Fish oil isnt a vitamin per se. Its literally oil extracted from fish. The pills with the endemic coating get broken down in your intestines so you dont have worry about stomach aches or fish burps. If your pills dont have this coating you probably want to take them when there’s some food in your stomach or with a snack.
>And while we’re at it is their any agreement on how much fish oil to take daily?
Generally people at 2000-4000mg per day of oil or about 1000mg of DHA+EPA. While I dont doubt that fish oil is good for heart patients and people who eat poorly, Im certain a lot of the other benefits are the placebo effect or greatly exaggerated. People who eat pretty well to begin with get a fair amount of Omega-3 naturally. A lot of what I see regarding fish oil lacks control groups or involves small groups. Or it purposely confuses cause vs correlation like “Japanese people live long, they also eat fish, thus fish oils make them live long.”
If you’re me and you take an iron-containing multivitamin on an empty stomach, you vomit within five minutes. I did it three times before I realized what was happening. I buy my multivitamins without iron these days.
I used to buy One-a-Day brand multivitamins, which are bright red capsule-shaped pills. Taking them on an empty stomach always caused a moderate tummy ache for an hour or so, but nothing worse. Tried several store brands, all marked “Compare to One-a-Day®” and all bright red. Same tummy ache.
Switched to Centrum brand, which are sorta pink / caucasian colored. No tummy ache ever. Tried the various store brands like them. Also no tummy ache.
The labelling of which active ingredients are in which appear to be all but identical. Same stuff in the same proportions +/- a couple percent. But if the pill is red, I’m gonna feel like crap.
So consider fillers & colorants as a possible source for the difference between various pills.
This is what happens to me with my regular multivitamin, and it took about the same amount of time… on day two I was starting to worry I was pregnant. :smack: I switched to chewables after that.
/edit: I’ve taken my fish oil capsules on an empty stomach before with no problem other than fish burps, but I usually don’t.
In really simple terms, fat soluble vitamins need to be dissolved in fat to cross the gut wall. If there is no fat in the gut they simply cannot cross the gut wall and are excreted.
What the relevance of fat itself being readily absorbed is remains totally beyond me.
As I said in an earlier post here, an absence of an accompanying dietary fat may decrease the “efficiency” of fat soluble vitamin absorption, but to say that the latter are not absorbed whatsoever in the absence of the former, does not jibe with my cite. And even your very first cite (in the Yahoo search you provided) says that dietary fat must be coingested, “in order (for fat soluble vitamins) to be properly absorbed” (emphasis added).
So, to be sure I’m understanding, are you saying that fat soluble vitamins are NOT absorbed unless accompanied by dietary fat?
In my mind, barring a prolonged fast, or a literally fat-free diet, I would have guessed that there is always enough residual fat in the small bowel (from earlier intake) to facilitate the absorption of a fat soluble vitamin. And, (this is not a disingenuous question, please teach me) but would fat soluble vitamins not be at least partially absorbed even in the total absence of dietary fat anyway, because of the action of things like bile acids, the vitamins’ chemical nature (fat solubility) promoting their uptake by gut cells, and maybe even by mechanical means (emulsification). Thanks.
If you’re only dispute is that, even in the absence of fat, .00001% of the vitamins will still be absorbed, then have it your way. the fact is that the majority of fat soluble vitamins can’t be absorbed without fat being present. They’re wasted.
And no, bile salts don’t help at all. Bile salts solubilise fat. The vitamins are fat soluble, they aren’t fat. If they have no fat to dissolved in they can’t be absorbed. The problem isn’t solubilising the vitamins. The problem is that they need to be incorporated into a lipid micelle to pass through the gut wall. No lipids, no micelles. No micelles, no absorption.