A friend bought a bottle of fish oil pills for their positive effects on her health. The purchase was not, shall we say, a success, and looking at the label it's not hard to figure out why. There are so many disturbing things in this picture, it's hard to know which is the most egregious example.
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- If you're expecting a viscous liquid to come out based on the
large “Fish Oil” label, you will be disappointed. Nobody actually knows
what a “softgel” is, because it doesn't mean anything. Softgels should,
strictly speaking, be smooshy, like gummi bears. These are pills,
they're not particularly soft and they're most definitely not like
gummi bears. - “Odorless” is borderline false advertising. Nobody in the world
has made an odorless fish oil pill. I guess “does not totally smell
like you've left a trout on a heat register for the last fortnight”
didn't really fit in the limited space on the label. - Exactly what do they do to these poor fish to convert them to
oil? I mean, pressing salted fish to express their fishy essence has
been a staple of Southeast Asian cookery for millennia, but they call
it fish sauce and it isn't particularly oily. - “May Reduce Coronary Heart Disease Risk”, indeed. This is because
with sufficient application of a kind of Pavlovian stimulus response in
the form of a bottle of these pills, you can condition yourself to
reject even bacon and avocado cheeseburgers. - “Controls fish burps.” I have nothing to add. I'm too busy throwing up in my mouth at the mere suggestion.
