Palm Oil Developments No.49 (Dec 2008) p1-7

A Potential Source of Vitamin E Extracted From Palm Oil for Aquaculture Feeds

NG Wing Keong, WANG Yan , YUEN Kah Hay

The aquaculture industry is currently the fastest growing food production sector in the world. World aquaculture produces about 60 million tones of seafood worth more than USD 70 billion annually (FAO, 2006). Farmed fish accounts for about 50% of all consumed fish in the world, and this percentage is expected to continue to increase due to dwindling catches from capture fisheries. In recent years, technological advances in the aquafeed manufacturing industry have made possible the incorporation of high levels of dietary oils in fish feeds to produce energy-dense diets. Improvements in growth and feed utilization efficiency have been reported in fish due to the protein-sparing effect of dietary lipids. However, feeding high levels of dietary fish oils, which contain a high proportion of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) which are highly susceptible to oxidation, can lead to increase oxidative stress for the fish that can result in pathological conditions (Sakai et al., 1998) and deterioration of fillet quality (Scaife et al., 2000). Farmed fish quality deteriorates rapidly after slaughtering and this affects the shelf-life, storage properties and quality of seafood and surimi-based products. Increases in the lipid content of commercial fish feeds are usually not followed by appropriate antioxidant supplementation in order to maintain normal antioxidant status which further exacerbates the deleterious effects of lipid peroxidation, especially in cellular biomembranes which contain high amounts of PUFA.



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