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Seal Oil Research Paper

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The Benefits of Seal Oil

Walking down the aisles of your local drugstore, you are bound to see rows and rows of supplements and vitamins. Many would be curious about them and their touted super health benefits, but few would actually spend the money to try one of these supplements. In some cultures, these supplements are ingested as part of a daily, natural diet, leading researchers to find why these cultures have lower instances of certain diseases. For example, villages in Northern Alaska have an incredibly low instances of heart diseases, despite having predominantly fatty diets. Researchers have found this to be due to a diet rich in fish and seal [8]. Because I am interested in village medicine in Alaska as a career, and my majors are Biochemistry and Environmental and Outdoor Education, I will detail the effects of seal oil. I am going to discuss how the structure of seal oil and unsaturated …show more content…

Unsaturated fatty acids are characterized with having at least one carbon double bonded with another carbon, losing the normal bond with hydrogen and the corresponding hydrogen. The number of double bonds, hydrogens, and carbons differ in structure of different types of fatty acids and cause the difference in function between the fatty acids. But even though most fatty acids are different from each other due to structure and function, all unsaturated fatty acids do have some things in common. They all enter the cell via the membrane and increase the fluidity of the plasma membrane, increasing overall cell health, and they all form unsaturated fats [3]. Unsaturated fats are made up of many different strands of different types of fatty acid. The type of unsaturated fatty acid I will be talking about today is an omega-3 fatty acid made up of three different types of fatty

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