Back at Ocean Nutrition, though, things look a little less dire. I've just returned from the company's purification plant in Mulgrave, Nova Scotia, where I donned lab coat, hairnet, glasses, hardhat and galoshes and took a tour through the facility. To give a sense of the scale of their operation, Lucas showed me a three-story tank of oil left over from the purification process. Slightly yellow, the oil in the tank was so clear that I could see all the way to the bottom. While remarkably unsmelly, what odor it did have resembled a mixture of fish skin and varnish.
Upon my return to Ocean Nutrition's Halifax headquarters, I meet Jaroslav Kralovec, the company's director of chemistry. Kralovec helped develop the technology behind Meg-3, and like everyone else I spoke to about the techniques behind fish oil microencapsulation, he's tight-lipped about specifics. Basically, it involves creating a white, milkshake-like mixture of fish oil, pork gelatin (for kosher products they use fish) and a salmagundi of unidentified additives, which is then spray-dried to create tiny gelatin balls with even tinier balls of fish oil inside. Viewed under a microscope, each capsule looks like the frothy interior of a malted milk candy.
Ideally, Kralovec tells me, one wants to make capsules that are perfectly round, since spheres have the most "structural integrity." That integrity's important because if those capsules break, as can happen when you bake or process products that have a single shell around their fish oil rather than Ocean Nutrition's double shell, the leaking oil can make the food taste like fish. "You have to treat oil gently," Kralovec explains, smiling. "If you don't, it will punish you." Indeed, once oxidized, omega-3s can be smelled at several parts per billion.
To understand why any sane person would subject himself to punishment by fish oil requires knowing a bit about what fats can do in the body. First of all, both omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids are polyunsaturated -- which in simplified science lingo means that their chains of carbon atoms have more than one double bond in them. That structural difference between the two is also the reason for their names: omega-3s' first double bond occurs three steps up from the bottom of their chain, while omega-6s' first double bond is, you guessed it, six steps up.
No one -- not even Kralovec -- understands exactly why the placement of the first double bond has such a profound effect on the way fatty acids work in the body. What we do know is that omega-3s and omega-6s make cellular membranes more liquid -- which helps the membranes do their jobs better. They also produce hormone-like substances called eicosanoids that affect everything from blood pressure to immune system performance, the perception of pain and the susceptibility to allergies and inflammation -- and even play a role in determining whether certain genes are expressed. Though both families of eicosanoids are vital, those from omega-3 fatty acids are anti-inflammatory and anti-clotting, while those from omega-6s promote inflammation, blood clotting, and the proliferation of cells. When the two families of fatty acids exist in roughly equal ratios in the body, they work as a well-balanced team. But when this balance tips out of whack, bad things can happen.
Also, unlike cholesterol and protein, the type of fat we eat directly affects what type we've got in our cellular membranes -- for example, if we eat a lot of omega-3s, our membranes will have a lot of omega-3s. And that relationship transfers up the food chain. If an animal eats omega-3s (or 6s) and you eat the animal, your cellular membranes will be affected by what the animal ate. In that regard, at least, we really are what we eat.
So it's too bad that we've changed our animals' feeds so much over the past century. Eggs from free-range chickens raised on a diet of wild greens, insects and worms can have several times the omega-3 fatty acids as eggs from grain-fed birds. Grass-fed beef can have two to four times more omega-3s than those raised on grain. Even farm-raised salmon have significantly fewer omega-3s than their wild counterparts. The fact that we now primarily feed our livestock corn (high in omega-6s) instead of grass (higher, relatively, in omega-3s) means that we have changed the fat content of our meat and eggs and milk -- and thus, inadvertently, the composition of nearly every cell in our bodies.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
The more I've learned about omega-3s, the more I've wanted to eat salmon for every meal. I've also started taking supplements: large, amber-colored capsules with a lemon-flavored gelatin coating that makes them go down easy. But if you bite into them -- which, for the sake of journalism, I made myself do -- they explode in an oily burst on your tongue, leaving a slick coating that tastes like day-old salmon. I don't recommend it.
One of the main challenges to supplement makers is that their pills can cause fishy after-burps, a side effect known in the business as "burp-back." When this happened to me, I called the company.
"What do you mean they make you burp?" asked the representative.
"I mean that after I take them, I burp."
"You might not make enough lipase," she said, referring to the enzyme in the stomach that helps break down fats. "Are you eating them with meals?"
I told her I was.
"I don't know why that's happening, then," she said. "Our supplements don't make people burp."
She was right to be concerned. If preventing mackerel burps were important to me, I could easily switch brands. My local grocery store's supplement aisle is cluttered with fish oil, flaxseed oil and algae oil -- not to mention strawberry- and lemon-flavored fish oil -- as well as fish oil capsules with enteric coatings to prevent burp-back. Many come in liquid or gelcap form, most are molecularly distilled, and some even include omega-6s. As Corinna Benoit, the national sales manager for a high-end fish oil company called Nordic Naturals, put it, "It's not your grandmother's cod liver oil."
And here's something your grandmother almost certainly didn't know: There are three main kinds of omega-3 fatty acids, and their effects are not the same. An omega-3 is not an omega-3 is not an omega-3.
ALA, or alpha-linolenic acid, which is most often found in leafy green plants and nuts (the best-known source is flaxseed), is the only omega-3 fatty acid considered to be "essential," since the human body can't produce it. While still under study, its benefits seem mainly cosmetic and are associated with skin and hair.
When it comes to potential medical benefits, the two omega-3s currently garnering the most attention are EPA and DHA (eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic acids). Roughly speaking, EPA is credited with cardiovascular and mental health benefits, while DHA is particularly prevalent in brain and eye tissue and important in prenatal and neonatal development. The body can make EPA and DHA from ALA, but since we're extremely inefficient at this conversion, it's best to eat them directly. Unfortunately, not many Americans do.
And that fact has everything to do with matters of taste: EPA and DHA are most prevalent in the flesh of fatty fish (think anchovies, sardines, mackerel and salmon), which many Americans either don't like, can't afford, or avoid because of possible environmental contamination. Until the supplement market -- and now, fortified food business -- started booming, it was difficult to bypass the mackerel and go directly to the source, since these fatty fish get the EPA and DHA from the bottom of their own food chain: algae.
