What Is The International Fish Oil Standard – And Should You Worry About It?

Have you heard about the International Fish Oil Standard? If you're looking for quality omega 3 supplements, you may have come across this organization. But do you need to worry about these so-called standards? What do they mean for you, the consumer?

The International Fish Oil Standard (IFOS) is an organization that rates fish oil products for purity.

Purity is assessed by measuring the levels of heavy metals, PCBs and dioxins. These toxic substances can be bad for your health, causing cancers and developmental problems, so it stands to reason that you need to be certain that the product you buy is free of them.

But despite this official-sounding name, the International Fish Oil Standard is a private organization that charges a fee for testing. If manufacturers pay the fee and meet the guidelines, they can call their products 'pharmaceutical grade', which refers to a product that has been highly refined to eliminate impurities and contaminants.

Unfortunately, there's no globally recognized standard to define what pharmaceutical grade really means. Various organizations, including the IFOS, detail some standards that are really not very high so it's actually a rather meaningless term.

What does this mean for you, the consumer, when you just want to make sure you get a supplement that's free of contaminants?

It means that you will need to carefully examine the label of the product you want to buy to make sure the purity levels quoted are good enough. You can't just rely on a statement that says that the product is 'pharmaceutical grade' or meets the International Fish Oil Standard, since we now know this is quite meaningless.

Here's some hints about what to look for.

A quality supplement should state its purity level on its label in a Certificate of Analysis (COA). This certificate records the actual tested levels of different impurities and toxins.

The amount of impurities should be shown as parts per billion (ppb) and parts per trillion (ppt).

For example, the IFOS, the Council for Responsible Nutrition and the European Pharmacopoeia all allow up to 100 ppb of mercury in a fish oil supplement.

This is actually quite a high figure - it's possible to find supplements that have less than 10 ppb of mercury.

So you can see that an omega 3 supplement that boasted that it was 'pharmaceutical grade' might have as much as 99 ppb of mercury!

Make no mistake about it – some marketers will push the International Fish Oil Standard as a measure of purity but you can easily find supplements that exceed the rather weak standards of this unofficial organization.

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