• Farmed salmon are fed
pellets made out of fish oil and smaller fish, ground-up chicken feathers,
poultry litter (yes, that’s poop), genetically modified yeast, soybeans and
chicken fat.
• Wild salmon get its lovely
rose color from eating krill and shrimp. Farmed salmon, because it eats those
pellets, is grey. To make it more appetizing to consumers, farmers add dyes to
their feed.
• Studies show that farmed
salmon contains up to eight times more PCBs — cancer-causing industrial
chemicals that were banned in 1979 — than wild, as well as high levels of
mercury and dioxins from herbicides like Agent Orange.
• We’ve all heard that omega-3
fatty acids are essential nutrients for nervous system, heart and brain health.
Omega-3 in fish are derived from plants like algae, leaves and grass. Because
farmed salmon are fed a lot of soy, they are high in omega-6, which you don’t
want: Omega-3 fights inflammation while omega-6 promotes it.
• Then there are environmental concerns: pollution from fish
excrement and uneaten feed; farms releasing diseases to wild fish
stocks; escapees unwittingly released into the wild where there are no natural
populations and then outcompeting native fish populations.
Many people also have ethical concerns about farming carnivorous
fish. To produce farmed
fish such as salmon, you must feed them about three times their weight of
wild-caught fish. That’s like feeding a whole sheep to a chicken to get that
poultry to harvest weight.
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