Ik neem aan dat Chris Masterjohn geen uitzondering vormt .. ?
Maar goed, als het de bedoeling is om mensen zelf te laten nadenken, denk ik dat het gepast is om te quoten wat er gezegd wordt. Ik heb begrip voor mensen die Engels niet beheersen en voor diegenen: laat het een uitdaging zijn; tweetaligheid en dergelijke niet fysieke aspecten (voeding o.a.) zijn even belangrijk voor hersenfunctie en geven daarnaast een verbreding van je perspectief.
Ik ben het niet echt oneens met hetgeen Mike eruit haalt, maar zoals eerder aangegeven heeft iedereen een andere interpretatie. Mijn (kleine) op-/aanmerkingen: (1) Eiwitten kunnen evengoed een substraat kunnen zijn voor fermentatie. (2) Eerst concludeer je dat D2 wel opneembaar moet zijn en later stel je dat D2 mogelijk niet opneembaar is gezien de complexiteit van natuurlijke producten en het zou gaan om ‘D2’ - dat geen D2 is. En je benadrukt transparantie, maar echt transparant zou zijn het vermelden dat het mogelijk leverolie van koolvis bevat. Een DNA test is vrij ‘straight forward’ en kan alleen maar missen als er werkelijk gesjoemeld is met de samples of door een ondenkbare lab fout. Wat wel duidelijk is, is dat het niet gaat om een ranzig product met lipide peroxidatie en verwante producten.
Hier aspecten ter balans of die ik belangrijk vind om nog even te benadrukken:
Personal Conflicts of Interest
Dave Wetzel has given me a large amount of free cod liver oil and skate liver oil over the years. If I remember correctly, years ago he paid me for permission to publish an article I had written about cod liver oil on his site. I had already written the article, I did not own the rights to it, and he could have legally published it on his site without asking permission, so technically that was a small monetary gift. Overall, I consider the value of these gifts as a proportion of my income to be negligible.
Background: My Thoughts on Cod Liver Oil
I have never seen cod liver oil as a necessity; instead, I have seen it as a convenience. Price used it in his practice not because the healthy non-modernized populations he studied used it, but because it was a convenient way to increase the fat-soluble vitamin content in the diets of people who needed it. It provides retinol, the physiologically essential form of vitamin A, which can also be obtained from most animal livers, and, in smaller amounts from other animal fats, particularly butter and egg yolks. It provides vitamin D, which can be obtained from sunlight, many fish, and in lesser amounts from terrestrial animal fats, particularly butter and egg yolks. It provides EPA and DHA, of which I am mostly interested in obtaining DHA, and this can also be obtained from fatty fish and, to a lesser extent, from terrestrial animal fats. In general, all these are more available from terrestrial animals raised on grass and in the sunshine than from terrestrial animals raised on grain and in confinement. It is easier to add cod liver oil to an imperfect diet than to perfect the diet, and for many people the most balanced approach to obtain all of these nutrients will be to consume a small amount of cod liver oil while also trying to hit the other dietary bases more often than not, allowing the cod liver oil to relieve the need for dietary perfection.
I do not recall what dose of cod liver oil I used early on, but it was never my only major source of retinol because I had, from the beginning of my venture into this way of eating, been eating copious amounts of buffalo liver. I read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration even before I read Nourishing Traditions, and Price writes very clearly therein that cod liver oil is most beneficial in low doses but toxic at high doses. Further, exposure to Mary Enig's writings made me skeptical of large amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). Later, exposure to Ray Peat's writings made me even more skeptical. Peat and Enig disagreed over the value of cod liver oil because Peat took a more extreme stance against PUFAs. I never fully agreed with Peat, but I did come to believe that it is desirable to get adequate physiologically essential PUFAs (which I see as arachidonic acid and DHA) and fat-soluble vitamins (in this case, A and D) without unnecessarily increasing the total PUFA content of the diet.
Biogenic Amines
Not every fermented food is good for every person, and some people don't tolerate fermented foods well at all. I think this is largely mediated by the biogenic amine content. I suspect that some negative reactions some people experience with FCLO are due to the amine content, and I find this far more plausible than that people are being harmed by toxic byproducts of lipid peroxidation in the oil.
Fat-Soluble Vitamins
The vitamin D activity in cod liver oil is likely from a variety of vitamin D metabolites. Dr. Daniel collected laboratory data using very high quality methods of analytical chemistry, and they are probably very accurate about the vitamin D2 and D3 contents of the samples. This does not mean that they accurately convey the biological vitamin D activity. Wetzel submitted his FCLO for a test of its ability to prevent rickets in rats, and this test found high levels of D activity.
Pollock Not Cod
I do think it is self-apparent that consumers benefit from greater transparency about the sources of a product. If Green Pasture were to determine that there is no ethical or legal responsibility to distinguish between species in the cod liver, I would hope they would begin clarifying this in their labeling anyway.
Conclusion
I think competition among cod liver oil suppliers in the ancestral health community is a good thing, and I think critical analysis of these products is a good thing. Toward that end, I appreciate Dr. Daniel for offering a critical analysis of the Green Pasture products.
At the same time, I find the antagonistic tone of the report to be unfortunate, and many of the accusations reach beyond what the evidence should allow for. If this report stands on its own, I do not think Green Pasture gets a fair hearing. However, if this report initiates a reasonable dialog about these topics and leads to a greater supply of information through more rigorous and sophisticated testing and a competition between companies for greater openness and transparency, I think everyone will benefit.
Toward that end, I hope my critique of the critique contributes well to that type of dialog.