Fish oil is oil obtained from tissues of oily fish found in the sea and rivers. The fish oil is considered as the best and healthy diet as it contains the omega-3 fatty acids, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), precursors to eicosanoids reducing inflammation all over the body. The fish oil is produced omega-3 fatty acids accumulating them from either consuming microalgae producing fatty acids just in the case of fishes such as herring and sardines . These fish oil found in the fatty predatory fish which eats prey fish got accumulated omega-3 fatty acids from microalgae. These fatty predatory fish such as mackerel, lake trout, flounder, albacore tuna and salmon have high storage of omega-3 fatty acids which helps in the production of fish oil. Because of its positioning at the top of the food chain these species accumulates toxic substances which is not beneficial for fish oil as lot sof consumers intake it. Seeing this fact FDA annonced the small consumption of these fish species such as e.g. albacore tuna, shark, and swordfish as they have toxic contaminants like mercury, dioxin, PCBs and chlordane in their body. More than 50 percent of the world fish oil production is also fed to farmed salmon. So in this way fish oil is having DHA Omega-3 vegetarian products obtained from algae.
Lots of people now turned to fish oil supplements to have adequate omega-3 fatty acids. Many supplement formulations includes several other fatty acids like omega-6 and omega-9 required for fish oil production. So in this way the beneficial part of fish oil such as omega-6 is generally also seen in lots of food diets like cereals, whole grain bread, baked goods, fried foods and margarine. In this way fish oil's omega-6 supplementation is not needed. But the consumption of fish oil supplements have undergone scrutiny in these years. Government agencies like Food Standards Agency of UK and the Food Safety Authority of Ireland reported the PCB levels exceeding the strict new European maximum limits in many fish oil brands in 2006 . To share the growing concern of contaminated fish oil supplements, the International Fish Oil Standards program, a voluntary review process developed at the University of Guelph.
After this the patented production purification processes existed in order to avoid pollutants and dioxins from the fish oil for matching the levels far below the EU limits. This patented technology is also known as stripping technology. The fish oil production stopped in many producing countries except Iceland in 2005. in the year 2005 production of fish oil was approximately about 570 000 tonnes in five main exporting countries such as Peru, Denmark, Chile, Iceland and Norway which was less near about 12% from the 650 000 tonnes production in 2004. till now Peru remains the main fish oil producer across the globe of having around one fourth of total fish oil production. So conusmer must read about fish oil usages and side effects before making it as dietry supplement.
