Nutritional treasures found in moose meat, antlers

A scientistin Corner Brook has found a few more important reasons to get your moose each season.

Raymond Thomas and his team havefound evidence of particular types of functional lipids in moose and caribou meat, and in moose antlers, that have shown promise in the treatment of diabetes, inflammation and cardiovascular diseases.

"I've realized from my time herethat moose is very, very popular as part of the Newfoundland landscape for positive and negative reasons, so I decided that I was going to look at the lipid profile of the antlers," said Thomas, whose team is based in the Functional Foods Laboratory on Memorial University's Grenfell campus.

He found three very special compounds: monoacetyldiglycerides,diglycerides and fatty acid esters of hydroxy fatty acids, in both moose and cariboumeat and in moose antlers.

For comparison, a type of red deer in Korea whose antlers are often used in traditional medicine contains only one of those three compounds.

New source could lead to new products

His team's discovery opens up the door for new sources of the lipids for nutraceutical products or for specialized food products.

It could also be a boost for disease specialists.

"They would have new sources of these compounds to see if they have benefit beyond what is currently available."

Though the lipids don't show up in high concentrations, a little goes a long way.

"They're very potentin their bioactivity at low concentrations," he told CBC Radio's On the Go.

Antlers have ahigher concentration of the treasured compoundsthan meat, he said.

Cover story

Thomas and his team published their findings in the open-source chemistry journal Molecules, and their discovery has been chosen as the cover story for the journal's print edition.

Thomas said they published their results in an open-access journal so other scientists could delve into their findings and figure out how tobest use this big nutritional find.

As for he and his team, they've got a few ideas about where they'd like to take these moose molecules, but "as a scientist, you don't really want to throw everything on the table," he said, laughing.

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