LOGAN PREDY
Opinions Writer

There comes a time in everyone’s life when you go to the doctor for a check-up and instead of the doctor just glancing at you approvingly as they pass by the room on their way to more important things, they come in and once they stop laughing tell you that there’s something terribly wrong with you.

This time in my life came a few months ago when I went to the doctor to discuss the results of some blood-work that I had done to ensure that my cholesterol medication was working properly. No, I am not 87; high cholesterol runs in my family, thank you very much.

As usual, the doctor said that everything was fine, but then he uttered the word that is feared by every man in a doctor’s office: “but.” To my relief this wasn’t the form of the word with two Ts that implies that it’s time for me to start getting my prostate examined, but it did mean that something was amiss.

Apparently my polyunsaturated fat (“The Fun Fat”) levels were a tad low, so he suggested that I eat more fish. Personally, I have nothing against fish when their parts are in soup or on a plate, but my family generally disagrees. Thus, I needed to find an alternate source of those fishy juices called Omega-3s.

My first idea revolved around eating more of all those foods you see around the grocery stores these days featuring smiling fish, who are happy to share their juices with you, and the word OMEGA-3 used in all caps at least twice per sentence.

My breakfast the next day consisted of toasted smiley fish bread and margarine whose fish logo looked so happy that it would have been insulted had I not eaten it. The taste of this combination of fish-imbued foods is hard to describe without using the words “nasty fish sandwich,” perhaps with some expletives thrown in.

I have already established that I don’t mind eating fish, but having them intrude on my breakfast when they were neither invited nor technically present was not a pleasant experience.

Having not learned my lesson, I proceeded to try out various other foods blessed with Omega-3s, just in case they didn’t happen to taste more like fish than whatever the label said they were supposed to be. Omega-filled yogurt, milk, orange juice and eggs tasted like pollock paste, salmon shake, trout tea and caviar respectively, so this was obviously not the best course of action. Having exhausted my fortified options, I decided to switch to the obvious solution for all ailments: pills.

Omega-3 supplements come in roughly 3.8 billion more varieties than actual fish do, all promising that they’re much better than the ones sullying the property value of the shelf space around them. Instead of choosing the one with the happiest fish logo (since this method had betrayed me before), I decided to go for the absolute cheapest ones. If these pills could have been sold in a soggy cardboard box in a back alley, they would have been, but their nonsensical fish-rating numbers (37,000 picograms of EPDHQA) were roughly the same as the others.

My family started taking the fishy pills every morning and I basically forgot about the whole fish crisis for a while. After two weeks my brother asked if I had been having fish-flavoured burps lately. Giving it some thought, I had to admit that I had indeed been experiencing fish-laden belching, but never thought that it was odd. I’d simply burp, think “Hmm”¦ I wonder when I last had fish,” and continue along my merry way.

The fish pills had betrayed me even more than the deceptively smiley fish bread. Now I wasn’t just experiencing an unwelcome fish flavour in my mouth for the duration of a meal, but for a large part of my day.

I looked up alternative ways of taking Omega-3 supplements, but fish suppositories have unfortunately not yet been invented. Fishy flatulence would probably be much more tolerable (for me anyways) than fish burps, but unfortunately, I may never know.

Now when I go to the store I specifically make sure that there are no fish anywhere near the packaging of the foods I am buying, whether the fish are smiling or not. A missed marketing opportunity in the food industry these days would be to label food as being “Omega Free.” If I saw a margarine that proudly contained no fish at all, I would be all over it like stink on a fish.

Hopefully modern science will soon advance to the point where the flavour of Omega-3 fortified products is not interchangeable with physically licking a fish, but until then I guess I’ll just have to accept my fishy fate or slowly die from a lack of fish. At least my meals will taste like they’re supposed to in the mean time.

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image: Flickr