***Please note that there have been some recent concerns about the below product. Please read more at this post, or click here for which kind to take. Do some reading and research, and decide for yourself what is best for your family.
As my regular readers know, I'm always talking about how important it is to take cod liver oil. So as you would guess, it's not unusual for me to hear about all the reasons people are told they shouldn't take cod liver oil.
Don't believe me!
Even though, as I've said before, I don't want you to blindly believe what I say, but instead to let what you read here motivate you to do your own research, obviously, I still want to be careful about what I suggest to you. So if I hear something that conflicts with anything I recommend, do what I do–start researching like crazy and asking people who are much more knowledgeable about the topic than I am.
Let's get to the bottom of it…
So to take care of any misinformation that you might be hearing, and in order to clear things up, today I'll share some recent email exchanges with you from my email box.
The first one is with Chris Masterjohn, who was nice enough to answer some questions for me; and following that, with Sally Fallon, who also helped to straighten things out. (In case you're not familiar with them, scroll to the bottom of this post for more information.)
Warning:
Some of the following can get a little technical compared to the information I normally share on my blog, so if you would rather not read through all of it, be assured that after going over all of this many times, I'm still comfortable with continuing to recommend the amounts suggested at the WAPF site . (Except in a few circumstances , so you really should keep reading to find out more! You can also find out more here: common questions about cod liver oil where I talk about the possibility of vitamin A or vitamin D toxicity–especially look down in the related posts at the bottom.) However, if you choose not to do further reading and research on your own, please be sure to take another look at the disclaimer at the very bottom of this post!
An email I sent to Chris Masterjohn:
Recently a reader struggling with depression was told to only take enough cod liver oil to reach 4000 IU/day of vitamin A because it can cause liver damage. (I had suggested she take at least the amount recommended by the WAPF , which is the dose that equals 10,000 IU/day of vitamin A.)
I found this online at Dr. Andrew Weil's site: “The Upper Limit of vitamin A set by the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences is 10,000 IU per day. Although it is an essential nutrient, an excessive, chronic intake of the form of vitamin A from animal sources (including cod liver oil) can be toxic, leading to hair loss, confusion, liver damage, and – more recently discovered – bone loss.”
Could you comment on this?
Thanks, Kelly
Chris replied:
Hi Kelly,
Vitamin A can be toxic to the liver if intake exceeds the liver's storage capacity. This is evident on blood tests if you test for serum retinol and serum retinyl esters both. If the latter exceeds 10% of the sum of the two measurements, this is a sign that the liver's storage capacity has been overwhelmed.
Vitamin A toxicity generally takes much more than 10,000 IU/day. Protein and zinc are necessary for vitamin A utilization, so the dose that would lead to toxicity would be much lower on a diet deficient in protein and zinc — i.e., deficient in animal foods. Vitamin D protects against vitamin A toxicity and also increases the utilization of vitamin A, making it even less likely you'd overwhelm your liver's capacity.
Since cod liver oil — good cod liver oil, that is, like the brands recommended by WAPF — contains vitamin D, it's incredibly unlikely that anyone would get vitamin A toxicity from 10,000 IU/day vitamin A.
Hope that helps,
Chris
I bugged Chris one more time:
Thanks for your help! One last question that I'm concerned about: someone recently stopped taking cod liver oil when their doctor said it can cause bleeding–that it can thin the blood. Is this something I should be warning my readers about?
Chris replied:
Hi Kelly,
There is EPA in cod liver oil, a fatty acid that can compete with arachidonic acid, an important fatty acid necessary for blood clotting. In my PUFA Report, I argue that EPA is not an essential fatty acid, but that if your diet is low in linoleic acid from vegetables and rich in zinc and B6, you'll convert small amounts of EPA to DHA, which is essential.
Either way, the amount of EPA in cod liver oil is small, and blood thinning is mostly a concern with large amounts, like when people take “fish oil” in large amounts for its anti-inflammatory properties.
You can minimize the EPA you get by using high-vitamin cod liver oil, so you get the most vitamins for the least EPA. You can get over 10,000 IU vitamin A from just one teaspoon of high-vitamin cod liver oil, which provides only a small amount of EPA that will probably not cause blood thinning in most people.
Chris
By the way, Chris has a great new blog called, The Daily Lipid .
(Note: the above information was used here with permission from Chris Masterjohn.)
Recently, I also emailed Sally Fallon with my concerns, and she replied with a new cod liver oil update.
However, if I posted all of it here, this would be way too long. So click here for the Information update on cod liver oil from Sally Fallon.
More you might like:
- My favorite cookbook: ” Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats ” by Sally Fallon
- Another book by Sally Fallon along with Mary Enig – I love this one too: Eat Fat, Lose Fat: The Healthy Alternative to Trans Fats
Chris Masterjohn's Bio from the Weston A. Price Foundation :
Chris Masterjohn is the author of several Wise Traditions articles and the creator and maintainer of Cholesterol-And-Health.Com , a website dedicated to extolling the virtues of cholesterol and cholesterol-rich foods. He has authored two items accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals: a letter in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology criticizing the conclusions of a recent study on saturated fat and a full-length feature in an upcoming issue of Medical Hypotheses proposing a molecular mechanism of vitamin D toxicity. Masterjohn holds a Bachelor's degree in History and is preparing to pursue a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology. He is also a Weston A. Price Foundation Local Chapter Leader in West Brookfield, Massachusetts.
Sally Fallon:
Sally Fallon is the author of Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats (with Mary G. Enig, PhD), a well-researched, thought-provoking guide to traditional foods with a startling message: Animal fats and cholesterol are not villains but vital factors in the diet, necessary for normal growth, proper function of the brain and nervous system, protection from disease and optimum energy levels. She joined forces with Enig again to write Eat Fat, Lose Fat, and has authored numerous articles on the subject of diet and health. The President of the Weston A. Price Foundation and founder of A Campaign for Real Milk , Sally is also a journalist, chef, nutrition researcher, homemaker, and community activist. Her four healthy children were raised on whole foods including butter, cream, eggs and meat.
Kelly the Kitchen Kop says
Shauna,
Yay on the beef heart! Let me know what you think, although I don’t taste anything at all (tastes like plain ground beef), so I doubt you will either, as I have the pickiest palate in the world. (If you can eat your eggs fried in coconut oil, surely you won’t notice the beef heart!)
But you’ll love the extra nutrition you’ll know your family is getting!
Kelly
Michigan Mom2three says
andrea – I had similar experiences with the book. As with Kelly, I thought the book was more valuable in it’s educational aspect. I didn’t follow the book’s recipes to lose weight, but I did follow the principals. For example – when sauteeing vegetables, I use extra virgin coconut oil, and I generally use the coconut oil when making my eggs (I like the flavor, not everyone does). When I use the oil in cooking, it doesn’t bother me – when I was trying to “take” the oil mixed in a tea or water or whatever, I was gagging, and feeling very nauseous. I, too, was able to shed my extra weight by limiting my carbs and eating lots of fresh veggies, meats and healthy fats. I limited fruit for a short time, and all grains for a couple weeks. I quit eating sugar. Then I began adding in brown rice, sweet potatoes, whole fruits (as dessert), barley (in a soup), etc. Now that I am maintaining, I can eat real whole grain carbs, and as long as I stay away from anything refined, I’m fine. I can also use real maple syrup on my pancakes, or raw honey stirred in my oatmeal. HTH
Kelly – I’m anxious to read what Sally has to say! I take cod liver oil regularly, and I buy a NT recommended brand (w/the vitamin D). Plus, I eat plenty of healthy meats, so it was encouraging to read Chris’s remarks.
Oh – Kelly – guess what – I ordered beef heart from Creswick on my most recent order! I’m going to try it! Are you proud of me or what?!?
Shauna
Kelly the Kitchen Kop says
Hi Andi,
I can definitely see why you would be turned off on the diet – I wouldn’t last long on anything that made me nauseous!
I had read about people having that problem somewhere, too. Honestly, I didn’t think much about it though, because I didn’t use it so much as a diet book to follow closely, but more as a source for more coconut recipes, and an informational book – in the beginning, I love how the facts about fats are explained clearly and more consisely than in Nourishing Traditions. (Especially when I need to pass along info to someone who isn’t likely to go online. I like to have in-print options.)
I’m not saying you were wrong in following the diet, that’s what the book suggests after all, I’m just saying that’s not how I used it myself.
When I need to drop some pounds, I start really watching the carbs (and keep eating the healthy fats, meats, and veggies) and that works for me. You can read more about that under the “carbs” label in the blue section down on the right.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts! 🙂
Kelly
Andrea says
Thanks for the blogs on cod liver oil, Kelly! I had noticed at the bottom where you mentioned about Sally Fallon’s and Mary Enig’s book on Eat Fat Loose Fat. I recently purchased the book because I had loved the Nourishing Traditions cookbook, and we could stand to loose some weight over here 😀
Anyway, we found the book to be a little unbalanced. We wanted to try it anyway, because we trusted her from the Nourishing Traditions cookbook, and though it might sound out of balance to us, she is the authority, which is why we bought the book. The diet made us nauseous. We wondered if this was due to the coconut oil and looked online for some answers and found the website dedicated to the book where people were writing in to say they were throwing up on the diet, and wanted to know why. Her answer was that if you are used to a low fat diet, your body needs time to adjust to fats, so to start with smaller quantities of coconut oil and work your way up. Well, that made sense to us, so we tried it. I eventually got over the nausea, but my husband didn’t. So we had to discontinue the diet.
It seems odd to have to discontinue a diet because of one component…you would think that you could just adapt without it, you know, figure out what was in the food that you needed nutrient wise and substitute other foods that had those nutrients, but that was part of what we thought was so unbalanced about this book. There was such a large coconut portion to the diet that it might as well have been called the Coconut Diet, because without the coconut, there was no diet.
Given how well written Nourishing Traditions is, I guess I would have expected in this book for her to make substitutions known, for example if coconuts aren’t a local food for you, what you really need is x amount of lauric acid and X amount of MCFA’s per day and those can also be found in food items A, B, and C if you don’t have access to coconuts (or happen to be intolerant or can’t afford it or whatever).
Something else became very apparent as we shopped for groceries the first month we were on the diet. My husband and I are hoping to be able to feed our family off of our little suburban plot of land, and to buy the meats and eggs we need locally. We would need to abandon that idea almost entirely in order to remain on that diet.
While I have more to say about the book, I have probably said enough.
Blessings,
Andi