OMEGA 3 - from Algae 170mg DHA per serving (2 Capsules)
Supplement details
Product Name: Algae omega 3
9 parts Omega 3 and 1 part uptake blend
What is it? Omega-3 DHA from algae - Schizochytrium limacinum
DHA is a long-chain omega-3 fat, and this is where it actually comes from. Fish don't make it, they eat things that ate microscopic marine organisms that do.
Schizochytrium is one of those organisms: a single-celled marine microbe, technically not a plant or a true alga at all but a thraustochytrid, a group closer to kelp and diatoms than to anything green, that lives on decaying mangrove leaves and seagrass in warm coastal water and stores up to a third of its weight as oil, most of it DHA.
What's in this capsule is the whole dried organism, milled to a powder, not an oil pressed out of it, so there's no liquid fat to go rancid and no gelatin softgel to hold it. T
Why the name. "Omega-3" is chemists' shorthand for where the first double bond sits in the fatty-acid chain, counting from the tail end, the "omega" end, last letter of the Greek alphabet.
Ralph Holman at the University of Minnesota coined the term in the 1960s. DHA is docosahexaenoic acid: docosa- twenty-two carbons, hexa- six double bonds. Schizochytrium is Greek for "split vessel", from the way the cell divides; limacinum is Latin for slug-like, after the way it creeps.
How long people have used it. DHA as food: as long as anyone has lived by the sea. Coastal and island peoples everywhere, the Inuit, the Japanese, Pacific islanders, Norwegian and Scottish fishing communities, have eaten diets heavy in oily fish and shellfish for thousands of years.
It was the Inuit diet that got two Danish doctors, Hans Olaf Bang and Jørn Dyerberg, on a boat to Greenland in 1970 to draw blood from people who ate almost nothing but seal and fish.
Their papers through the 1970s are where the modern interest in omega-3 starts. As a named molecule DHA goes back to the 1930s and 40s, when it was first identified in fish oils and then in the fats of the brain and retina.
Getting it from algae instead of fish is much more recent, and it's a NASA story. In the early 1980s Martin Marietta, the American aerospace firm, was researching microalgae for the space programme, as a way of making oxygen and food on long missions.
When the contract ended, a few of the scientists left in 1985 and set up Martek Biosciences in Maryland to keep working on what they'd found: that certain marine microbes made oils rich in DHA.
Their DHA went into infant formula in Europe in the mid-1990s and the US in 2002, and today almost every tin of baby milk on earth has algal DHA in it. Schizochytrium itself was picked up separately by a company in Colorado, OmegaTech, in the 1990s; the strain that most of the industry uses, S. limacinum SR21, was isolated by Japanese researchers in 1998 from mangrove leaves on Yap Island in Micronesia.
Who used it. For DHA generally: every fishing culture in history has eaten it.
Which part of the plant is used ? Algae
Strength / Specs ? 10% DHA
What exactly do we get ? Each serving (x2 capsules) has 1,704mg Schizochytrium limacinum (Algae) which gives us 170mg of Omega DHA and 190mg uptake blend (1:1:1) Black Pepper 10%, Ginger 5%, Cumin 10/1. All premium extracts. We sell all of our products in monthly packs so it's easy to buy and rebuy things that help us.
