What's the Deal with Fish Oil?

Re:What's the Deal with Fish Oil? by alecco on Thursday December 17, 2009 @12:00AM (#1000441)

And the funny thing is the Omega-3 oil in question comes actually from algae and not fish. I bet it's even easier to get it directly from the source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docosahexaenoic_acid

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Re:What's the Deal with Fish Oil? by tokenadult on Thursday December 17, 2009 @12:23AM (#1000472)

I bet it's even easier to get it directly from the source.

I think in terms of what is economical for food production and what is bioavailable to human eaters, that is not the case yet today. Scientists are working on that, I have read elsewhere.

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Re:What's the Deal with Fish Oil? by evgen on Thursday December 17, 2009 @01:07AM (#1000522)

Soon it will be even easier to get. The new GMO coming down the pike is a soybean that produces omega-3 via SDA (converted to EPA by humans once ingested) which is a more efficient conversion process than the ALA -> EPA process that most other botanical sources provide.

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Re:What's the Deal with Fish Oil? by dejb on Thursday December 17, 2009 @01:54AM (#1000580)

> I think in terms of what is economical for food production and what is bioavailable to human eaters

I've been taking Algae based DHA supplements for a while. The consensus seems to be that it should work just as well as DHA from fish oil but so far there are no studies using this form so it isn't 100% certain. The cost is somewhat more than fish oil (maybe 2 or 3 times the prices) although I'm sure that is mostly because it is a niche product. There are also version with both DHA and EPA but they are a fair bit more expensive and the conversion of ALA to EPA is generally viewed as good enough for flax seed oil to be used for EPA.

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Re:What's the Deal with Fish Oil? by alecco on Thursday December 17, 2009 @07:11AM (#1000855)

There are studies with pure DHA, EPA, and ALA. The source shouldn't matter the result of those studies.

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Re:What's the Deal with Fish Oil? by dejb on Thursday December 17, 2009 @08:42AM (#1000976)

Thanks it's good to hear.

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