About a week ago, Dr Kaayla Daniel published a report on Green Pasture Fermented Cod Liver Oil giving various reasons why she claims it is not good. The report is not publicly available, you need to give your name and email address before you can read it – you can access it here. Very soon afterwards, Green Pasture put out a blog post refuting this. And then Yesterday Chris Masterjohn published a critique of Dr Daniel’s report.
Disclaimer/Conflict of Interest: As you may know, I sell the Green Pasture brand of Fermented Cod Liver oil and Butter Oil on my website. I also take it daily. And I am not a doctor or scientist.
I found Dr Daniel’s report to be written in quite a strange way, overly emotional, and making accusations without any real evidence. I found this bit particularly strange “Notably, Green Pasture does not seem to have filed a patent application for its unique and mysterious “fermentation” process.” – anyone who knows about patents knows that a patent is to protect the inventor, and there are reasons why people don’t want or need to apply for them, and it implies absolutely nothing about the process.
A key point people seem to be bringing up is that Lab #3 said that the cod livers in the Cattle Lick product (not the FCLO for human consumption) was “100 percent Alaskan pollock.” But failing to mention that in the “2.4 Evaluation of Species” section of Lab #5, it says “These values of sn-2 position specificity are similar to previous analysed cod liver oil samples. […] The overall CNMR carbonyl profile are similar to cod liver oil, although the levels of monounsaturated fatty acids in sn-2 position seems to be a bit higher than previously analysed cod liver oils.” And as someone points out in the comments to Chris’s article, Alaskan Pollock is a type of Cod fish:
Atlantic cod = Gadus morhua.
Pacific cod = Gadus macrocephalus.
Alaska pollock = Gadus chalcogrammus.
Reading Chris Masterjohn’s critique put my mind to rest, it seems that Chris understands the subject better than Dr. Daniel, and gives a more balanced view. From this I have decided to continue taking the Green Pasture products, and continue to sell them. (I currently take the infused coconut oil.) But I’m providing the links above to all three documents so you can read and make your own mind up. What do you think? Please leave your comments below.
Update 7 Sept 2015: Sally Fallon Morell of the Weston Price Foundation has now also published a reply here and also in February this year published test results showing the the FCLO is not rancid.
Update 21 Oct 2015: We are now also stocking Rosita Extra Virgin Cod Liver Oil (EVCLO) at Funky Raw. This is completely unprocessed and raw from wild cod from Norway.
