Producing The World's First Full Spectrum Fish Oil

We produced the first full spectrum natural oils that were from the original fish because of his fish processing system. So the fish are brought in, the guts are frozen on board. Within 15 to 20 minutes they're brought to our shoreside plant. We actually built a plant. We have native Alaskan partners because you don't own property on shoreside in Alaska unless you have a native Alaskan partner. So we have, one of the native Alaskan development groups is our partner. We built this plant that allows us to retain the. Without ever getting above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the natural ingredients in the product that come directly off the ships into the plant. And I think we're producing a fish oil that's like none other in the world.

The other thing that you had mentioned about 10 minutes ago was the idea of these pro resolving mediators, which from what I understand are more of something that you would find in some of these marine compounds for the anti inflammatory or the pain blocking effect, et cetera. Tell me about that because you fascinated me, I think again at that discussion we were having a few years ago when you described to me what your fishing operation actually looks like up there in Alaskan and what you guys are doing as far as how you're harvesting sustainably in what you're doing with the fish. Can you, can you tell me about that?

Yeah. Thank you. So this story is a little bit reminiscent of my story with the Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat meeting Sam Beer and his wife and their little hobby farm and getting totally pulled into the Himalayan tartary buckwheat story. In this case, it's a family hobby that pulled us into the story on the oils.

My wife and I have over the last 20 plus years been pretty active in boating up the Pacific coast. We live in the Seattle area, so we do a lot of boating up into Alaska. We've done many trips, just in fact, many times we've been over two weeks not seeing another human plane car. All we saw were animals. Out in Anchorages in Alaska we have about 30, I think about 35,000 miles on our boat over the last several years cruising up there. And so we have had the chance to meet a lot of very interesting people. The people in Alaska are definitely.

Their own cut of personalities, individualistic, rugged. And so we spent time obviously anchored out and at times come into some of these small marinas where there's a lot of commercial fishing going on. And so one day we were up in Sitka and I saw this very interesting boat come in that I had never seen a Fishing boat, probably about 100 foot fishing boat. And I went up and talked to the skipper and I said, you know, this is a really interesting design on this boat. I've never seen a boat with this design. He said, oh, if you're interested in it, you know, the, the person who designed this boat, who's the owner of our fishing company is going to be flying in here later today. You got to come over and talk to him. So I came over and met him. Dave Little is his name. And Dave is a really interesting gu. He got a degree from University of Michigan in marine architecture and then took a kind of sabbatical. He and his wife came out to Seattle just to have fun and do some commercial fishing. And he got really caught up in the fishing industry and ultimately then started his own fishing company and designed his own boats. And these are long line boats in which there are multiple hooks that are deployed. Each one is baited and they, they fish for.

A lot of bottom fish, halibuts and then cod as well as also fish, some for salmon as well. And the, the story was that these boats were outfitted to be able to bring the fish in on a, on a hook one at a time as they're reeled into the boat. The crew then takes the fish off the hook and processes that fish on board so that the, the processing, the outcome goes into a deep freeze within 20 minutes from a live fish, it gets frozen to sub zero temperature, which traps all of the goodness in that particular fish.

And by the way, I talked to a lot of companies. I've never heard of any fish oil company that does that fast.

This is n of 1. Having traveled around the world and visited fish oil companies in Brazil, in Peru, in Norway and in Iceland. There is no other company that I'm aware of that is doing this kind of fishing. And in fact he was, Dave Little was instrumental in getting the fisheries department of the government to control this as a controlled fishery. And it's now MSC certified, Marine Stewardship Council certified. It's also got.

Even a higher level of certification, Responsible Fish Management. That's RFM certification that certifies not only that the fish is sustainable, but the shoreside communities, the ecological impact on the shores are sustainable. So our, our product that is produced out of this process is RFM as well as MSC certified. Wow. So what happened out of this whole process is that when I was speaking with him, he said, you know, we have one problem. Now that we have a sustainable fishery.

We, we can't expand. We can only catch so Many fish a year. And so for me it means, you know, the concept of building a bigger market. I really can't build a bigger market because we're kind of quoted now. But we need to use every part of the fish. We, we should not waste any part. So I found markets for the fins. I've bought markets for the head. But there's one, one part of the fish that I can't sell that I have to grind up and throw back in the water. Yeah. I said, well, what's that? He said, it's really the fish guts. So I said, well, what's in the fish guts? And he looked at me, he says, what do you mean, what's in the fish guts? And I said, like, what are the biomolecules that are in the fish guts?

Yeah.

And he said, jeff, I'm, I'm a fisherman, not a chemist. I said, well, I'm a chemist. Why don't you send me some of the frozen fish guts? Well, be careful what you ask for, because not too long thereafter, DHL truck backed up to our facility and unloaded several hundred pounds of frozen fish guts. I just needed a little yummy. So now truck of fish cats.

Well, we get cats in the neighborhood, I bet.

Exactly. And so what we were able to find when we did the analysis where there were some really interesting bioactive molecules that we could develop a process to mildly extract them. And one of those were these pro resolving mediators that are found in the original fish oils that you don't find in most commercially processed fish oils because they're removed by the distillation processing. We were able to capture these and capture as well as natural astaxanthin, capture the active vitamin A and D as well as not only EPA and dha, but DPA and eha, all sorts of different oils that are lost by processing. So we, we produced the first full spectrum natural oils that were from the original fish because of his fish processing system. So the fish are brought in, the guts are frozen on board. Within 15 to 20 minutes, they're brought to our Shoreside plant. We actually built a plant. We have native Alaskan partners. Because you don't own property on Shoreside in Alaska unless you have a native Alaskan partner. So we have, one of the native Alaskan development groups is our partner. We built this, this plant that allows us to retain the. Without ever getting above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the natural ingredients in the product that come directly off the ships into the plant. And I think we're producing a Fish oil that's like none other in the world as a consequence of this process. Yeah. And it's very high in these pro resolving mediators. Yeah.

And the pro resolving mediators, correct me if I'm wrong, but they have pretty good data behind them for both inflammation as well as pain management, right?

Yes. Actually these were discovered by an investigator at Harvard, Mass General. And at first people in the, in the science of, of lipids, of oils doubted his work because no one had ever seen these before. But he's done extraordinary work over the years, published hundreds of papers, now has a whole international group of investigators looking at these resolvins, protectants and morisons. Those are the three families of these pro resolving mediators that are actually very strong in their ability to quench the inflammatory process. So once you get inflammation started, you want to have a break that can stop it. And these proresolving mediator compounds are those that put brakes on the inflammatory process and keep it under control. So that's why we feel our oils are very valuable in supporting balanced inflammation because they have these PRMs that put the brake on inflammation.

That's fantastic. I haven't, thank God, been struggling much lately with pain or inflammation, but I've been looking into some of the things you can combine with photobiomodulation or infrared light therapy or sunlight exposure, in the latter case, not only for the UVB and UVA protective effect for the skin and also the enhancement of vision, but also the fact that it appears from what I've looked into, that something like DHA or a DHA rich compound may allow, via process called quantum tunneling, better penetration of light photons, particularly like that at 600 to 800 nanometer spectre into the, the cell to produce more ATP via activation of cytochrome C oxidase. And so I've been intentionally trying to up my DHA intake because I do a lot of like infrared sauna and red light exposure and similar compounds would be a lot of your dark greens. So I suppose I might be enhancing that a little bit with this greens component of the microbiome product you sent me. And then also shield kind of like the dark blacks and then the blues, something like methylene blue. So I've been experimenting with these little like, like stacks, you know, pre infrared therapy, pre photobiomodulation stacks. And you know, the best way I can describe it is it almost feels like my body is photosynthesizing energy like a plant. It's really, it's really interesting to mess around with. I don't know if you've gotten into, you know, from a functional medicine standpoint, any of the research on photobiomodulation, but, you know, being able to stack it with some of these compounds that seem to interact really well, you know, with. With the skin and with the photoreceptors is something I've just found intriguing lately.

Well, you're right. You're right on the frontier. I mean, that's one of the reasons that I love following your podcast and what you're doing. You. You've. You're a translator. You're doing a fantastic job of translating this contemporary stuff that is geeky, but it's. It's also valuable if we can just get it translated into ways that people can apply it in their lives. So, yeah, I want to compliment you and give you a shout out. That's a tremendous contribution you're making to getting people acquainted with these things that can make a very, very big difference. Oh, yeah, these. These pigments, like lutein and astaxanthin, they are. They're. They're photomodulators. They. They pick up light in various wavelengths and they translate them into photonic quantum energy sources. And so they, they are translators. And I think you use an analogy of, like, photosynthesis through chlorophyll. Well, these are kind of helping biosynthesis through these specific energetic pathways that modulate.

The electron transport ch.