Something fishy

Pumped into foods from yogurt to pizza, omega-3 fatty acids, made from fish, are being hyped as an elixir for heart disease and depression.

Editor's note: This is the second entry in the new Salon series "Eat & Drink." To read last week's feature, click here.

By Catherine Price

Read more: Nutrition, Cooking, Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel

Oct. 17, 2006 | I can't say I've ever eaten yogurt fortified with microencapsulated fish fat before, but hell, there's a first time for everything. I'm in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and Ian Lucas, executive vice president of global marketing at a marine research company called Ocean Nutrition, has just handed me a spoon. The yogurt sitting between us is flecked with peach, but it also contains a surprise: powdered oil from smushed anchovies, encapsulated in pork gelatin. You might say it's surf and turf in a cup. It's also just one of a slew of newly developed food products that have been fortified with omega-3 fatty acids.

With the yogurt still in front of me, Lucas pours a large, cold glass of fish-oil fortified milk as I rip open a bag of omega-3 tortilla wraps -- all products that contain what's referred to in industry circles as designer lipids. Food technologists working the world over have been busy figuring out how to shrink fish oil capsules to microscopic size and bake them into bagels. Entire companies have devoted themselves to breeding algae laden with omega-3, which can be dried into flakes and used as animal feed, or sprayed as powder and used in food products. There are already omega-3-fortified eggs and infant formulas on the market (not to mention margarine, gummy candies, orange juice, fruit chews, nutrition bars, chocolate, bread, pizza crust and, yes, yogurt) -- and eventually there will be omega-3-fortified cake. There will be cookies. There will be omega-3 ice creams and cheeses. Research has even begun on omega-3 pâté.

Scientists started investigating the nutritional benefits of omega-3 fatty acids from fish flesh in the early 1970s, when H.O. Bang and J. Dyerberg trekked to Greenland to study the link between the Inuits' high consumption of fish and low rates of coronary heart disease. Since then, several trials have suggested that omega-3 fatty acids may, among other things, reduce the risks of cardiovascular disease, cardiac arrhythmias, Alzheimer's and schizophrenia; alleviate symptoms of depression and rheumatoid arthritis; improve neonatal brain and eye development and prevent premature births -- even reduce people's homicidal tendencies and make puppies easier to train. Though their precise effects on the body are still controversial, several supposed benefits have enough research behind them (preventing cardiovascular disease and depression, for example, or improving neonatal health) that omega-3s are emerging as a potential wonder fat -- especially for food companies, who are rushing to pack omega-3s into as many edibles as possible.

Companies may be dreaming big, but not every fish oil scheme has been a success. In fact, Ocean Nutrition -- which supplies about 50 percent of the fish oil for America's flourishing supplement market -- has leapt ahead of its competition by patenting a method of microencapsulating fish oil, then spray-drying it into a powder that can be added to food. If that doesn't sound appetizing, consider the alternative: When omega-3 fatty acids are exposed to air, they oxidize, which can make whatever they have been added to smell and taste like rotting fish. No one wants this to happen, least of all Lucas. It took Ocean Nutrition more than seven years and $50 million to figure out how to manufacture its powdered oil, a process that is patented and closely guarded. Now, the 47-year-old Ontario native dreams of turning the supplement -- called "Meg-3" and represented by a smiling fish mascot -- into a branded ingredient that will one day be as familiar as NutraSweet.

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The disappearance of omega-3s from the American diet, their discovery as critical nutrients, and, now, their surge back into the food supply is a prototypical example of the modern food industry in action: Identify a nutrient that food processing has removed from our diet, build hype around it, and make consumers pay to get it back. The irony is, we didn't always need supplements or fortified food to get our omega-3s. Some omega-3s -- several of which are considered to be "essential" fatty acids (EFAs) since the human body needs them but cannot produce them -- naturally occur in canola, soybean and flaxseed oils, green plants like algae, the eggs of grass-fed chickens, and the flesh of fatty fish. Back when Americans' diets were closer to hunter-gatherers' -- relying mainly on lean meat, fish, green leafy vegetables, fruits, nuts, berries and honey -- we got enough omega-3s from our food alone. But when the Agricultural Revolution introduced cultivated crops, and we began eating farm-raised, corn-fed animals and products made from vegetable oils like corn, soybean, safflower, cottonseed and sunflower, the amount of naturally occurring omega-3s in our diets dropped drastically. At the same time, we dramatically increased our consumption of another, less desirable, fatty acid: omega-6.

Thanks to the promotion of oils like corn and soybean as "heart healthy" in the mid-20th century (not to mention subsidies for them), Americans' consumption of vegetable oils has increased enormously over the past 100 years. Lard and butter have been demonized; margarine and Pam have basked under greasy halos. In one telling example, in 1990 McDonald's boasted of its switch from cooking its fries in beef tallow to using vegetable oil and in 2002 announced plans to prepare all American French fries in a blend of corn and soybean oil, thus upping the omega-6 content of each of its billions served.

Whereas the ideal ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids should hover around the Paleolithic range of about 4:1 to 1:1, nutritionists estimate that the average American's diet ratio now falls closer to 20:1. And according to these experts, the effects of this imbalance on the body are potentially disastrous: One recent study suggested that omega-6 quickened the growth of cancerous human prostate tumors, and omega-3 specialists like Artemis Simopoulos, M.D., president of the Center for Genetics, Nutrition and Health, and the coauthor of "The Omega Diet," speculate that the imbalance might even play a role in our increasing rates of heart disease, insulin resistance, allergies, autoimmune diseases, depression and suicide.

Next page: The pills can cause fishy after-burps, a side effect known in the business as "burp-back