Fish oil and polystyrene
On Tuesday’s news on TV was a report that a couple in Taiwan was shocked to discover that their fish oil supplement could melt styrofoam. Then viewers were shown a patch of defaced foam. However the report didn’t offer conclusive details for this phenomenon.
And since I’m taking fish oil supplement (from Blackmore), I MUST see for myself if mine does the same thing or not! But before anything else I got online hoping to find some clarification, and I realised that this piece of news isn’t new. Many people were also puzzled by this and had already been posting their questions on the web since a few years ago.
One website explains that the majority of fish oils sold today are not natural triglycerides (TGs), but are made up of concentrates of ethyl esters (EEs), which are unnaturally derived by reacting free fatty acids with ethanol (eww!). The site suggested that a simple way to test if a fish oil is in TG or EE form is to put the oil in a polystyrene cup. EE fish oil will eat through in just a few minutes and then a significant leakage can be seen after 10 minutes. Natural TG fish oil may show leakage in very small amounts after 2-3 hours.
In my own experiment, the sides and bottom of the cup began to feel oily after about 3 hours. But no fierce meltdown.
As to why fish oil leaks through polystyrene, this and this helped to offer some explanation.
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