- (intense music)
- And then he said to me that our one problem is that
we've got almost a fifth of the fish, 20% of the fish, is--
we don't have a market for, it's the fish guts.
You know, because this is a controlled fishery,
I always feel bad that we're losing some value.
I just don't know what to do with fish guts,
and no one really wants to buy it.
And so, then I asked him, well, so what's in your fish guts?
And he said, well what do you mean what's in it?
I said, like, what are the molecules in there?
He goes, Jeff, you gotta be kidding me,
I mean, like, I'm a fisherman, not a chemist.
And he said, well I am a chemist.
- (laughs) Yeah.
Why don't you send me some of your frozen fish guts
and lets see what's in it.
And that kind of started the relationship.
- What's in the fish guts?
- So the truck backed up one day
with these 50 pound slabs of fish guts to my lab
and freaked out my lab people,
it was a little more than we thought.
But, anyway, we did the analysis,
and it turned out we found some extraordinary things
in the oils of the-- particularly the livers,
which represent about 17-20% of the weight
of the cod is livers.
- 17%, 20%, the liver.
- Huge, huge organ in the cod. - Wow!
- Because the cod is processing so many things
and it's exposed to so many hostile things
that the liver, which is both a digestive
and a metabolic organ, but it's also an immune organ,
so it's working overtime to do its job.
So what we found in that liver when we processed the oil
was ingredients that had never been seen before
in any other cod liver oil.
And these bioactives have a name called
pro-resolving mediators, or PRM,
its pro-resolving mediators.
So they are really very powerful immune modulators
in terms of the inflammation process.
And they help to arrest inflammation,
in other words, put the breaks on inflammation,
and restore proper recovery.
And it turns out that they are present in very high levels
in certain areas where immune function is very active.
Like in white blood cells.
White blood cells are our immune defense military,
our militia.
And our white blood cells produce these
as part of their process of both,
regulating immunity, and controlling inflammation.
They're also found, and this is very interesting,
in mothers breast milk, and you might say
well why in mothers breast milk?
Remember, when an infant is born,
its immune system is very naive and it's very vulnerable
to all sorts of things that might happen
'cause it doesn't have an adaptive immune system
that's been developed yet.
It helps to both initiate the infants immune system
and to provide protection against infection.
So we now recognize that these are extraordinary
important, like in post surgical healing,
in lung diseases, in various types of infections.
And our body is continually producing them,
if it's working well.
Now, the problem is that to make these materials,
the body has to have a pretty adept immune system
in terms of its function, and it also needs to have
the proper starting materials.
And the starting materials are not only EPA and DHA,
the omega three fatty acids,
but also, some of these other down stream materials
that are 18-Hydroxy and DHA and so forth,
I won't get into the specifics.
But these are the things that we found in our cod liver oil
that we had generated through this very unique process
in Alaska and, so, we started to say
I think we really have discovered something
that's never been seen before.
So, when we started looking at the levels,
and this required us to develop new analytical technique
'cause this was a whole new branch of chemistry basically.
As we got the analytical methods developed
with researchers around the world, Germany and elsewhere,
we started to recognize that the levels
that were in our cod liver oil were not just, kind of like,
well, so small it wouldn't make a difference.
They were really levels that were found
in mothers breast milk.
They were the levels that the body would make
to respond to immune challenges,
like inflammation or infection.
So now, we really started to get excited
because now we say well, gee, we have an oil that--
it's tasteless, it's odorless,
it has no degradation products,
and it has high levels of EPA, DHA.
It has the natural vitamin D in its (mumbles),
the natural vitamin A in its (mumbles).
And it has these pro-resolving mediators.