Aker BioMarine: Exploring research on krill oil’s muscle health benefits in weight loss
02 Sep 2025 | Aker BioMarine
Krill oil supplementation during a fasting diet helps to reduce the decline of muscle mass and strength, which is commonly associated with losing weight. We discuss the study’s findings with Line Johnsen, Ph.D., senior vice president of Human Health & Nutrition R&D at Aker BioMarine, who highlights several proposed mechanisms that might explain how krill oil supports muscle function. She also points to follow-up research on krill oil’s muscle health benefits in weight management and healthy aging.
This is Yolanda van Gaal from Nutrition Insights.
Today I'm meeting Doctor Lena Johnson, who is a senior vice president in human health and nutrition Research and Development at Acre BioMarine, and we'll be talking about the outcomes of a recent study on krills, krill oil's benefits in muscle health during weight loss.
Thank you so much for joining me today, Lena.
Happy, I'm happy to, to hear from you.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
I'm looking forward to talk to you.
Awesome.
And I, I wanted to, cause I have a few questions that I wanted to ask you about this study, and first one really is more to understand, how the company or how you are leveraging the findings of this recent study on krill oil, which has been shown to have some benefits in muscle health.
And, is there anything you will integrate it into product messaging, R&D roadmaps?
What, what can you tell us about that?
Yes.
So first of all, we are very excited about these findings, and believe they are valuable for many conversations currently taking place on weight management, muscle preservation, and healthy aging across the industry.
And with the GLP drugs blooming, solutions that can maintain muscle mass during weight loss are seen as the next frontier, both, medically and commercially.
So for us, it's important to take these key findings, especially when promising, as seen in this study, and translate that together, of course, with our marketing department, to value propos, propositions and concepts, which again, marketing and sales will take to inspire our customer and prospects.
So that is how it normally works.
And we have been working with the University of Glasgow for many years, and the focus has been mostly on muscle health.
So it's muscle muscle health related to aging, sport, nutrition, and now weight management, and this is work that will continue also in the future.
Awesome, I'm, I'm really curious because if you could talk a bit about the mechanisms that might explain or could potentially explain how krill oil actually supports muscle function during weight loss.
Yes, very good question, and I think to do that, I will have to be a little bit more technical, and I think it's important to understand that krill oil, is a unique, Delivery of EPA and DHA because they are bound, so that is the fatty acids, they are bound in a phospholipid form, and most of those phospholipids are what we call phosphatidylcholine.
So in addition to having these omega 3s in phospholipid form, you also have the essential nutrient choline.
So exactly how ridle oil contributes to these kind of beneficial effects, it's not fully understood yet, but we believe that there are several kinds of key mechanisms behind it that could explain it.
So first, it is known that the, long chain omega-threes, can stimulate, muscle protein synthesis.
So this is important both for maintaining muscle mass and also to grow muscle mass.
And secondly, you have the anti-inflammatory effect.
So, obese and overweight are often associated with what we call low grade inflammation.
Which again can have a negative impact when it comes to maintaining muscle mass.
So what we actually also saw in this last study was that krill oil has the potential to significantly increase, sorry, decrease inflammatory markers like TNF alpha and CRP.
And then you have mitochondrial function, which also can be improved by krill oil, which again has a positive effect on muscle and muscle health.
And the last one is, what we call, a neuromuscular function, where we believe that krill oil can have a positive impact in several ways.
And it also kind of the coalline part might be important here since coline is a precursor for acetylcholine, which again is important for neurotran transmission.
So several kind of angles, to this.
OK, really interesting to hear about that and , you already mentioned that you're working with the University of Glasgow to do, you know, more research.
Can you, shed some light on what kind of follow-up research we may expect sort of based on these findings, whether that's looking at the mechanisms you just described or, looking at dosage adjustments, delivery formats for the krill oil that Ecobiomine currently offers, with just to enhance the usability and performance or weight management.
Yes, so, there are actually quite a lot of clinical trials going on right now, and those are kind of, having different focus areas.
So that is everything from doing kind of a deeper, exploration of the mechanistics aside to really understand what the kind of the reason behind the effects, and then we have, for example, clinical.
Trials going on, looking more into the sport nutrition segment, for example, muscle recovery after exercise.
So there's a whole range of ongoing studies and some of them are at a different dose, compared to what we have previously investigated.
OK, interesting.
And I'm also curious because I remember that in the study, it was about weight loss, but it was not specifically people using GLP-1 drugs to lose weight.
And I'm really curious, is there, are there any plans from Ecobiarine in research exploring the synergy of crude oil with GLP-1 therapies for metabolic health as?
Yes, we are actually now exploring the possibility to set up a trial where we will include the patients on GLP1 therapy.
And that is specifically to see will krillo work in this setting and also maintain muscle, muscle mass when you have kind of even more pronounced, weight loss.
So hopefully, we'll be able to kick that off in the beginning of 2026.
That's interesting.
OK, I'm looking forward to that.
I'm also curious because of course we know that krill oil can be used, has many different health benefits.
So I'm curious, can you talk a bit about beyond weight loss interventions, to what extent super krill oil of ecobaymarine can support aging populations in maintaining muscle strength or other areas.
Yeah, no, I think this is a really important.
Area.
We know that the number of old people are increasing and we know that as we age we do lose muscle mass again that leads to more falls, more fractures, more accidents.
So this is definitely an area that we are focused on and back into, let me see, 2022, there was another publication coming out from the University of Glasgow.
Which was published in Clinical Nutrition, where they actually looked at how krill oil could have an impact on muscle mass in elderly.
So also this was a kind of gold standard clinical trial, randomized placebo controlled trial, and I think they included around 100 and 100 elderly patients.
So they were given either krill oil or placebo for a period of 8 weeks, no, sorry, I think it was 6 months, 6 months.
It was the longest study.
And what they actually found there was that krill oil, could not only improve, the muscle strength, but it also increased the muscle size.
And this was quite surprisingly since these, people were not exercising.
So it was all kind of due to the, the nutrition.
And if you look at the numbers, they might not look that big, but the changes that were observed during those six months, actually equals the difference that you normally see, in a 10 year period.
So you could actually kind of lose a decade going from 65 years to 55 years, when it comes to muscle health.
So that was, very interesting.
Very impressive.
Wow, yeah, great to hear.
And I'm also curious just to round things up, what can you tell us about what's next for ecobimarine and krill oil research or developments or what can you share on that?
Yes, so, I, I will share a couple of things at least.
So, first of all, you have seen that or heard that muscle health is a big exploration area for us within kind of different segments.
So it's poor nutrition, healthy aging, and weight management.
But we're also looking at, for example, healthy aging from different aspects.
In a nematode study, it was shown that krill oil can improve several of the hallmarks of aging.
So this is something that we are continuing to explore also in a clinical setting.
And then there's a whole range of other studies going on on the product development side.
We are now working on kind of the next generation of quillo.
So that is something that will hopefully come in near future.
And then we have also seen that there is a lot of interest around Product, combination specific formulation, so that is also something that we're working on.
And lastly, maybe you can also mention our open innovation program.
So we, I think it's very important that, all the science is not only coming from us, so universities can kind of reach out to us and we can provide them with krill oil capsules and placebo capsules, so they can test out krill oil within their own field of, research.
Very interesting.
Thank you so much, you know, for the insights.
