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  • Looking at the European Green Deal Through the Lens of the Marine Ingredients Industry

    The marine ingredients industry is delighted with the European Commission’s recent announcement of a European Green Deal to become the world’s first climate-neutral continent by 2050. IFFO, The Marine Ingredients Organisation is fully convinced that growth does not always mean more, but also better. In our view, this deal will trigger even more innovation in the sector and contribute to increased efficiency and competitiveness.

  • GOED Exchange 2020 Discount for IFFO Members

    GOED Exchange, the premier biennial event for omega-3 professionals, is now open for registration. The event will take place February 4-6, 2020 in Barcelona, Spain in the Hotel Arts. Attendees will experience a full agenda of presentations on marketing, business, supply chain and scientific topics of interest to the industry. A cadre of expert speakers will speak on the theme of “growth in the omega-3 industry,” including a New York Times-bestselling author who will discuss how to learn from big data, several world-renowned omega-3 scientists who will present the latest omega-3 research, a spe...

  • The Bias Against Seafood and Omega-3s

    The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans were released last week and predictably, they caused controversy and a media firestorm. I say ‘predictably’ because every time they are updated, it makes various interest groups unhappy. However, from our perspective, they continue to reinforce the important role of seafood and omega-3s in the diet, noting that virtually ALL of the EPA and DHA in the American diet are provided by seafood. However, you really would not know seafood is a critical component of the new guidelines if you looked at the media coverage. To be clear, the Dietary Guidelines ...

  • Omega-3s and Cognition: Dosage Matters

    Adam Ismail, Executive Director Once again the role of omega-3s in health is being called into question, this time in relation to cognitive decline…and once again I feel compelled to try to remind people that we need to look at the overall body of science before drawing conclusions based on a single study. As many scientists have noted, no single study is perfect…so no definitive conclusions can be drawn from a single study. Yet, this is exactly what is happening in the consumer media in response to a new paper from Chew et al on the role of omega-3s and other nutrients in cognitive decline. T...

  • Welcome To The New GOED Current

    GOED is pleased to introduce our newly expanded weekly newsletter, now titled The GOED Current. This is our answer to requests from members to provide regular information on a variety of topics while not increasing the number of emails they receive. The GOED Current will be sent out every Monday and we will continue to send out Breaking News alerts separately, but on a less frequent basis. Read on for more details. In the Monday newsletter, we are now adding a lead editorial article each week. Sometimes this will be on a topic “in the news”; other features will include details about...

  • The impact of omega-3s in Europe

    In the last two weeks of data visualizations I shared global data on intakes and the burden of coronary heart disease due to low omega-3 intakes, but these two data points taken together tell an important story. For the third installment of my 52 weeks of data project, I looked specifically at Europe and how intakes of EPA and DHA in each country differ and the corresponding death rates attributable to low omega-3 intakes.    Learn About Tableau h/t to Li Luo at Radio Free Europe for using an interesting model to tell a data-driven story in Europe, which I re-created to tell t...

  • 1.4 million CHD deaths globally attributable to low omega-3 intakes

    This is the second chart in my goal to create 52 visualizations on important omega-3 topics. Last week I used an infographic to tell the story of how EPA and DHA intakes vary from country-to-country. Since this is the first week of Heart Health month, I decided to use another infographic format to deliver one simple clear statistic around the impact of omega-3s and heart disease. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) manages a database of statistics on the global burden of diseases and estimates that 1.4 million coronary heart disease deaths in 2010 were attributable to low ...

  • 52 weeks of data: week 1

    I was inspired by Max Roser, an economist who is sharing 100 charts to help you feel like the world is getting better. Those who know me know I love data visualization, so I decided to do something similar for the omega-3 world. I am not as ambitious as Max though, so instead you get 52 weeks of omega-3 visualizations this year and I am already two weeks behind! Regardless, for the first visualization, I developed an infographic with consumption statistics from the Global Burden of Diseases Nutrition and Chronic Diseases Group (NutriCoDE). They estimated EPA & DHA intakes for every country o...

  • Quick look at Food Ingredients South America

    I attended the Food Ingredients South America (FISA) conference, which took place in Sao Paulo, Brazil, earlier this month. Below are some thoughts on the event. Overall show: This is the 18th time this show has taken place. Previously it had been every other year, but the event organizers moved to an annual event in the last few years. It also includes CPhI for the pharma industry, and this is about 25% of entire show. The show hours are quite unusual, from 1pm-8pm each day, to accommodate Sao Paulo traffic. Most exhibitors were “food” focused with very little emphasis on nutraceutical...

  • DHA and human brain evolution

    I read a review recently in The Economist of Clive Finlayson’s The Improbable Primate: How Water Shaped Human Evolution and it prompted me to buy the book. This subject has fascinated me ever since I saw Michael Crawford give a talk on the importance of DHA omega-3 to the human brain and how its dietary availability may be a prime factor in the evolution (and potentially devolution) of the human brain. However, the more I have read about brain evolution, the more controversial every theory in this field seemed to be. The camp that believes DHA played an important role in evolution of the...