nutrition
Today, we often hear talk of danger-
ous stomach fat. By that they mean your waist-
line and the fat you have around your stomach
and intestines. This kind of fat is the most harm-
ful to our health. Anje Höper, a Medical Biology
Research Fellow at UiT, gave mice that were on
a fatty diet copepod oil as a dietary supplement.
Calanus finmarchicus is the species of copepod
from which this oil was produced, and when the
mice ate this oil daily, they got thinner.
“Not only was the amount of body fat
reduced, but the fat cells in the mice also got
smaller. The so-called low-grade inflammation
that is characteristic of fatty tissue with large fat
cells was significantly reduced, suggesting that
the cells function more normally,” says Höper,
who has had her research published in the
British Journal of Nutrition
.
Höper had 80 mice in her study and they
were divided into four groups:
• Mice that received normal mouse feed.
• Mice that received fatty mouse feed.
• Mice that received a small dose of copepod
oil along with fatty mouse feed.
• Mice that received fatty mouse feed but were
only given copepod oil after seven weeks on
the diet.
The mice stopped putting on weight
so quickly
“Up to week seven, all the mice who ate the fatty
feed developed fairly similarly. They weighed
around 30 grams at that point, but then there
was a change in the two groups that were given
copepod oil,” says the Research Fellow. She
explains that the mice stopped putting on weight
so quickly. Their weight curve evened out more,
while the mice that received the same diet but
without the oil, continued to gain weight.
Höper weighed the mice over a period of
27 weeks and, at the end of her study, the “oil
mice” weighed 42 grams, and the “fatty-diet
When laboratory mice on a fatty diet were given copepod oil as a
dietary supplement, interesting things started to happen.
Text: Elisabeth Øvreberg
Mice lose
weight with oil
44
labyrint
•
research magazine
from
u
i
t
the
arctic
university
of
norway
