Is Norwegian cod liver oil the best in the world?

No other place on earth offers such splendid conditions for making superior quality cod-liver oil as the coast of Northern Norway. This is the birth place and home of cod liver oil and the people here know more about true cod liver oil than anyone, anywhere else on this planet.

However, things have changed. Although Norway is still a very remote and untouched land, our technological world has unfortunately had a negative impact on the quality of many cod liver oils. Cod liver oils now commonly undergo intensive refining and processing to produce refined, bleached, deodorized and tasteless oils. Beneficial oil-soluble ‘minor ingredients’ which should remain in the oil are removed by intensive refining. Some of the molecules present in the oil change from being in a natural and beneficial form to an unnatural and possibly toxic form. Fat-soluble vitamins are typically destroyed during this processing. The result is a “derivative cod liver oil” which is NOT the same as the parent/real cod liver oil it was derived from. This is very similar in the way that the fuels used to power our motor vehicles are simply derivatives of naturally occurring unprocessed crude oil found beneath the Earth’s surface. The crude oils and fuels derived from them are both very different!

Even more worrying is the fact that 95% of all Norwegian fish oils sold on the Norwegian market today actually come from Chile and Peru! This also means that many of the foreign companies that think they are selling Norwegian oils are not! There are only four main factories in Norway that produce cod liver oil. They produce cod liver oil for about two months during the winter season (approximately 400 tons) and store this oil in tanks. The livers used to produce their oils are actually a mixture of farmed and fresh livers. Some of these livers are also sold frozen, in bulk, to cod liver oil manufacturers in Norway and to foreigners abroad.

The cod liver oil a consumer purchases may be between 1-2 years old! The oil sitting in these containers has to be refined before being sold because it has already gone bad and the reason it has gone bad is because cod liver oil is one of the most unstable fish liver oils. You simply cannot let cod liver oil sit for long periods of time without it becoming rancid. After these cod liver oils are refined, they then add back the vitamins lost through the refining process via the use of synthetic vitamins like vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol) etc.

Rosita feels very strongly about these deceitful practices and is one of the main factors that prompted them to produce, for the very first time, the genuine raw Norwegian cod liver oil that their ancestors produced and consumed.