|
|
|
Something Fishy about Salmon Eric Bakker ND
I love salmon, doesn't it taste great! While fish farms now contribute a large amount of the fish being consumed, over 50% of salmon in fcat, the bottom line is that wild "free range" fish are far superior in many ways to their farm-raised counterpart. I can remember as a child that salmon used to be expensive, including pink salmon (which all came from Canada) and particulary the red variety (which is still expensive, because it is wild salmon - the best).
Have you not noticed, like supermarket chicken, that pink salmon has become ridiculously inexpensive? That is because, like the supermarket chickens, they have become a farmed commodity.
Statistics on the nutritional content (protein and fat-ratios) of farm versus wild salmon show that wild salmon have a 20% higher protein content and a 20% lower fat content than farm-raised salmon. But what about the pesticides?
European farm raised salmon contain pesticides
Several studies have also shown that farmed salmon accumulate more cancer-causing pesticide residue than wild salmon. A recent report analysed two metric tons of salmon from 39 sources worldwide.1 The results clearly make a strong case that eating farm-raised fish poses a significant safety concern. Research clearly shows that European salmon are far more contaminated with cancer-inducing contaminants than salmon from American sources, in some cases containing ten times the contamination levels of American sources.
The biggest reason that the farm-raised fish had higher levels of pesticides appears to be dependent upon the type of feed they are receiving.2
Farmed fish are given feed pellets that are most often made from fish meal and fish oil-extracted from sardines, anchovies and other ground-up fish. Pesticides, including those now outlawed in the United States, have circulated into the ocean where they are absorbed by marine life and accumulate in their fat. If the fish oil is not properly distilled to reduce the concentrations of these pesticides, it can lead to much higher concentrations in the salmon feed. One commercial salmon feed analysed in a Canadian study showed a total pesticide level ten times higher than any other feed.3
To reduce your chances of eating fish that is tainted with chemical toxins:
References
|
|
|
  
|