There’s something fishy about the taste.
Are you getting enough PUFAs? If you take lýsi every day, you probably are. Lýsi is the Icelandic word for cod liver oil; and it’s extremely popular here in Iceland. PUFAs, on the other hand, are polyunsaturated fatty acids, and anything with a name that long and scientific-sounding just has to be good for you.
Unlike in most of the world, Icelanders have a choice between cod ‘cod liver oil’, coal fish ‘cod liver oil’ and even shark ‘cod liver oil’.
Anyway, the magic oil is such a local institution that many Icelanders react with genuine surprise to find out that theirs is not the only country in which the stuff is available — so maybe keep your mouth shut when you are proudly informed that lýsi is the reason Icelanders “live longer than anyone else in the world”. Keep your mouth shut even tighter when you realise that isn’t even true.
A concise guide to lýsi might look something like this:
- It tastes fishy and oily, but you soon get used to it and may even grow to like it.
- It is reputed to improve your health in almost every way, but is especially good for joints, hearts, skin, brains and nails.
- Purists maintain that the liquid version is much better for you than the capsules; but that might just be hyper-macho snobbery.
- Finally, and possibly most important of all, in the event of household accidents, lýsi is less dangerous than baby oil.
Bottoms up!
More Lýsi: Uncyclopedia | They Make it | They drink it
Previously on Cultural Learnings of Iceland to Make Benefit Glorious Nations of the World: Skyr and Kókómjólk
2 Comments
For some reason there is this big misconception in the Netherlands (we call it levertraan) that it’s being made from whale’s liver…
And then, back in October… they made fools of themselves: http://foksuk.nl/imggif.php?i=/upload/d1289.gif
It translates ‘Fokke & Sukke are going into biological nutrition’ ‘New harvest! New harvest!’ ‘The one and only Icelandic lýsi!’
Nice try, but… no, they missed the point :-)
Sigh… I have to explain this over and over again. But now I can just point them to this article, yes! (And they can directly book a flight while they’re here)
I take the shark one everyday in winter, in pills. In the beginning of the winter I didn’t take it, although an Icelandic friend of mine recommendeded it to me. I thought that maybe it was more about hype than real facts. However, with the cold wind, my skin in my hands started to get a bit bad. So I decided to try it. My friend drinks it straight from the bottle. I tried to do the same and arg… not my kind of flavour exactly, so I went for the pills. We want vanilla-skyr flavoured lýsi!
This is my first winter in Iceland and I haven’t got any cold or flu so far (touch wood!). I usually get one or more colds throughout the winter in Spain (the city where I live is a cold one, it’s not like those tourist places!). So I’d say lýsi works (and maybe Skyr and Kókómjólk too :P).
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