Monday, October 12, 2009

Flax, The Beginning.

This month we celebrate the 21st anniversary of the birth of "Flax" seed oil. Prior to this time in 1988 all oil extracted from the flax plant, or linum usitatissimum, was referred to as linseed oil. All of Dr Budwigs work referred to "cold pressed linseed oil". The word flax had never been used in relation to the plant byproduct. The problem that occured when my company, BioNatures, began importing the oil into the US for the first time related to the name. You see linseed oil was the boiled, trans fatty, indigestable, inedible version of the oil which was, and is, used as a drying agent for paint! You can imagine what the FDA had to say when a product tried to cross the border with the name "C-Leinosan cold pressed Linseed Oil" and was labeled for human consumption. Their response was, no way! So with 10,000 bottles of oil being sent back to Flora Oils in Canada, we had to think of something fast. Our ewfforts to convince the government that this oil was different were in vain. We explained to them that the same oil was being sold in health food stores in Canada and that the Canadian Food and drug inspected the plant that makes it. To no avail. They simply said, unnapproved food. I contacted a specialist in FDA law and asked what we had to do to convince the government this was a safe food that had been consumed in this form all over the world for thousands of years. The answer was...staggering. the amount of studies and red tape that had to be submitted was mind boggling and would clearly take months if not years to prepare. My staff and I began to brainstorm. One night I woke up and sat straight up in bed. It was one of those "aha" moments that changed my life forever. The next day we commissioned Flora to print all new labels with the name C-Leinosan Cold Pressed Flaxseed Oil" and send the shipment back through. Sure enoiugh it came in without a hitch and from that moment on a new product was born into the world. In the next installment, how Barleans Oil was born.

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