Palmitoleic acid is an omega-7 fatty acid: a 16-carbon monounsaturated fat with one double bond seven carbons from the end of its chain, written C16:1 n-7. Your body makes it from other fats, and a handful of foods, led by macadamia nuts and sea buckthorn berries, supply it directly.
Here is the part the chemical catalogues at the top of the search results never mention. Much of the palmitoleic acid in your blood right now was never eaten. Your liver and fat tissue make it. In a study of 3,630 American adults, the lifestyle factors linked with higher blood palmitoleic acid were body weight and intake of carbohydrate, protein and alcohol. This guide explains what the fat is, where it comes from in food, how a puree differs from a capsule, and what research does and does not show. It is part of our complete sea buckthorn guide.
What is palmitoleic acid?
Fats are chains of carbon atoms. Palmitoleic acid has 16 of them. Between two of those carbons sits a single double bond, which puts a kink in the chain and makes it a monounsaturated fat, the same family as the oleic acid in olive oil. Count from the far end of the chain, the omega end, and that double bond sits at carbon seven. That is all "omega-7" means: where the bond is, not what the fat does.
The shape matters in practice. Monounsaturated fats stay liquid at cooler temperatures than saturated fats, which is why olive oil pours and butter does not. For the broader family, read monounsaturated fat, explained.
What is another name for palmitoleic acid?
You will see it written several ways: cis-9-hexadecenoic acid, (9Z)-hexadec-9-enoic acid, palmitoleate (its salt form in the body), 16:1n-7, and on supplement labels simply omega-7. Palmitoleic acid is the main member of the omega-7 family. The other one you will meet is vaccenic acid, found in dairy fat and, in smaller amounts, in sea buckthorn pulp.
Palmitic acid vs palmitoleic acid: not the same fat
The names are one syllable apart, and people confuse them constantly. Palmitic acid is saturated, with no double bonds, and it is the most common saturated fat in the diet, found in palm oil, meat and dairy. Palmitoleic acid is what you get when an enzyme called stearoyl-CoA desaturase 1 adds a double bond to palmitic acid. Your body does this conversion itself, mainly in the liver and fat tissue, as Frigolet and Gutiérrez-Aguilar describe in their 2017 review in Advances in Nutrition.
So when people ask whether palmitic acid is good or bad, they are asking about a different fat. The general advice on palmitic acid is the general advice on saturated fat: the US Dietary Guidelines recommend keeping saturated fat under 10 percent of daily calories.
Your body makes it too
Because the body builds palmitoleic acid on its own, your blood level is not a score of how much omega-7 you ate. In the Cardiovascular Health Study, Mozaffarian and colleagues (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2010) found that higher body weight, carbohydrate intake, protein intake and alcohol were each linked with higher blood palmitoleic acid. The associations with health markers ran in mixed directions: higher levels went with less LDL and more HDL cholesterol, but also with higher triglycerides and, in men, more insulin resistance. This was observational research on blood levels, not a test of any food.
That is why this fat is so easy to misquote. A headline about blood palmitoleic acid may be describing how much the body is making, not anything a food did.
What foods are high in palmitoleic acid?
Here are the everyday sources, using USDA FoodData Central values converted to usual serving sizes, plus sea buckthorn pulp oil from the Yang and Kallio analysis.
| Food | Usual serving | Palmitoleic acid per serving | Per 100 g |
|---|---|---|---|
| Macadamia nuts, raw | 28 g (a small handful) | About 3.6 g | 13.0 g |
| Salmon, Atlantic, farmed, raw | 100 g | About 0.8 g | 0.79 g |
| Avocado, raw | 100 g (about half) | About 0.7 g | 0.70 g |
| Anchovy, European, raw | 100 g | About 0.4 g | 0.40 g |
| Olive oil | 1 tbsp (13.5 g) | About 0.17 g | 1.26 g |
| Butter, salted | 1 tbsp (14 g) | About 0.13 g | 0.96 g |
| Sardines, canned in oil, drained | 100 g | About 0.2 g | 0.22 g |
| Sea buckthorn pulp oil | Not a food serving | 12 to 39 percent of the oil | Varies by berry |
| Human Renaissance pouch | 30 mL | About 233 mg omega-7 | Not listed per 100 g |
Swipe the table sideways on a phone. USDA values are for the listed food; the Human Renaissance row is our per-pouch omega-7 figure.
Plainly: a small handful of macadamia nuts carries far more palmitoleic acid than a pouch of sea buckthorn. If grams of this one fat were the only goal, macadamias would win, and that handful also brings about 200 calories. The fish sources come with omega-3; the plant sources do not come with the fishy aftertaste. For the full ranking, see omega-7 foods ranked and macadamia oil vs sea buckthorn.
Sea buckthorn: why pulp oil and seed oil are different products
Sea buckthorn is the plant source people mean when they talk about omega-7, and the detail most labels skip is where in the berry it sits. Yang and Kallio at the University of Turku found palmitoleic acid made up 12.1 to 39.0 percent of the oil in the pulp and peel, and was practically absent from the seed oil (Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2001). The seed oil is mostly omega-3 and omega-6 instead.
So a "sea buckthorn oil" capsule can carry a lot of omega-7 or almost none, depending on which oil is inside. Read the label for pulp or fruit oil. We compare the two in sea buckthorn pulp oil vs seed oil.
Puree vs capsule: what you actually get
A capsule gives you a measured dose of oil and nothing else. That is useful if you want a known number of milligrams of one fat. It leaves behind everything water-soluble in the berry, including vitamin C, which does not dissolve in oil.
Whole-berry puree keeps the pulp oil inside the fruit it came from, next to the berry's vitamin C, flavonoids and carotenoids. Human Renaissance sea buckthorn puree contains 190+ naturally occurring compounds, omega 3, 6, 7 and 9, 201 mg of vitamin C per pouch (223% NRV), 0 g sugar and 5,640 hand-picked berries per box. Within that, one 30 mL pouch carries about 233 mg of omega-7, from 94 berries picked wild on the Tibetan Plateau, above 3,000 metres, and in Inner Mongolia. Capsules and puree are compared directly in sea buckthorn puree vs capsules.
What are the health benefits of palmitoleic acid? What research has and has not shown
This is where most pages overreach, so here is the evidence sorted by type.
Cell and animal studies
Researchers have studied palmitoleic acid as a possible lipokine, a fat released by fat tissue that may act as a signal to other organs. The idea comes largely from cell and mouse work, reviewed by Frigolet and Gutiérrez-Aguilar in 2017. In one widely cited study, Bolsoni-Lopes and colleagues (Lipids in Health and Disease, 2014) found that palmitoleic acid increased glucose uptake in mouse fat cells in a dish and in mice given it by tube. These results are real, and they are about cells and mice. They are not evidence that any food changes blood sugar in people.
Observational studies in people
The Mozaffarian cohort above tracked blood levels, not diets. The links it found ran both ways, and blood levels mostly reflected what the body was making.
Human trials
Controlled human trials of palmitoleic acid or sea buckthorn oil are few and small, and none tested sea buckthorn puree. In a 2020 dosing trial in the Journal of Nutrition, Huang and colleagues gave 13 metabolically healthy adults two sea buckthorn oils, one unmodified and one enriched in trans-palmitoleic acid, at rising doses for three weeks each. Blood levels of the matching fats rose moderately, and no significant effects appeared on blood glucose, insulin or lipids, though the trial was not designed to detect them. One more thing worth knowing: a 2014 trial of purified palmitoleic acid that was widely quoted online was retracted by the Journal of Clinical Lipidology in 2021. If a page leans on it, read that page with care.
The honest summary: palmitoleic acid is a genuinely interesting fat with promising laboratory research and very little human trial evidence. There is no officially authorised health claim for omega-7. For how it sits next to the omega-3s, read omega-7 vs omega-3.
How much palmitoleic acid do you need?
There is no official requirement, because palmitoleic acid is not an essential fatty acid. Your body makes it. That separates it from omega-3 alpha-linolenic acid and omega-6 linoleic acid, which you have to eat. Eating omega-7 foods is a choice about the foods themselves, and the best reason to choose them is everything else they carry.
Cis and trans palmitoleic acid
The palmitoleic acid your body makes, and the kind in sea buckthorn and macadamias, is the cis form. A trans form also exists, found mainly in dairy and ruminant fat. It is natural, not the industrial trans fat from partially hydrogenated oils, and researchers use it in blood tests as a marker of dairy fat intake. If you read about "trans-palmitoleic acid", it is describing dairy fat, not a berry.
How to add omega-7 foods this week
Step 1: swap one snack for a small handful of macadamia nuts. It is the most concentrated whole-food source there is.
Step 2: add half an avocado or a portion of salmon to one meal. Both carry smaller amounts alongside other fats worth eating.
Step 3: take one pouch of whole-berry sea buckthorn with breakfast for the pulp oil in its original fruit, with the berry's vitamin C beside it. More on the wider family is in omega-7, the forgotten fatty acid.
Frequently asked questions
What foods are high in palmitoleic acid?
Macadamia nuts are the richest everyday food, at about 13 g per 100 g in USDA data. Sea buckthorn pulp oil is richer still as a share of its fat, at 12 to 39 percent. Salmon, avocado, anchovies, olive oil and butter carry smaller amounts.
Is palmitoleic acid the same as omega-7?
Palmitoleic acid is the main omega-7 fatty acid. The omega-7 family also includes vaccenic acid, found in dairy fat and in smaller amounts in sea buckthorn pulp. When a label says omega-7, it usually means mostly palmitoleic acid.
What is another name for palmitoleic acid?
Chemists call it cis-9-hexadecenoic acid or (9Z)-hexadec-9-enoic acid. Its salt form is called palmitoleate, and its shorthand is C16:1 n-7.
Is palmitoleic acid an essential fatty acid?
No. Your body can make palmitoleic acid from palmitic acid, so there is no set daily requirement. That separates it from the omega-3 and omega-6 essential fats, which you must get from food.
Is palmitic acid good or bad for you?
Palmitic acid is a different fat: a saturated fat and the most common one in the diet. Dietary guidelines advise keeping saturated fat under 10 percent of daily calories. Palmitoleic acid is its monounsaturated relative, not the same thing.
Does sea buckthorn puree contain palmitoleic acid?
Yes. Whole-berry puree keeps the pulp oil, which is where sea buckthorn stores its palmitoleic acid. Seed oil on its own carries almost none. A Human Renaissance pouch carries about 233 mg of omega-7.
The fat, in one line
Palmitoleic acid is a 16-carbon omega-7 fat that your body makes, that macadamias and sea buckthorn pulp supply, and that research is still working out. You do not have to guess which oil ended up in a capsule. You can turn the pouch over, read the single ingredient, the whole berry, and decide for yourself. See Human Renaissance sea buckthorn puree.
Sources
- Frigolet ME, Gutiérrez-Aguilar R. The role of the novel lipokine palmitoleic acid in health and disease. Adv Nutr, 2017. PMID 28096141.
- Mozaffarian D, et al. Circulating palmitoleic acid and risk of metabolic abnormalities and new-onset diabetes. Am J Clin Nutr, 2010. PMID 20943795.
- Yang B, Kallio HP. Fatty acid composition of lipids in sea buckthorn (Hippophaë rhamnoides L.) berries of different origins. J Agric Food Chem, 2001. PMID 11308350.
- Bolsoni-Lopes A, et al. Palmitoleic acid (n-7) increases white adipocytes GLUT4 content and glucose uptake in association with AMPK activation. Lipids Health Dis, 2014. PMID 25528561.
- Huang NK, et al. Supplementation with seabuckthorn oil augmented in 16:1n-7t increases serum trans-palmitoleic acid in metabolically healthy adults: a randomized crossover dose-escalation study. J Nutr, 2020. PMID 32140719.
- Bernstein AM, et al. Retraction notice to "Purified palmitoleic acid for the reduction of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein and serum lipids". J Clin Lipidol, 2021. PMID 34144766.
- Solà Marsiñach M, Cuenca AP. The impact of sea buckthorn oil fatty acids on human health. Lipids Health Dis, 2019. PMID 31228942.
- USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy, MUFA 16:1 per 100 g: macadamia nuts raw (FDC 170178), salmon Atlantic farmed raw (175167), avocados raw (171705), anchovy European raw (174182), olive oil (171413), butter salted (173410), sardine Atlantic canned in oil (175139); macadamia energy 718 kcal per 100 g (170178).
- Mozaffarian D, et al. trans-Palmitoleic acid, other dairy fat biomarkers, and incident diabetes: the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA). Am J Clin Nutr, 2013. PMID 23407305.
- US Department of Agriculture and US Department of Health and Human Services. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020 to 2025 (saturated fat under 10 percent of calories).
Specialists share education, not medical advice. Sea buckthorn is a food. Nothing in this article claims that sea buckthorn or any product diagnoses, treats, cures or prevents any disease. Talk to your doctor before changing your diet if you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication or have surgery planned.
