Being Smart—A Fishy Matter of Fat

Abstract

You are what you eat. Many of the molecular building blocks that our body is made of are supplied from the diet. Our food consists of protein, sugar, and fat (in addition to a lot of important minerals). These food molecules are broken down, e.g., to amino acids and fatty acids, and put together again to produce precisely the kind of proteins and lipids that we need in order to build our cells and to maintain their specific functions. In the case of lipids, our body has systems that are capable of transforming some fatty acids from the food into other fatty acids that are the ones needed for the construction of certain lipids. For example it is common for animals that they are able to transform saturated fatty acids into mono-unsaturated fatty acids with a double bond in position 9 along the carbon chain, whereas they lack the ability to make unsaturated bonds in positions 12 and 15. Only plants have the capability of doing so. The transformation in plants is facilitated by a host of enzymes, so-called elongation and desaturation enzymes, which can extend the length of a fatty-acid chains and increase the number of double bonds (C=C) on the chains.