Shark liver oil is an oil obtained from the livers of sharks. It has been used for centuries as a folk remedy to promote the healing of wounds and as a remedy for respiratory tract and digestive system problems. It is still promoted as a dietary supplement, and additional claims have been made that it can treat other maladies such as cancer, HIV, radiation illness, swine flu and the common cold. To date, none of these claims have been medically validated and shark liver oil (alone) is not a medication prescribed or utilized by American physicians. However, it is a component of some moisturizing skin lotions, and some hemorrhoid medications.
Many fish maintain buoyancy with swim bladders. However sharks lack swim bladders, and maintain their buoyancy instead with large livers that are full of oil. This stored oil may also function as a nutrient when food is scarce. Deep sea sharks are usually targeted for their oil, because the livers of these species can weight up to 20% of their total weight.
Read more about Shark Liver Oil: Medicinal Use, Shark Oil Barometers
Famous quotes containing the words shark, liver and/or oil:
“I have often told you that I am that little fish who swims about under a shark and, I believe, lives indelicately on its offal. Anyway, that is the way I am. Life moves over me in a vast black shadow and I swallow whatever it drops with relish, having learned in a very hard school that one cannot be both a parasite and enjoy self-nourishment without moving in worlds too fantastic for even my disordered imagination to people with meaning.”
—Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–1948)
“A life-worshipper’s philosophy is comprehensive.... He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death ... and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Friendship and money: oil and water.”
—Mario Puzo, U.S. author, screenwriter, and Francis Ford Coppola, U.S. director, screenwriter. Michael Corleone (Al Pacino)