Just wondering if Krill Oil supplements are any better than fish oil capsules. Do you have any suggestions on the best way to get the benefits of fish without actually eating it?
yummy / Originally posted on DDT in Fish Oil Supplements
Answer:
The longest study I could find done on krill oil was only 3 months in duration, so long-term effectiveness and safety is unknown, but recent short-term studies suggest that krill oil would have comparable bioavailability and metabolic effects.
Krill are lower on the food chain and would be expected to have lower levels of accumulated pollutants, though an upcoming paper in Environmental Pollution suggests that they do take up DDT metabolites and previous work suggests they bioaccumulate pesticides from the seawater.
When it comes to industrial toxins, always seek as low as you can go on the food chain, in this case algae that produce bioequivalent long-chain omega-3′s. Check out videos like Algae-Based DHA vs. Flax and The Problem with Organic Salmon.
As an aside, you never know what you’re going to run into in the medical literature. In looking up krill oil for you I stumbled across a paper in the Journal of Plankton Research published this year (with pictures!) entitled: Ocean-bottom krill sex.
Image Credit: Telemetry9 / Flickr
