When you think of Salmon

My family loves salmon, with the great taste and quite a bit of essential benefits to boot what is not to love.   I am always so excited when I hear that the first shipments of fresh wild caught salmon come are coming into our local store it’s the good stuff!  I try to buy it when I can, it can be pretty pricy for the good stuff.  I always make sure I check the label to see that it lists in the description entails wild and not farm-raised in it. 

It may look the same but make no mistake.  There is a reason why salmon is often at least double the price of farm raised salmon.  The difference is huge.  The wild caught ocean salmon has this nice natural pink color to them.  This color comes from being in the wild, where they have the ability to eat a daily diet from natural food in the ocean.  Because of how the salmon are raised on the farms they do not have this natural color so to replicate the look of fresh wild ocean salmon they add canthaxanthin and astaxanthin to artificially color the fish, this leads us to believe it looks healthy and makes it more enticing to the eye. 

Farm raised salmon contain PCB’s or Polychlorinated biphenyls.  PCB’s have been used as coolants and lubricants in capacitors, transformers, and other electrical equipment because they don’t burn easily and are good insulators.  And while they no longer use it today because of the harmful effects to humans it still exists in the environment from contamination.  Farm raised fish are fish squished together tight in bins with hundreds of other salmon where they are fed fishmeal pellets, these fishmeal pellets contain high levels of PCBs.

This is not good.

Remember how I said they are kept in jam packed bins tight with hundreds of other salmon?   Well they are in so tight that they are unable to move freely like the wild caught salmon in the ocean so like us humans who sit still for long durations of time the salmon have a higher level of fat.  Not only that but the fishmeal they are fed contain grounded-up sardines, anchovies, mackerel, and other small fish and the oils from the fishmeal pack more fat onto farm raised salmon giving them more than 50% more fat than the wild ocean caught salmon.

You pay a bit more but the alternative is not something to expose your family to. 

A tip for you, make sure when ordering fish from your favorite restaurant to ask whether the fish is wild or farm raised, you definitely want to get your money’s worth.