Any suggestions for dealing with a long-lasting bad taste?
The main (but not only) culprit for me is the prescription Omega-3-from-fish-oil capsules (formerly Omacor, now named Lovaza) I need to take daily. Basically, I burp fish oil, and my mouth tastes of it much of the time. And I hate fish!
Suggestions?
Tic Tacs? Or some other kind of strong, small mints.
Altoids are better. Or you could take a few drops of peppermint extract. That will mix with the fish oils in your stomach and ‘come up’ with the fish smells when you belch. I take a mixture of fish, flax, and borage from Rexall (Omega 3, 6, 9)and I only rarely get any taste from it. I tend to drink a lot of water or juice when I take them and usually right before I eat something.
Altoids are definitely better than Tic Tacs at doing away with bad taste. Those Listerine Quick Strips (I think that’s what they’re called) are good, too.
I planted a row of evergreens so that I cannot see my neighbor’s house.
If you’re looking for omega-3, I don’t reckon it really has to be fish oil does it? I understand there are other things like flax oil that are just as effective. I’ve never had flax burps, personally I like salmon burps because I can imagine I had a nice broiled salmon filet with soy sauce for breakfast.
My suggestion is use flax seed or oil.
Does it have to be Omacor? Can you try an over-the-counter brand, and see if that affects you differently?
I get fish-oil burps when I take the (OTC) capsules on an empty stomach, or just before bedtime. If I take them with a meal, or earlier in the evening, no problems.
I suggesy you freeze the fish oil tablets, so they dissolve in your intestine and you avoid the fish burb. I read that idea in Men’s Health magazine.
Brush your teeth afterwards. I find this helps with my coffee breath.
Although, I don’t know how often you burp, so maybe it’s not that feasible.
Do you take your fish oil on an empty stomach? I too got that fishy taste after taking the capsule, so eventually I took them before meals, most of the taste disappeared.
Freeze the oil? This sounds a bit, er, fishy to me. A convenient property of fish oil (at least if you’re a cold-water fish) is that it only freezes at extremely low temps. I’m not sure your kitchen freezer would do it.
I think the idea is to freeze the “membrane” that contains the fish oil (I have no idea what the actual capsule is made out of). The oil may remain liquid, but the capsule will dissolve slower, so it’s farther along in the digestion process before the oil is released. Again, I read this in a magazine as a cure for “fish burp.” Personally, I take fish oil at night with a meal, and I don’t really notice the taste.
Thanks for the peppermint extract idea. I’ll try it tomorrow.
I’ve tried the “curiously strong” Altoids, but they aren’t ideally effective because I still get the fish burps and so I end up with a mixture of Altoids and fish tastes, which is not something I would recommend. The peppermint extract idea may work better because I imagine the extract is swallowed, allowing the mixture to combine in the stomach rather than the mouth.
teehee. I thought about phrasing my OP with the words “bad taste in the mouth”, but then I figured that was redundant because where else would a bad taste be? I didn’t think about the neighbors…
Thanks for the info about alternatives. I’m a bit puzzled, though, because my doctor is very sensitive to minimizing his patients’ expenditure on medicines yet he still advised me to take Omacor/Lovaza even though it’s a ridiculously expensive source of Omega-3s. The manufacturer processes and purifies it very extensively to eliminate mercury and other toxins and to adjust it to what they consider an ideal proportion of various elements, which is the justification for the steep price. (See No other omega-3 product is like LOVAZA™)
My guess for why he insists on this product is probably that, while it appears to me to be heavily processed from fish oil rather than from other sources of Omega-3s, the only peer-reviewed, properly controlled studies that clearly demonstrate a significant reduction in triglycerides were all based on Omacor/Lovaza.
I did try at least 2 different brands of over-the-counter fish-oil capsules, but they were even worse for me in this regard, even though I always took/take these or Omacor/Lovaza half-way through a meal in hopes of “embedding” them with food.
Hey, that sounds promising. I’ll try it!
Oh, one thing I forgot to point out is that “fish burps” are a documented side-effect of Omacor/Lovaza, so I suppose that the problem just might be worse than with OTC, non-processed fish oil in this regard.
Also FYI, the name change from Omacor to Lovaza was to minimize pharmacists’ confusion btween Omacor and a very different medication named Amicar.
I switched to “Enteric Coated” fish oil caps for just this reason. It does seem to help.