Want to live longer? You need this nutrient
The future of fish
Colin Barrow, PhD, Ocean Nutrition's vice president of research and development, has any number of ways of getting omega-3s into his diet. He could, he points out, spread specially formulated Becel margarine onto DHA- and EPA-spiked Wonder Bread and wash it down with omega-3 supplemented Danone liquid yogurt. Instead, he prefers to take his omega-3s neat: He stirs a tablespoon of pure powdered fish oil into his morning juice.
A tall, soft-spoken New Zealander with a ginger beard and a long-toothed smile, Barrow has used the expertise gained from a PhD in chemistry and marine natural products to develop the process that allowed Ocean Nutrition to reintroduce omega-3s into packaged foods.
"The process is called microencapsulation," says Barrow, "and it was originally used for delivering ink in the cartridges of ink-jet printers." If you increased the size of a grain of Ocean Nutrition's microencapsulated powder to that of a basketball, it would be filled with Ping-Pong-ball-size agglomerations of oil encased in gelatin. Each particle is like a microscopic fish-oil capsule, allowing the powder to be added to food without changing the food's taste. Without a protective coating to prevent oxidation, the omega-3 in a glass of orange juice would stink like a sardine tin left out in the sun. Ocean Nutrition has taken any hint of fishiness out of fish oil — an essential move in the notoriously seafood-averse North American market.
The source of Ocean Nutrition's meticulously deodorized oil is, ultimately, a fish. Namely, Engraulis ringens, the Peruvian anchoveta, a small schooling species that lives in the relatively unpolluted waters off the west coast of South America. The process starts when fishing boats encircle the vast schools with purse-seine nets and bring the catch back to barges. Under the close supervision of rabbis, who are there to ensure that no squid, shellfish, or other nonkosher species remain in the nets, billions of fish are sucked through a pipe to onshore processing plants. There, the anchoveta are heated to 85 degrees Celsius, ground with an auger, and pulverized with a hydraulic screw to extract the oil. The oil is then distilled and filtered through clay to eliminate all traces of mercury, dioxins, and other persistent organic pollutants, those nasty toxins that can cause developmental and long-term neurological problems in consumers of tuna and farmed salmon. Transported by container ship through the Panama Canal, the oil arrives in Nova Scotia, where it is further concentrated and refined. Some of the oil ends up on the shelves of Walmart, Walgreens, and other major retailers that package it in their house-brand capsules. The rest, in powdered form, goes to the likes of PepsiCo and Unilever, who mix it into packaged foods. Ocean Nutrition now supplies 60 percent of the North American fish-oil market.
For anybody concerned about the future of the oceans, Ocean Nutrition's sourcing policies are good news. With big predatory species such as tuna, sharks, and swordfish already fished to 10 percent of their former abundance, and marine ecologists predicting the collapse of most major fisheries by the year 2048, conservationists have expressed concern about what kind of impact the widespread use of omega-3 supplements could have on the world's remaining fish stocks. Fortunately, the Peruvian anchoveta fishery — one of the world's largest — is in no imminent danger of collapse.
"These fish have been harvested in a highly regulated way, in very pristine waters, for more than 50 years," says Ian Lucas, Ocean Nutrition's executive vice president of marketing, "and the biomass is actually expanding." Fish oil is an industrial by-product of the fish-meal industry, which supplies feed for livestock and farmed shrimp and salmon. "It's going to take a long, long time before the fish-oil industry actually causes more fishing to happen," says Lucas. But according to Daniel Pauly, PhD, a leading authority on the decline of the world's fisheries at the Fisheries Centre at Vancouver's University of British Columbia, stocks of Peruvian anchoveta can fluctuate wildly; there was a temporary collapse in the 1970s and again in the 1980s. To forestall future problems, Pauly believes the fishery needs to be even more strictly monitored and regulated than it is today.
As word spreads of omega-3's benefits, so does fish-oil consumption. Lucas says that the share of omega-3 fatty acids in the supplement market has been growing by 30 percent a year for the past five years. Though alternative sources of fish oils exist, some are clearly more ecologically questionable than Peruvian anchoveta. A Virginia-based company called Omega Protein nets a schooling fish called menhaden off the mid-Atlantic coast; its -menhaden-based fish oil may now be added to 29 different categories of food. The fishery has been criticized because menhaden is a keystone species in the food chain of the East Coast; the fish feed by filtering algae from the water, and, in their absence, microscopic plankton have proliferated, creating the harmful algae blooms and dead zones that plague places such as Chesapeake Bay.
Barrow escorts me into a lab and shows me a 10-liter glass fermentation tank bristling with hoses and filled with a cloudy, swirling, foam-topped liquid. In its search for alternative sources of omega-3s, Ocean Nutrition has gathered a DHA-rich alga from an undisclosed location in Canada. In the United States, a company called Martek has already patented its own DHA-producing alga called Crypthecodinium cohnii, which is grown in massive multistory tanks in South Carolina; much of the infant formula in North America is now supplemented with Martek's patented Life's DHA.
"The product is good," says Barrow, "but it's really expensive, and they can't get their microorganisms to produce EPA. Our organism is a really good producer; we can get it to express about 8 percent EPA." This may be the future of omega-3s: an essential nutrient grown in tanks, sparing the world's fish stocks from overharvesting.
If Ocean Nutrition's better-living-through-chemistry approach to good nutrition strikes you as somewhat sinister, there is a straight-forward alternative to microencapsulated fish oil. The best way to get high-quality DHA and EPA into your body, it turns out, is the old — fashioned way: Eat more seafood, especially shellfish and smaller fatty fish such as herring, mackerel, anchovies, and sardines.
"You should eat vegetables and fruits, of course, and get exercise," advises Cunnane, "but you have to eat fish. You can take fish-oil capsules, but part of the point is to enjoy the experience of eating. So buy the best fish you can afford." Seafood also has the edge on omega-3 capsules because it includes the brain-selective minerals zinc, iron, copper, iodine, and selenium, cofactors our bodies need to make optimal use of EPA and DHA.
Getting rid of omega-6s
And now, full disclosure: As part of the research for a book I was writing about the sustainability of seafood in our world's oceans, I have radically increased my intake of omega-3s over the past two years. I've been taking three fish-oil capsules a day (a combined total of 1,800 milligrams of DHA and EPA), and having at least four fish meals a week. Early on, I saw a marked change in my alertness and capacity for sustained attention. But it wasn't until I started diminishing the amount of omega-6s in my diet that I started to lose weight. In the past year, I've shed five pounds and reversed the first swellings of a nascent potbelly.
The goal is not to "nix the six" completely, as the writer of one diet book puts it; after all, omega-6s are essential to good health. But getting an adequate supply is hardly a challenge; they are omnipresent in our food, and we would all be better off if our diets were closer to the 1:1 omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
For me, the easiest change has been ridding my kitchen of such high-omega-6 fats as sunflower oil, corn oil, soybean oil, and margarine; I now favor olive oil, canola oil (a polyunsaturate, but one that is high in omega-3s), and butter. I have lately become an assiduous reader of food labels. Polyunsaturated fats, I now know, are usually synonymous with omega-6 fatty acids, which seem to have worked their way into virtually all the processed foods in the supermarket. It is much healthier to seek out monounsaturated fats like olive oil, and even avoid processed foods altogether. Even some forms of fish are high in omega-6s, especially fried fish sticks, fast-food sandwiches, and farmed catfish, tilapia, and salmon (whose feed is now spiked with large amounts of soy).
And those omega-6 capsules sold in health-food stores are worse than useless: Adding additional omega-6s to your diet defeats the whole purpose of the exercise. When shopping for an omega-3 capsule, I typically look for the brand with the highest levels of DHA and EPA, usually about 400 milligrams of EPA and 200 milligrams of DHA.
Omega-3s aren't a quick fix like Advil, or even, for that matter, Prozac, which takes several weeks to change brain chemistry. Omega-3s take at least three months to harness themselves into heart cells, for example. I can't be certain about improvements in my cardiovascular health, but since I started loading up on DHA and EPA, I feel as if I've upgraded my brain. My energy is high, and I feel strangely unflappable, like I've gained some kind of unbeatable equilibrium. My body feels different too, as though my fat and muscle have been redistributed to more useful places. Navigating among the omega-6-fattened hordes, I feel lean and swift, like a tuna darting among sea cows.
So, by all means, keep swallowing those omega-3 capsules. But here's an even better idea: Seek out grass-fed beef, free-range chickens and their eggs, the best olive oil, canola oil, and butter you can find, and lots of fish and shellfish, preferably small wild-caught species from clean waters. In other words, if you are looking for a guiding principle, keep it simple and eat like your ancestors ate.
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