Krill Oil

Omega-3 fatty acids are all around us. Yet few of us get enough of them.

Even those people who think that fats are bad make an exception for the omega-3s. These polyunsaturated fats are essential to our good heart health, something that everyone with diabetes needs to take seriously. The most important of the omega-3s are eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), and alpha-linolenic acid (ALA).

Although our bodies can't synthesize omega-3s, they can convert some ALA into EPA and DHA. But our bodies have a limited ability to convert ALA into EPA and DHA.

And the omega-3s in our diet compete with the omega-6 fatty acids for space in cell membranes and for the attention of various enzymes. This means that too much omega-6 in our diet is just as much of a problem as too little omega-3.

Most of us think of fish as the source of omega-3s. But fish get them from plants. Most of the omega-3s in our bodies ultimately come from green leaves. On the other hand, most of our omega-6s come from seeds. This means simply that this lack of balance ultimately boils down to overconsuming seed oils and underconsuming greens. We worsen this imbalance when we eat grain-fed animals.

"No one knows what the optimal ratio in the diet is for these two families of fats," writes Susan Allport in The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed from the Western Diet and What We Can Do to Replace Them (University of California Press, 2006). But "humans evolved under conditions in which they were about equal."

Now, however, the current ratio in the United States is about 10 times the amount of omega-6s in our diet as omega-3s. We can trace a lot of this imbalance to the ratio of omega-3s to omega-6s in the cooking and salad oils that we use.

Even everybody's favorite, olive oil, has a ratio of 12 times the amount of omega-6 to omega-3, according to data from the USDA Nutrient Data Laboratory that Allport cites in her book. Canola oil has a better ratio, 2:1 (twice as much omega-6 as omega-3), but that ratio is still way out of balance. Soybean is 7:1, butter is 9:1, corn oil is 46:1, sesame oil is 137:1, and cottonseed oil is 259:1.

But that's not the worst balance. This invidious distinction goes to safflower oil because it totally lacks omega-3s, giving it a ratio of infinity to 1.

If all those oils are mostly omega-6, then where can we find foods with a positive omega-3 to omega-6 ratio? It's actually easy when we look for them.

They are abundant in the green leaves of plants, fish and fish oil supplements, omega-3 enriched eggs, flax, chia, wakame, and krill. We all know most of those sources, right? But krill?

In fact, krill oil has been available since 2003, when a Canadian company, Neptune Technologies and Bioressources Inc., launched its patented extraction of Neptune Krill Oil (NKO) from Antarctic krill, a shrimp-like crustacean. But until I read the newsletter from Dr. Michael Eades, who wrote Protein Power and The Protein Power Lifeplan with his wife Dr. Mary Dan Eades, I had discounted the hyperbole of some other advocates, who -- unlike Dr. Eades -- make money from selling it.