Whole Living > by Dylana Accolla, LAc
Singing the Praises of Salmon

illustration by Jim Bliss

This story started innocently enough when I heard Casey Mallinckrodt, host of “Food for Thought” on WKZE, talking about antibiotics and artificial coloring in salmon. Quoting from a book called Salmon Nation, Mallinckrodt brought important salmon facts to listeners’ attention. Intrigued, I decided to follow up. What follows is the first part of a two-part article.

I love fish, eat it all the time. Cooked, raw. I stay away from shrimp (due to trawling) and sea bass (over fished), but I regularly recommend fish to my patients. I even have fish dreams. And salmon? I avoid salmon sushi (parasite fear), but have eaten it cooked for years at restaurants as a nutritious alternative to beef (hormones, pesticides, and genetically modified feed) and grilled at home (because it’s good).

So I, too, have sung the praises of salmon. It is not only tas ty and beautiful—it’s supposed to be good for you. It is one of the best sources of omega-3 and -6 fatty acids, the precursors of the good prostaglandins that aid in reducing hypertension, migraine headaches, arthritis, and other conditions.

But salmon, wild salmon as it appeared in nature, once so plentiful, has become threatened on many levels. The industry that feeds us just can’t seem to let salmon be. As the world market for salmon expands, salmon carry the repercussions in their bodies. From the extinction of native species to changes in the nutritive content of its flesh, the squalid living conditions, and additives to its food pellets as it is raised in captivity, right down to the integrity of its genes, salmon has become a questionable source of nutrition, at best.

A Filet of Salmon History
Salmon Nation’s history of salmon begins in the Pacific Northwest, so we’ll begin there, with a brief comment that Atlantic salmon were over-fished into near-extinction by the time commercial fishing in the West began. Commercial fishing of salmon began on the West Coast in the 1860s, at a time when the salmon were so abundant that they spooked horses with their upstream splashing. The opening of the first salmon canneries occurred 10 years later, as political leaders wondered whether the industry could sustain itself. Spencer Baird, the first head of the newly formed US Fish Commission, presciently warned in 1875 that habitat alteration, dam construction, and over-fishing would eventually destroy the Pacific salmon industry as it did the Atlantic salmon on the other side of the continent.

To counter the fish’s eventual demise, Spencer supported the development of fish hatcheries, which were embraced as the key to salmon “conservation”. The earliest hatcheries were simple egg-incubating stations hoping to increase fish populations by releasing tiny fry into the streams. By the 1920s, managers began to feed the fry and raise them to fingerling size before turning them loose. Population increases and the need for electrical power fueled a push for the creation of dams in salmon rivers in the 1930s and 1940s. Though scientists understood that dams would destroy fish runs, politicians chose dependence on the hatcheries to offset lost natural fish production.

Even cases in which dams were built with fish ladders (stair-stepped cascades of artificial pools that allow the fish to swim through the dams) fish runs dwindled.

In the 1960s pelletized feed made from fishmeal revolutionized the trade, and suddenly hatcheries were able to successfully raise significant numbers of salmon. But indiscriminate hatchery programs led to serious problems in the wild salmon stock.

Fish hatchers had a poor understanding of the delicate balance that exists in nature and didn’t understand important concepts such as the “carrying capacity” of a river—that there is a limit to the number of fish that a particular stream could support. Or that each river or tributary has its own distinct strain of naturally selected fish that best fit that environment, complete with resistance to the parasites and diseases of their native streams. Hatchery fish competed with wild salmon for food as they swam oceanward, to the detriment of them all. At other times hatchery managers transplanted fingerlings from one river system to another, or confused fish swam into the wrong streams after spawning. Either way, they interbred with wild salmon and began diluting their local adaptations.

The disappearance of watersheds throughout the Pacific Northwest has led to the wide scale disappearance of salmon runs, and ultimately, extinction. In all, 232 salmon stocks in the region are known to have been lost in the last century. (Fish stocks are genetically distinct subspecies within a species of fish. There are many different stock in a river, often with each geographically distinct tributary of a river having its own stock.) According to Salmon Nation, extinctions are concentrated in the southern and eastern portions of the fishes’ ranges, where human impacts have been most pervasive and the climate leaves salmon especially vulnerable to human-caused disruptions such as irrigation projects, logging, dam-building, and livestock grazing.

Fish as Livestock
Salmon farming is a more substantial part of the industry than hatcheries. In the past decade, farmed salmon have emerged as the main source of salmon for the world’s seafood consumers, accounting for an estimated 50 percent of the salmon on the market today. Two years ago, global farmed salmon production increased 18 percent to reach 2.5 billion pounds, far outweighing the 1.65-billion-pound wild salmon haul.

Norway initiated the salmon-farming industry in the 1970s and it still leads the farmed salmon-production pack. Chile has grown to be a major player in the industry, as have Japan, Scotland, and the Pacific Northwest.

The increase in fish farms has created a crisis for the wild salmon industry. A glut of farmed fish on the market has driven the price of all salmon way down, from $5 a pound in the 1970s to $1 a pound in the late 1990s, with ruinous consequences. Last summer Alaska Governor Tony Knowles declared an economic disaster in western Alaska salmon fisheries, blaming part of the problem on competition from farmed salmon.

Salmon farmers tell consumers and purveyors that aquaculture (fish farming) benefits us all because it takes pressure off wild salmon stocks while it provides a hungry world with food. While it sounds good, this claim is disputed for many reasons. Environmentalists, for example, claim that the farms pollute, that escapees (mostly Atlantic salmon farmed in the Pacific Ocean) spread disease to and compete with wild runs.

Salmon is also an inefficient food source. Each pound of salmon produced requires at least three pounds of wild-caught fish for feed, challenging the presumption that fish farming reduces commercial fishing. Fish farming sponsors the vacuuming of the ocean floor for low-cost protein to feed the carnivorous salmon. These smaller fish are then reduced by a factor of five and turned into pellets, effectively destroying the ocean floor for feed. Wild salmon fingerlings then swim upstream to find that the fishmeal trawlers have excavated their food source.

Fish farms are beset with numerous odoriferous difficulties, fish excrement being one of them. According to Seth Zuckerman, co-editor of Salmon Nation, the excrement from one large British Columbia fish farm equals the sewage of a city of ten thousand people. All of the excrement is sent into the surrounding waters, where it pollutes nearby clam beds and other sea habitats, often at too high a concentration to be easily assimilated by natural forces.

Fish Dyes, PCBs, and Antibiotics
Another issue is that farm companies have turned salmon into livestock that are inoculated to ward off disease and fed pigment-fortified pellets to turn their flesh pink. Wild salmon flesh gets its color from its prey, particularly krill, tiny shrimp-like crustaceans. But fishmeal pellets leave farmed fishes’ flesh a pale gray. Fish farmers know that gray salmon won’t sell well, so they add a dye, astaxanthin, to their feed.
Fish dyes are not the only chemicals found in salmon. In 2001, British farms, supporting fish research in an attempt to bolster consumer confidence, found that farmed salmon contains trace amounts of chemical contaminants. Researchers at the toxicology group of the University of Surrey in England detected polychlorinated biphenyls in Scottish-farmed salmon and in fish that escaped from farms or were hatched in the wild. The levels sometimes exceeded the recommended maximum daily dietary intake of PCBs set by the British government.
In a separate pilot study for the David Suzuki Foundation, Canadian geneticist Michael Easton also found that feed samples and farmed salmon in British Columbia had higher PCB levels than wild samples. In a documentary produced by the Suzuki Foundation, Dr. Easton said: “The results were very, very clear. Farmed fish and the feed they were fed appeared to have a much higher level of contamination with respect to PCBs, organo-chlorine pesticides and polybrominated diphenyl ethers than did wild fish.”

PCBs are also being tracked in the Pacific Northwest, where National Marine Fisheries Service biologists have found them in juvenile wild salmon and in those released from hatcheries.

Greenpeace scientist Dr. Paul Johnston, quoted in a BBC article from January 2001, said: “Ultimately, all these practices lead to products that are consumed by human beings. We are maximizing human exposure to these chemicals by promoting an artificial food chain.”

Nutreco, a Dutch company that has operations in five nations and is the biggest player in the increasingly corporate world of salmon farming, has acknowledged that the Atlantic bait fish, which inhabit Europe’s industrially polluted seas, may have dioxin and PCB contaminants. Nutreco has shifted to Pacific bait fish, which have “considerably lower” dioxin and PCB concentrations than Atlantic bait fish and are within standards set by the World Health Organization, according to a Nutreco corporate report. (“Why You Should Be Concerned about Eating Salmon,” by Hal Bernton, Seattle Times, September 2, 2001.)

PCBs are among the most toxic and persistent pollutants in existence. Once ingested, PCBs build up in body fat and take years to break down. Because they mimic the female sex hormone estrogen, studies indicate that the chemicals can cause cancer, decreased sperm counts, deformed genitals, and sterility.

But the PCBs are not a problem in salmon, our government reassures us. By the time they grow to adulthood, these fish will have PCB levels well under federal limits for human consumption, according to John Stein, a federal fisheries biologist. US Food and Drug Administration officials say the overall level of PCB contamination in US foods has plummeted dramatically during the past 20 years, and annual salmon surveys do not indicate a PCB problem.

Antibiotics are another problem. According to Zuckerman, “Farmed fish are so densely confined that a typical one-pound Atlantic salmon is within 15 inches of its neighbors. Diseases spread rapidly, so the fish are fed antibiotics, including oxytetracycline and sulfa drugs, just like most domestic chickens or cattle.”

Antibiotics don’t stop at the salmon farms. Zuckerman explains that about 30 percent of the medicated feed goes uneaten. From uncontained net pens it enters the sea’s food chain, where it has been found to kill natural marine algae and bacteria as well as cause deformities in halibut larvae.

Unfortunately, the antibiotics have hardly succeeded in wiping out fish disease, continues Zuckerman. “The farmed fish still contract infections and parasites. Wild stocks pick up those diseases in two ways—either from escapees, or as they pass by the fish farms en route to or from their spawning streams.” Disease runs rampant, as one would expect from creatures forced to live 15 inches from its neighbor. Norwegian authorities have opted to deal with it by poisoning 24 rivers with rotenine, a chemical that kills all aquatic life, in attempt to eradicate sea lice and a lesion-causing disease spread there by farmed salmon, according to Zuckerman.

We are What They Eat
Farmers keep finding ways to produce more fish with less feed, which is why they prize the Atlantic salmon. The Atlantic salmon converts feed to flesh more efficiently than any other salmon. For every 1.2 to 1.4 kilograms of dry feed, the farms produce about a kilogram of Atlantic salmon flesh. Compare that with more than two kilograms of feed required to produce a kilogram of flesh on penned Pacific Chinook, the focus of the fledgling industry in the 1970s, and you’ll understand why we’re being fed farmed Atlantic salmon so much at restaurants.
I had never really thought about a farmed salmon’s diet before researching this article. I have to say, ignorance was bliss.

Twice a day, the pellets containing soy meal, corn-gluten meal, and canola oil are flung into the water by an automated arm that whirs at the center of each pen. The fish are cut off from the feed five days before harvest, a process known as “starving” that is meant to reduce oil content and improve flavor. The pellets also contain fish meal and oils processed from anchovies or mackerel. The fish products help fuel the Atlantics’ growth but also tie the farmers to the wild-ocean harvests of bait fish.

(“Why You Should Be Concerned About Eating Salmon,” by Hal Bernton, Seattle Times, September 2, 2001)

The grain fed to salmon is non-organic, which means they are ingesting pesticides that are eventually making their way to our bodies. It is hard to say whether farmed fish are being fed genetically modified corn and soy products, but since they have been approved for animal feed, and in light of the fact that the corn industry is supporting the FDA’s approval of genetically modified fish, an unsubstantiated risk is certainly there. (See “Biotech Corn Found In Variety of Foods,” by Marc Kaufman, Washington Post, April 24, 2001; pp. A03) There is currently no research on the long-term effects of bio-tech food on the human body.

The substantiated problem with corn- and soy-fed salmon is that salmon are carnivores, and corn and soy-based feed changes the chemical composition of their flesh, making them far less nutritious for us. As Joseph Mercola, MD, a holistic physician from Chicago, reports, “When the fish are fed these foods, the concentration of their fats turns far away from the ideal beneficial 3:1 omega-6 to omega-3 ratio and it turns far closer to the 20:1 found in commercially raised beef.”

Did you get that? From a nutrition point of view, eating farm-raised salmon is hardly better than eating commercially raised beef. There are biochemical reasons for this, which I will explain when I do an article on oils, so look for it in a Chronogram article later this year.

This concludes the first portion of the Saddest Fish Story. Next month: a discussion of the ever-worsening mercury toxicity and what’s happening with genetically modified fish. In the meantime, if you are pregnant,
just stay away from fish altogether, or for details go to www.mercola.com and search for “mercury in fish.”