The Essential Fatty Acids and the Diet of Polar Bears

Abstract

Plasma lipids of polar bears are significant because these bears prefer to consume high quantities of fat; furthermore one population fasts each year for over four months. In this paper plasma lipids of fed polar bears were compared to fasted bears. Fasted bears were hyperlipidemic to fed bears; both were hyperlipidemic to normal human plasma, in respect to cholesterol and triglycerides. In lipoproteins, the HDL (High Density Lipoproteins) triglyceride was very low as in human subjects in both fed and fasted animals. The other two, LDL (Low Density Lipoproteins) and VLDL (Very Low Density Lipoproteins) were consistently higher in fasted bears than in fed bears, and these fasted bears had much higher cholesterol and triglycerides than the fed bears. Since the fed bears seem to be protected against hyperlipidemia, the fatty acid composition of serum lipids was analyzed. The n-3 fatty acids not the n-6 type dominated in fed bears. These n-3 fatty acids (which were not available to fasted bears) seem to protect against high serum lipids. These results seem to support the concept of using fish oil capsules in the human clinic.