The recent Prop 65 lawsuit filed in California may have some consumers wary of fish oil supplements, but a toxin detection instruments company executive says there is no need to worry. In a Health News Digest article, Michael D. Shaw, executive vice president of Interscan Corporation, noted published research on the health benefits of fish oil include reducing inflammatory response; lowering cholesterol, tryglicerides, low-density lipoprotein (LDL), and blood pressure while at the same time increasing good high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol; mitigating the clots that can cause heart attack and stroke; improving brain function; reducing depression and other psychiatric conditions; and may prevent breast, colon and prostate cancer.
However, entrepreneurs, who Shaw said “have seen an opportunity for some publicity,” recently filed a lawsuit against some fish oil dietary supplement manufacturers and retailers, based on California's Proposition 65 standards for polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB).
Shaw said the plaintiffs are combing two provisions of the law—No Significant Risk Level (NSRL) and Maximum Allowable Dose Level (MADL). He said MADL is associated with chemicals that may cause reproductive toxicity, but such levels have not yet been set for PCBs. Because no levels exist, some assume that any amount of PCBs are dangerous, a notion that Shaw said is absurd. He noted contaminates are found in nature and are found in virtually all approved drugs and herbs currently in the market. He said if we truly followed this “no level is safe” criterion, no medicines would be allowed to be sold.
Another point Shaw brought up is that consumers have taken fish oil for years without observable ill effects. Just because technology has improved to allow more sensitive measurements of containments, he said, doesn’t mean they fish oils are more dangerous than they were before.
Additionally, Prop 65 standards for PCBs are drastically less than requirements set by FDA or EPA, he wrote, and even then, the majority of the products in the lawsuit don’t exceed Prop 65’s limit of 90 nanograms per day. This may be due to the Global Organization for EPA and DHA Omega-3s (GOED), Voluntary Monograph standards, which many manufacturers follower to proactively address quality issues. He said most fish oil makers remove contaminants so that PCBs are far lower than would be found in the entire fish.
Lastly, he pointed out the California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), which runs the Prop 65 program, assigned its lowest priority to the fish oil project, based in part on a lack of need.