SO YOU THINK EATING FARMED SALMON IS HEALTHY!

If you are like us girls at DANIELE de WINTER, you've been eating farmed salmon regularly and feeling virtuous about it for its skin smoothing, heart healthy Omega 3's. If this is you, then read on :

A staggering 395 kg of pesticides are sprayed on farmed Scottish salmon each year, twice as much as in 2008, to control the growing numbers of fish lice that infect them. In the wild, salmon are migratory fish and travel many km every day; keep them in a packed cage and aquatic parasites have a field day.

Farmed salmon has been found to contain tumour-promoting PCB’s (Poly-Chlorinated Biphenyls) and Dioxins that can damage brain development in children even in tiny doses. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) warns that eating more than one portion of farmed salmon weekly could exceed the World Health Organisation’s maximum intake for these toxins.

Salmon from fish-from farms in Scotland and the Faroe Islands are so pesticide rich that just 55 grams of uncooked salmon per month is the maximum amount that can be eaten before boosting cancer risk, according to EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) guidelines. The Pesticide Residues Committee also found the pesticides DDT, chlordane and hexachlorobenzene in 97% of the eighty farmed salmon they tested. Even a banned insecticide di-chlorvos has been found in farmed supermarket fish. Farmed Salmon, instead of being recommended as being good for you should probably carry a Health Warning! The least chemicals were found in salmon farms in Canada and Chile.

DESSIMATING WILD FISH STOCKS

Do you also eat farmed salmon because you think it will protect stocks of wild fish? Think again because the opposite is true: 80% of the fish oil produced worldwide is used to feed the salmon farming industry, as without supplementation of their diet with Omega 3 from wild fish, farmed salmon contain hardly any Omega 3 anymore as they do not move and are fed a mix of high-dose antibiotics, fish carcasses & faeces and other unnatural ingredients, including pink dye to colour their flesh which would otherwise be grey - the pink dye is Canthaxanthin (E161e), which is banned by the EU for direct addition to food for health reasons, but nothing tells us that we are already eating Canthaxanthin indirectly in farmed salmon.

As farmed salmon production increases, the numbers of wild salmon plummet. By merely swimming past disease-ridden salmon farms, wild salmon can catch many deadly diseases agaist which they have no natural defense as, unlike their medicated/vaccinated relatives, wild salmon are unprotected against their myriad exotic infections.

BUT FARMED SALMON STILL CONTAINS LOTS OF HEALTHY OMEGA 3, RIGHT?

The truth is that farmed salmon probably does not even offer the Omega 3 benefit we buy it for anymore as farmed fish are over 5x fatter than wild salmon, and most of this fat is the unhealthy Omega 6 found in junk food. For a health and beauty benefit we need to lower the RATIO of Omega 6 to Omega 3 in our diets (around 15:1 in a Western diet, it should ideally be around 2:1). By containing so much unhealthy Omega 6, farmed salmon probably does not raise our relative Omega 3 levels at all.

Far too few know this, so the global salmon farming industry is growing exponentially. In the meantime 80% of the precious fish oil from wild fish (and the even more precious wild fish themselves) are being wasted on an industry that no longer provides any real health benefit!

We think your best bet is to eat wild salmon once a month - and avoid farmed salmon entirely.

References:

http://www.salmonfarmmonitor.org/osullivan.shtml

http://gaaia.org/fishyleaks

http://whfoods.org/genpage.php tname=dailytip&dbid=30&pfriendly=1&utm_source=daily_click&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily_email