by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the mainstream media is hiding
Is farmed salmon really healthy? In truth, it is a highly polluted industrial product, five times more toxic than any other food tested. A well-known US doctor warns of “toxic junk food,” and a shocking documentary film warns of a “deadly chemical cocktail.”
Once a delicacy, now a mass product: Salmon is very healthy, isn’t it? After all, its pink flesh provides plenty of omega-3 fatty acids, and they’re good for the brain, lower cholesterol, and prevent heart attacks. Its antioxidants inhibit inflammation. Its calcium strengthens bones. It is also a rich source of iodine and vitamin D. Does it come from aquaculture? So much better, it is said that this protects the world’s oceans from overfishing.
So we can access and enjoy with a clear conscience? Consumers are doing this more and more extensively: more than every second fish that ends up on their plate now comes from breeding farms (1); according to other estimates, it is even more than 90 percent.
The truth is that salmon farming is a disaster – for human health as well as for the environment. Filmmaker Nicolas Daniels opens the eyes to this with an excellent documentary, “Fillet Oh Fish.” In 54 minutes, he offers exclusive footage from fish farms and factories around the world. His devastating conclusion: “The flesh of the fish we eat has become a deadly chemical cocktail through intensive farming and global pollution.”
Fillet Oh Fish focuses on Norway, the world’s largest producer of farmed salmon. More than a thousand farms dotting its fjords provide over 20 million salmon a year.
That aquaculture, in huge net cages, represents a sustainable alternative to overfishing of the world’s oceans is a sales-boosting fairy tale. In truth, fish farms are decimating stocks rather than saving them. 1.5 to 8 kilos of wild fish are needed to produce one kilo of farmed salmon.
How healthy can sick fish be?
Industrial fish farming means factory farming. In a salmon farm, up to two million animals are crammed together in a very small space. This promotes diseases that spread quickly. As environmental activist Kurt Oddekalv reports in Fillet Oh Fish, Norway’s farmed fish stocks have become rife with sea lice: jellyfish larvae that penetrate the fish skin, eating tissue and blood. They cause open wounds, which can then be invaded by pathogens. The highly contagious infectious pancreatic necrosis (IPN) and salmon anemia are also threatening to decimate stocks.
The consumer finds out about these fish pandemics: nothing. The sale of infected fish continues unabated, with unexplained effects on those who consume them.
To prevent and contain diseases, Norwegian breeders used five kilograms of antibiotics per tonne of fish 30 years ago. It is now said to be less than 0.9 grams per tonne. This is ensured by vaccination of the young salmon before they are released into the sea enclosure. Are the vaccines as unproblematic as manufacturers and health authorities advertise them? Where there is no research, there is no evidence.
Several flammable pesticides are also used to ward off disease-causing pests. Workers must wear protective clothing while dumping the chemicals into open waterways.
Some of the agents used to have a neurotoxic effect. Other pesticides damage the fish’s DNA, leading to genome mutations. Because of this, every second cod is deformed among farmed cod. Female cod that escape from farms mate with free-living cod. This is how genetic mutations and deformities are introduced into the wild populations. In the case of farmed salmon, such abnormal changes in the genome are noticeable in the strange consistency of the meat: it is strangely brittle; if bent, it breaks apart.
Anyone who thinks salmon farming is clean should go to the diving station as soon as possible. Beneath the farms lies a meter-thick layer of waste, teeming with feces, rotten feed, leftover medicines, and toxic pesticides. They contaminate the surrounding sea; their germs infect wild conspecifics. Hair-raising.
Floating omega-6 fat bomb
The nutrient content is also abnormal. Wild salmon contains around 5 to 7% fat. Farmed salmon, on the other hand, have between 14.5 and 34% fat.
Where does the drastically increased fat content come from? This is ensured by the processed, high-fat feed that farmed salmon receive.
But farmed salmon isn’t just much higher in fat. The ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids is radically distorted. (2) A 170-gram fillet of wild Atlantic salmon contains approximately 3934 milligrams of omega-3 and 374 mg of omega-6. (3) An equally large fillet of farmed salmon, on the other hand, contains a little more omega-3 – 4252 milligrams – but an amazing 1132 mg omega-6, more than three times as much as in wild salmon. (4)
Our body needs both fatty acids, but ideally in a ratio of 1:1. Because the standard Western diet has far too high a proportion of processed foods, it is already heavily omega-6-heavy. Instead of counteracting this imbalance, farmed salmon amplifies it.
The Stiftung Warentest 2018 made an April Fool’s joke: it advised against wild salmon precisely because of its lower fat content. It doesn’t taste that good – “less intensely salmon, not as buttery, tender and juicy.” (5). Because fat acts as a flavor carrier, farmed fish, therefore, have a clear advantage, according to the testers. When it comes to omega fatty acids, they apparently suffer from a lack of information.
Predatory fish are turned into vegetarians.
But how does farmed salmon get its excess omega-6 fats? The information portal “The Fish Site” explains what farmed fish from the Atlantic get to eat. In 2019, three-quarters of Norway’s fish feed came from land-based plant products not found naturally in the sea, including soybean concentrate, a protein isolated from soybeans, along with other plant-based protein sources such as wheat, corn, and broad beans. (6) A study published in Research Gate 2012 (7) also lists pressed residues from sunflower seeds, wheat gluten, fava beans, pea protein, and canola oil. Does a wild salmon ever get any of these ingredients in its mouth? “If we now feed the fish plant-based food, then the fish also has a fatty acid composition that corresponds to the plant material,” explains Ulfert Focken, an expert on fish feed at the Thünen Institute for Fishery Ecology.
There can therefore be no talk of “species-appropriate nutrition” in salmon farming. Marine protein sources comprise just 14.5% of the feed ingredients, and marine oils another 10.4%. (8th)
How do farmed salmon get reddish in the first place if not from the crabs they eat? You will be given artificially produced carotenoids.
Five times more toxic than any other food
Because of its high-fat content, farmed salmon contains far more pollutants than its wild counterparts. Many toxins easily accumulate in the fat – with the fatal consequence that farmed salmon absorb significantly more toxins under similarly contaminated conditions.
Where are you from? The greatest source of pollution is not pesticides or antibiotics. It is the dry food in the form of pellets. It found dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and pesticides, along with other drugs and chemicals. If the salmon eats them, they accumulate in its fatty tissue. According to a study that included 700 salmon samples from around the world, the PCB concentration in farmed salmon is eight times higher than that in wild salmon.
When the Norwegian biologist and toxicologist Jerome Ruzzin (9) from the University of Bergen tested several food groups for toxins, he came up with a surprising result: the greatest amount of toxins was found in farmed salmon. With a big gap. It turned out to be five times more toxic than any other food tested: hamburgers, whole milk, eggs, apples, potatoes, and cod.
Animal experiments give an idea of what these toxins can do. Mice and rats fed a diet supplemented with farmed salmon become obese; thick layers of fat surround their internal organs.
In addition, the animals fed farmed salmon develop diabetes.
From this, Ruzzin concludes that the obesity pandemic is not just due to too much-processed sugar, carbohydrates, and low-grade fats; more and more sheep materials also contribute to this.
How dioxins end up on the plate
Why is fish food so toxic? To find out, Fillet Oh Fish takes us to a Norwegian fish pellet factory. It turns out that the main ingredients are eel and other fish with a high protein and fat content. Where are you from? Mainly from the Baltic Sea – a highly polluted inland sea. Ten neighboring countries discharge their toxic waste, mostly untreated. Whatever swims around in this broth absorbs the toxins and stores them in body fat. At least Sweden has therefore obliged its fishmongers to expressly warn their customers about the possible toxicity of Baltic fish. The Ministry of Health recommends eating oily fish, such as herring, no more than once a week; Pregnant women should avoid it entirely.
What to do with fatty fish unfit for human consumption? They are processed into fish feed. And so they end up on our plates after all.
Monsanto pesticide – “the fish industry’s best kept secret.”
The manufacturing process of the pellets contributes further to toxins. The “raw material”, oily fish, is first boiled. This creates two separate products: oil, which is high in dioxins and PCBs, and protein powder secretly infused with an “antioxidant” called ethoxyquin — a chemical designed to keep the fats in fish from oxidizing and tasting rancid.
According to filmmaker Nicolas Daniels, it’s “the fishing industry’s best-kept secret”. And one of the most toxic. The scandal-ridden chemical giant Monsanto brought ethoxyquin onto the market in the late 1950s – first as an anti-aging agent for rubber, then for animal feed preservation, and finally as a pesticide. Its use in fruit, vegetables, and meat is now somewhat regulated, with a limit of 0.05 milligrams per kilo – but not in fish, which was never what the chemical was intended for. The foreseeable consequence: farmed fish can contain up to 20 times more ethoxyquin than other foods.
Little research has been done on how ethoxyquin affects human health. A Norwegian doctoral student, Victoria Bohne, reports in her dissertation about disturbing discoveries: ethoxyquin is able to cross the blood-brain barrier. And it may be carcinogenic.
How can it be that such a poison is allowed to be used in fish farming at all? Why hasn’t it been scientifically investigated for a long time what it does in the human organism? Consumer advocates assign responsibility for this to Lisbeth Berg-Hansen, Norway’s Minister for Fisheries and Coastal Protection from 2009 to 2013 – at the same time, the main shareholder in a commercial salmon farm, holder of high-ranking positions and holdings in the fishing industry. (10)
Against this background, the fact that the Stiftung Warentest was unable to determine “any significant” amounts of pollutants in farmed salmon (11) caused a shake of the head. Isn’t it always worth mentioning what can harm consumers – especially when it is unclear in what quantities from different sources they are consuming it?
Alternatives “Organic” and “Sockeye”
Switching to wild fish is, unfortunately, no longer a way out. Most of the large bodies of water on our planet are now polluted: with mercury, heavy metals, dioxins, PCBs, agricultural chemicals, industrial waste, and decomposition products such as microplastics. Eating fish regularly is therefore no longer a good idea for the health-conscious – particularly bad news for pescetarians, who avoid eating beef, pork, mutton, and poultry and instead eat fish and seafood.
What about farmed organic salmon? Out of 25 offers examined, “Gut Bio salmon fillets” from Aldi Nord took second place in the Stiftung Warentest in March 2018, with an overall score of 1.9. (12) Ethoxyquin is not relevant here, as it is banned in organic farming anyway. However, the examiners found minimal traces of a degradation product – otherwise, the organic fish from Aldi, 250 grams for around 6 euros, would even have become the test winner. (13)
Other pollutants are also far less common in organic products. The prescribed attitude contributes to this: only half as many salmon are allowed to cavort in one cubic meter of water as in conventional farms. As a result, they swim around more, stay fitter, and are less likely to be infested with parasites. Resourceful organic breeders are now using “cleaner fish” instead of pesticides to combat pests such as salmon lice.
But even organic salmon is not fed in a species-appropriate manner. EU organic guidelines do not stipulate more than 40 percent animal protein in the feed. Companies that feed salmon oil from seaweed or even organic insects are considered “innovative.” (14)
How else do we avoid “toxic junk food,” as the US holistic medicine doctor Dr. Joseph Mercola calls it? There is only one exception to strict salmon abstinence: genuine, wild-caught Sockeye, also known as sockeye salmon, from Alaska. This North Pacific swimmer with magnificent deep red meat, the noblest and finest for connoisseurs, eats only plankton with mini crabs and shrimp. “Its nutritional benefits still outweigh possible contamination, in my opinion. The risk of Sockeye accumulating high levels of mercury and other toxins is reduced because of its short life cycle of three years.”
However, consumers have to dig deeper into their pockets for this: a hundred grams of Sockeye can cost over ten euros. Discounter Aldi offers a 150-gram pack of “Sockeye Wildlachs” for 4.89 euros, Lidl for 3.25 euros (15), competitor Norma 100 grams for 2.53 euros – from “Öko-Test” at the end of 2022 rated “good.” (16) How much is our health worth to us?
(Harald Wiesendanger)
Remarks
1 Live Science 8.9.2009, https://www.livescience.com/5682-milestone-50-percent-fish-farmed.html
2 Global Seafood Alliance, 30. Januar 2017, https://www.globalseafood.org/advocate/omega-6s-and-the-threat-to-seafoods-healthy-halo/
3 My Food Data. Wild Atlantic Salmon Cooked, https://tools.myfooddata.com/nutrition-facts/171998/wt9/1
4 My Food Data. Farmed Atlantic Salmon Cooked, https://tools.myfooddata.com/nutrition-facts/175168/wt9
5 Zit. nach https://www.eatclub.tv/aktuelles/verbraucherthemen/lachsfilets-bei-stiftung-warentest-111664; https://www.chip.de/artikel/der-beste-lachs-testsieger-der-stiftung-warentest_104665
6 The Fish Site. 3. September 2019, https://thefishsite.com/articles/whats-salmon-feed-really-made-of
7 Research Gate. Norwegian Salmon Feed, https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Feed-ingredients-used-in-Norwegian-salmon-feed-in-2012-Data-are-reported-by-EWOS-BioMar_tbl1_279752594
8 Fish Site, a.a.O.
9 Siehe https://www.uib.no/en/rg/toxicology/56874/what-%E2%80%93-eating-salmon-may-not-be-good-me und https://www.uib.no/filearchive/final.pdf
10 Diese Interessenkonflikte beleuchtete 2014 die TV-Dokumentation „Giftiger Fisch – Die große Gesundheitslüge“ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_Sl_wjiOyI; siehe dort ib. Minute 31:26 bis 34:36.
12 Auch bei Öko-Test schnitt die Aldi-Marke „gut“ ab. https://www.heidelberg24.de/verbraucher/lachs-test-oekotest-vergleich-produkte-ergebnis-discounter-marke-lidl-wuermer-zr-91138930.html; https://www.stern.de/genuss/lachs-bei–oeko-test—-nur-ein-raeucherlachs-ist–sehr-gut–30961356.html
13 https://www.chip.de/artikel/der-beste-lachs-testsieger-der-stiftung-warentest_104665
15 Privateinkauf am 23.3.2023.
Salmon, farmed salmon, wild salmon, Nicholas Daniels, Fillet Oh Fish, fish farm, salmon farm, Omega 3, Omega 6, dioxin, ethoxyquin, sockeye, organic salmon, Harald Wiesendanger