GOED braces for supply issues, GOED Exchange
Ellen Schutt, Managing Director, the Global Organization for EPA and DHA Omega-3s, said she can sum up this year’s EPA and DHA omega-3 market in just one word: “supply.” The dominating topic this past year has been concern about the supply of fish oil, specifically from the Peruvian anchovy fishery, the largest supplier to the worldwide dietary supplement industry.
“Earlier this year, a season was canceled in the Peruvian anchovy fishery, which is the largest fishery that supplies supplements. And as a result of that, the supply situation is very tight,” observed Schutt.
Supply aside, GOED has tapped into research based on a clinical study database that it has built that looks at all the human studies on EPA and DHA.
“We purposely did something on brain health because we get questions so often about what the science and our question back to whoever is asking is, well, what are you looking at? Are you looking at depression? Are you looking at mood? Are you looking at cognitive decline? What do you mean when you say ‘brain health?’ So it's pretty broad,” said Schutt. “So if you're doing research on cognitive decline, you might test memory and I might test verbal skills. So you can't easily combine all of the research into one pool of subjects or one successful outcome, so that's what the challenge is. And we wanted to put together this report just to show there's this many studies on depression, there's this many studies on mood, there's this many studies on Alzheimer's, just to kind of give a scoping overview of what the science says and then figure out where the research gaps are.”
Additionally, Schutt said she is looking forward to GOED Exchange, taking place in Athens, Greece, January 23-25.
“Our event is really unique because we’re trying to bring in different topics or speakers from outside the industry to really give everyone in the audience food for thought and we hope that they leave there having learned something,” said Schutt.
