Fish Oils are heated

[Cairidh]

Does anyone know if fish oils being heated is a problem? There's a lot of hype about them, all the wonderful things they do. The evidence that they have a dramatic impact on health is undeniable.
So I was really surprised when I read a book by Dr Budwig, whose famous for using flax oil blended with cottage cheese (the omega 3 has to be mixed in sulphur containing amino acids to be absorbed) to cure cancer and other serious diseases. I was curious that she used flax oil over fish oil, but in the book she explains that fish oil is heat treated, and there was lots of evidence that when given to livestock, it damaged their health.
I was shocked at this - when fat is heated it becomes extremely bad for health, so how can fish oil be hailed so much as being so helpful? Yet sure enough when I looked it up, I found it is extremely heat treated.

So can anyone explain this?

[Bambi726]

Hello Cairidh. I would think that heating the oils would definately do some sort of damage to the quality of the nutrients present in them, especially the fats. There are, however, also unheated fish oils, though the large majority aren't. The cod liver oil of Dr. Weston Price's time (He was a pioneer of the diet-health connection mainly in the 30's and used cod liver oil extensively in his studies, as well as high-vitamin butter oil) was not heated, and we may therefore not be getting the same benefit on the heated oils as we could with unheated. I just found an unheated Cod Liver Oil that is filter using diatomaceous earth - quite interesting. I want to try it sometime. Anyone who wants to check it out go to:
http://www.wildernessfamilynaturals.com ... er-oil.htm
I'm still looking for other sources for unheated cod liver oil, but they're actually quite difficult to find.

~Amber