by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the mainstream media is hiding
Is farmed salmon really healthy? In reality, it is a highly polluted industrial product, five times more toxic than any other food tested. A renowned US doctor warns of “toxic junk food,” while a shocking documentary 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 is rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which are good for the brain, lower cholesterol levels, 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? All the better, that protects the world’s oceans from overfishing, or so they say.
So we can eat it with a clear conscience and enjoy it? Consumers are doing so more and more: more than half of the fish on our plates now comes from fish farms (1); according to other estimates, the figure is even over 90 percent.
In reality, salmon farming is a disaster – for human health and the environment alike. Filmmaker Nicolas Daniels opens our eyes to this fact with his excellent documentary, “Fillet Oh Fish.” In 54 minutes, he offers exclusive footage from fish farms and factories around the globe. His devastating conclusion: “The meat of the fish we eat has become a deadly chemical cocktail due to intensive farming and global pollution.”
Fillet Oh Fish focuses on Norway, the world’s largest producer of farmed salmon. More than a thousand farms dot its fjords, supplying over 20 million salmon per year.
The idea that aquaculture in huge net cages is a sustainable alternative to overfishing the world’s oceans is a sales-promoting fairy tale. In reality, fish farms are decimating stocks rather than saving them. It takes 1.5 to 8 kilograms of wild fish to produce one kilogram of farmed salmon.
How healthy can a 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 rapidly. As environmental activist Kurt Oddekalv reports in “Fillet Oh Fish,” sea lice have spread throughout Norway’s farmed fish stocks: jellyfish larvae that penetrate the fish skin and eat tissue and blood. They cause open wounds that can then become infected with pathogens. The highly contagious infectious pancreatic necrosis (IPN) and salmon anemia also threaten to decimate stocks.
Consumers know nothing about these fish pandemics. The sale of infected fish continues unabated – with unknown consequences for those who consume it.
To prevent and contain disease, Norwegian farmers used five kilograms of antibiotics per ton of fish just 30 years ago. Now, it is supposedly less than 0.9 grams per ton. This is ensured by vaccinating young salmon before they are released into sea pens. But are the vaccines as safe as manufacturers and health authorities claim? Without research, there is no evidence.
In addition, a number of highly dangerous pesticides are used to ward off disease-causing pests. Workers must wear protective clothing while dumping the chemicals into open waters.
Some of the substances used are neurotoxic. Other pesticides damage the DNA of fish, leading to mutations in their genetic material. As a result, every second farmed cod is deformed. Female cod that escape from the farms mate with wild cod, introducing genetic mutations and deformities into the wild population. In farmed salmon, such abnormal changes in the genetic makeup are noticeable in the strange consistency of the meat: it is strangely brittle and breaks apart when bent.
Anyone who thinks salmon farming is a clean business should dive for cover. Beneath the farms is a meter-thick layer of waste teeming with feces, rotten feed, drug residues, and toxic pesticides. They contaminate the surrounding sea, and their pathogens infect wild salmon. It’s hair-raising.
Floating omega-6 fat bombs
The nutrient content is also abnormal. Wild salmon contains around 5 to 7% fat. Farmed salmon, on the other hand, contains 14.5 to 34% fat.
Where does this drastic increase in fat content come from? It is caused by the processed, high-fat feed that farmed salmon is given.
But farmed salmon is not 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 about 3934 milligrams of omega-3 and 374 mg of omega-6. (3) In contrast, a fillet of farmed salmon of the same size contains slightly more omega-3 – 4252 milligrams – but an astonishing 1132 mg of omega-6, more than three times as much as wild salmon. (4)
Our bodies do need both fatty acids – ideally in a ratio of 1:1. However, because the standard Western diet contains far too much processed food, it is already heavily omega-6-biased. Instead of counteracting this imbalance, farmed salmon exacerbates it.
In 2018, Stiftung Warentest played an April Fool’s joke when it advised against wild salmon precisely because of its lower fat content. It doesn’t taste as good – “less intense salmon flavor, not as buttery, tender, and juicy.” (5) Because fat acts as a flavor carrier, farmed fish have a clear advantage, according to the testers. When it comes to omega fatty acids, they clearly lack 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 are fed. In 2019, three-quarters of Norwegian fish feed came from plant products that do not occur naturally in the sea, including soybean concentrate, a protein isolated from soybeans, and other plant protein sources such as wheat, corn, and field beans. (6)
A study published in Research Gate in 2012 (7) also lists: press residues from sunflower seeds, wheat gluten, fava beans, pea protein, and rapeseed oil. Does wild salmon ever get any of these ingredients in its mouth? “If we 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 in fish feed at the Thünen Institute of Fisheries Ecology.
There can therefore be no talk of a “species-appropriate diet” in salmon farming. Here, marine protein sources make up only 14.5% of the feed ingredients, with marine oils accounting for a further 10.4%. (8)
How do farmed salmon turn red if not from eating crabs? They are given artificially produced carotenoids.
Five times more toxic than any other food
Its high fat content contributes to farmed salmon containing far more pollutants than its wild counterparts. Many toxins easily accumulate in fat – with the fatal consequence that farmed salmon absorb significantly more toxins under similarly contaminated conditions.
Where do they come from? The biggest source of contamination is not pesticides or antibiotics. It is dry feed in the form of pellets. Dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and pesticides have been found in these pellets, along with other drugs and chemicals. When the salmon eat them, they accumulate in their fatty tissue. According to a study involving 700 salmon samples from around the world, the PCB concentration in farmed salmon is eight times higher than in wild salmon.
When Norwegian biologist and toxicologist Jerome Ruzzin (9) from the University of Bergen tested a range of food groups for toxins, he made a surprising discovery: The highest levels of toxins were found in farmed salmon. By a wide margin. It proved 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, with thick layers of fat surrounding their internal organs.
In addition, animals fed farmed salmon develop diabetes.
Ruzzin concludes that the pandemic obesity epidemic is not only due to too much industrial sugar, carbohydrates, and low-quality fats; more and more sheep substances are also contributing to it.
How dioxins end up on our plates
Why is fish feed so toxic? To find out, “Fillet Oh Fish” takes us to a Norwegian fish pellet factory. There, we see that the main ingredients are eel and other fish with high protein and fat content. Where do they come from? Mainly from the Baltic Sea – a highly polluted inland sea. Ten neighboring countries dump their toxic waste into it, mostly untreated. Whatever floats around in this broth absorbs the toxins and stores them in body fat. Sweden, at least, has therefore obliged its fishmongers to warn their customers explicitly about the possible toxicity of Baltic Sea fish. The Ministry of Health recommends eating fatty fish such as herring no more than once a week, and pregnant women should avoid it altogether.
What to do with fatty fish that is unsuitable for human consumption? It is processed into fish feed. And so it ends up on our plates after all.
Monsanto pesticide – “the fish industry’s best-kept secret”
The pellet manufacturing process adds further toxins. The “raw material,” fatty fish, is first cooked. This produces two separate products: oil, which has a high content of dioxins and PCBs; and protein powder, to which an “antioxidant” called ethoxyquin is secretly added—a chemical that is supposed to prevent the fats in the fish from oxidizing and tasting rancid.
According to filmmaker Nicolas Daniels, this is “the fish industry’s best-kept secret.” And one of the most toxic. The scandal-ridden chemical giant Monsanto launched ethoxyquin in the late 1950s – first as an anti-aging agent for rubber, then as a feed preservative, and finally as a pesticide. Its use in fruit, vegetables, and meat is now reasonably regulated, with a limit of 0.05 milligrams per kilogram—but not in fish, as the chemical was never intended for that purpose. The predictable consequence: farmed fish can contain up to 20 times more ethyl quinine than other foods.
Little research has been done on the effects of ethyl quinine on human health. A Norwegian doctoral student, Victoria Bohne, reports disturbing findings in her dissertation: Ethoxyquin is capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier. And it may be carcinogenic.
How can such a toxic substance be allowed to be used in fish farming at all? Why has there not been a scientific investigation into what it does to the human organism? Consumer advocates blame Lisbeth Berg-Hansen, Norway’s Minister of Fisheries and Coastal Affairs from 2009 to 2013, who is also a major shareholder in a commercial salmon farm and holds high-ranking positions and interests in the fishing industry. (10)
Against this backdrop, it is puzzling that Stiftung Warentest (a German consumer organization) has found “no significant” levels of contaminants in farmed salmon (11). Isn’t anything that could harm consumers worth mentioning, especially when it is unclear how much of it they consume from a wide variety of sources?
Alternatives: ‘organic’ and “sockeye”
Unfortunately, switching to wild fish is no longer a viable option. Most of the planet’s large bodies of water are now contaminated with mercury, heavy metals, dioxins, PCBs, agricultural chemicals, industrial waste, and decay products such as microplastics. Eating fish regularly is therefore no longer a good idea for health-conscious people – particularly bad news for pescatarians, who avoid beef, pork, lamb, and poultry in favor of fish and seafood.
What about organic farmed salmon? Among 25 products tested, Aldi Nord’s “Gut Bio Lachsfilets” came in second place in Stiftung Warentest’s March 2018 test, with an overall score of 1.9. (12) Ethoxyquin is not an issue here, as it is prohibited in organic farming anyway. However, the testers found minimal traces of a degradation product – otherwise Aldi’s organic fish, 250 grams for around 6 euros, would have been the test winner. (13)
Other harmful substances are also much less common in organic products. The prescribed husbandry practices contribute to this: Only half as many salmon are allowed to swim in one cubic meter of water as in conventional farms. This means they swim around more, stay fitter, and are less prone to parasites. Resourceful organic farmers are now using “cleaner fish” instead of pesticides to combat pests such as salmon lice.
But even organic salmon are not fed in a species-appropriate manner. EU organic guidelines do not stipulate that more than 40 percent of the feed must be animal protein. Companies that feed salmon oil from sea algae or even organic insects are considered “innovative.” (14)
How else can we avoid the “toxic junk food,” as US holistic physician Dr. Joseph Mercola calls it? He allows for one exception to his strict abstinence from salmon: genuine, wild-caught sockeye, also known as “red salmon,” from Alaska. This North Pacific swimmer, with its magnificent deep red flesh, considered by connoisseurs to be the finest and most delicate, feeds exclusively on plankton with mini crabs and shrimp. “In my opinion, its nutritional benefits still outweigh any potential contamination. The risk of sockeye accumulating high levels of mercury and other toxins is lower due to its short life cycle of three years.”
However, consumers have to dig deeper into their pockets for this: 100 grams of sockeye can cost over ten euros. Discounter Aldi offers a 150-gram pack of “Sockeye Wild Salmon” for 4.89 euros, Lidl for 3.25 euros (15), and competitor Norma offers 100 grams for 2.53 euros – rated ‘good’ by “Öko-Test” at the end of 2022. (16) How much is our health worth to us?
Comments
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.