind of sesame oil are you getting...

CreepGin• 3 years ago

I think unopened sesame oil can have years of shelf-life. I certainly never had a problem with the smell and we use sesame oil quite a bit in our household.

tomjakubowski• 3 years ago

I've been using the same bottle of toasted sesame oil for at least two years now with no ill effects

chriskanan• 3 years ago

Refrigerate it and the shelf life after opening increases greatly.

specialist2• 3 years ago

I now taste test most everything.

One challenge is not knowing how something should taste.

I once got harvest fresh olive oil (as a gift). Wow! Total game changer.

~TLDR~ FYI: The good stuff should make you cough a little bit after you swallow it.

reciprocity• 3 years ago

Three sentences with a "tl;dr" at the end?

mkoubaa2• 3 years ago

If you're in the US, I recommend the terra delyssa brand for olive oil (many grocery stores carry it)

colechristensen• 3 years ago

I’d rather recommended only buying bottles of olive oil with printed harvest dates on the bottle within the last year. It’s absurd that stores are selling two year old oil. There’s a real problem with grocery stores having too many options for a single product and then most of the product on the shelves is unacceptably old.

See also: coffee.

We could have better food with fewer preservatives and less processing if the supply chain would pay attention to this problem.

bjoli• 3 years ago

Rapeseed oil is what I use. It can be kept in the fridge, and from what I manage to read online there are no real benefits of olive oil over it except maybe taste and vitamin e content, and people claiming otherwise seem to never really be able to back up their claims.

It works just as well except when you want the taste of olive oil. I find it superior when I stir fry things since the smoke point is higher.

tyleo5• 3 years ago

I hate that the actual paper is behind a huge ($100+) paywall and the article doesn’t call out any brands. I take an Omega 3 supplement and want to know if mine is rancid :p

babyshake• 3 years ago

Same here. Assuming this is the case for fish oil capsules, even though you don't really taste the supplement itself?

tyleo5• 3 years ago

The article specifically says < 15% rate of rancidity for pills which looks like it includes capsules since the only other category they call out is flavored supplements.

thelastparadise• 3 years ago

It probably is.

tyleo5• 3 years ago

I use unflavored pills. The article says those are rancid at a rate of < 15% so probably not.

brutusborn2• 3 years ago

I don’t think they’d want to name and shame as that attracts litigation.

EpiMath• 3 years ago

$62 to access the paper

DoreenMichele3• 3 years ago

The researchers found a total of 45% of flavored and unflavored supplements tested positive for rancidity, with 32% of flavored supplements testing positive and 13% of unflavored pills.

The above math looks wonky to me but fits with the TLDR at the end of the piece:

Both Frame and Hands suggest exercising caution with flavored fish oil supplements at this point due to the uncertainty of how the flavoring may affect their freshness and, thus, any potential health benefits.

tyleo5• 3 years ago

I feel like this is an example of reporting on a paper misunderstanding some of the details. Specifically that probabilities can’t simply be added together.

justinclift• 3 years ago

May not have been a human writing it. :/

xwdv3• 3 years ago

It’s probably best to take your omega 3 in liquid form rather than capsules.

riffic2• 3 years ago

best is from dietary sources.

xwdv3• 3 years ago

You have any idea how much salmon you’d have to eat? Supplements are more concentrated.

kleton4• 3 years ago

Dietary sources are not vacuum-distilled for removal of heavy metals and microplastics.

kleton4• 3 years ago

Wouldn't the capsule provide an additional barrier to oxygen, ceteris paribus?

FriedPickles• 3 years ago

Maybe. But with the liquid form, you can smell and taste when it's rancid. You could take a whole bottleful of capsules and have no idea they've gone bad.

ramesh31• 3 years ago

Supplements are easily the biggest single scam against consumers in existence. Just walked out of a CVS where I saw a large bottle of Vitamin C pills for $42. That's easily a 10,000% markup or more on the raw ascorbic acid in those pills. Not to even mention the lack of health benefits.

tyleo5• 3 years ago

I don’t know. I buy caffeine pills, whey powder, and a few other supplements. They are certainly marked up but simultaneously the nest efficient way to get caffeine, protein, etc per dollar.

teaearlgraycold• 3 years ago

Gotta have my creatine

fragmede• 3 years ago

You think that's bad, just wait till you hear about bottled water! Or maybe it's a convenience thing and that's worth something to some people.

TylerE2• 3 years ago

Do people really not get that you’re paying for the shipping, not the water?

ryanklee• 3 years ago

Depends on the supplement.

mmh0000• 3 years ago

"Just walked out of a CVS"

Well, there's your problem. CVS and Walgreens are the two best places to go if you don't care about your money. Otherwise, at a grocer, Walmart, or Amazon, a bottle of a decent brand of VitC can be had for $7.5.

Overtonwindow2• 3 years ago

It's like a lot of things: A lot of dietary supplements are scams, but a lot of them are legitimate. The core issue for people who take dietary supplements is that a) they probably don't need it, b) they may be taking too much, and c) unless they are getting a mineral and metabolic panel, etc. they have no idea if they even need the supplement.

IMO before taking any supplements one should get a panel done to see if you even need it.

kleton4• 3 years ago

Abstract doesn't mention anything about tocopherols (vitamin e) that is frequently added to these oils as an antioxidant. Would these be expected to be effective at scavenging oxygen from the capsules?

terr-dav• 3 years ago

The researchers found a total of 45% of flavored and unflavored supplements tested positive for rancidity, with 32% of flavored supplements testing positive and 13% of unflavored pills.

They added percentages of two separate groups to get the total rate of rancidity. Seems like the overall rate of rancidness is roughly 1/4, not 45%. Makes me think either 1) this was not written by a human or 2) the human who wrote this made a pretty egregious error.

Overall takeaway is: don't buy flavored omega-3 supplements.

dsugarman• 3 years ago

From the actual paper, it looks like what they did was worse than just adding the two and the article is nonsensical

Overall, our results revealed that 68% (23/34) of flavored and 13% (5/38) unflavored consumer Ω3 supplements exceeded the TOTOX upper limit set by the Global Organization for EPA and DHA (GOED) voluntary monograph standard of ≤ 26, with 65% (22/34) flavored supplements and 32% (12/38) unflavored supplements failing the PV upper limit of ≤ 5 and 62% (21/34) flavored supplements exceeding the p-AV upper limit of ≤ 20.

MaintenanceMode• 3 years ago

That’s so gross. Ick. Great finding. I’ve actually wondered about this in the past.

caiomassan2• 3 years ago

on the peter attia podcast, rhonda patrick said omega 3 should be on the fridge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkp0DRUQ33g

specialist2• 3 years ago

Upvoted. I've been doing this. Glad to be validated.

(Also, Dr Patrick is the best.)

somedude895• 3 years ago

I keep them in the freezer and haven't had a fish oil burp since.

mckirk• 3 years ago

If you are in the EU, I can wholeheartedly recommend omega3zone[1]. Their fish oil actually tastes pretty nice and absolutely not like fish, keeps in the fridge for quite a while and has insane concentrations of the 'good stuff' (EPA and DHA in triglyceride-form). It is admittedly expensive (though you can dose it way lower than they recommend, given how concentrated it is), but to me it's worth it.

[1] https://omega3zone.de/products/omega-3-fischol-500ml

ClassyJacket• 3 years ago

Worth it why? What does it do?

elhudy• 3 years ago

Does anyone here have access to the list of rancid brands and can they post it?

tourmalinetaco• 3 years ago

It’s majority flavored are rancid, so just go unflavored and you have an 87% chance of being fine.

lacrimacida• 3 years ago

Just curious. Are the rancid ones bad for ones health or ineffective in any way?

pengaru• 3 years ago

Just eat canned sardines in water, drink the juice. It's an excellent source of omega-3s and protein.

colordrops• 3 years ago

Sardines can have a lot of arsenic. Also, for those of us that are vegan, they are not an option.

grooverider• 3 years ago

Note, even the "good" brand can go rancid if you don't take care of your stash. I highly recommend cutting one open for a smell test if you're unsure. Also, if you're getting gross burps, your batch may be bad.

I've used Aqua Omega (unaffiliated) with great success for years.

Overtonwindow2• 3 years ago

Dietary supplements in America are very loosely regulated. The law that governs this is the Dietary Health Supplements Act. Tl;dr DSHEA classified dietary supplements as a food or food product which the FDA classifies as "generally recognized as safe." (GRAS)

It also said that so long as a manufacturer is using a vitamin, mineral, or dietary substance that was available before 1994 then are ok to manufacturer and it would be considered safe (GRAS.)

There are additional requirements about manufacturing processes available before and after that date but that is the gist.

The problem with this law is that supplements are not required to undergo any kind of testing or validation. If a dietary supplement causes a problem, the FDA does not really have the authority to order a recall. Instead it has to depend on the Federal Trade Commission, which can order a recall and levy sanctions due to mislabeling.

Anyone can manufacture and sell a dietary supplements and sell them to anyone, there are no age restrictions. It's something that IMO needs greater oversight.

DSHEA: https://ods.od.nih.gov/About/DSHEA_Wording.aspx

General Recognized as Safe: https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/What-are-Generally-Recognized...

FTC and FDA: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/speeches/ftc-dietary-su...

Congressional Research Service, 2021: "Regulation of Dietary Supplements" https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R43062.pdf

curious_soul• 3 years ago

Slightly off-topic, but does anyone here notice a positive difference from omega 3 supplementation?

TjZkxkxeky• 3 years ago

I haven't died of cardiovascular disease this week!

mgarfias3• 3 years ago

So I was prescribed vascepa to lower my triglycerides. They’re now low enough that I was taken off them.

But I’ve also significantly cut down on the calories I’ve been eating.

oarfish• 3 years ago

Another reason to avoid random supplements. Most people don't benefit from Omega supplementation. Add the risk of contamination and increased chance of afib ... the supplement industry really has successfully brainwashed the public into ingesting all kinds of substances without clinically validates effect.

mgarfias3• 3 years ago

What is this risk of afib you talk about?