Women, children and adolescents should avoid eating farmed salmon, according to Norwegian doctors and international experts. The reason is that salmon feed contains harmful pollutants.
Talking to VG, specialist Anne-Lise
Birch Monsen and Physician and professor of medicine, Bjørn Bolann say
that it is uncertain in both the amount of toxins and how they affect
children, adolescents and pregnant. They point out that the type of
contaminants that have been detected in farmed salmon have a negative
effect on brain development and is associated with autism, AD / HD and
reduced IQ.
A large European study involving about
8,000 newborns, shows that pregnant women with high levels of toxins in
the body have children with lower birth weight, which may have an
adverse effect on child health.
Conservative party (Høyre) economic
policy spokesman Svein Flåtten asks fisheries minister to respond in
the Parliament on whether Norwegian farmed salmon is dangerous to eat
for children and pregnant women.
I want to know what she can do to make
Norwegian consumers and society sure that Norwegian farmed salmon is a
healthy and clean product. That’s what we’ve been hearing from
researchers for years, says Flåtten to NTB.
He believes there is reason to take seriously the warning raised by doctors.
- There is no doubt that such claims may
have a negative effect on salmon industry. Therefore, it is important
to clarify this quickly. I expect the health authorities to look closely
at the findings discussed, he said.
If you eat seafood, unless you catch it
yourself or ask the right questions, the odds are pretty good it comes
from a fish farm. The aquaculture industry is like a whale on steroids,
growing faster than any other animal agriculture segment and now accounting for half the fish eaten in the U.S.
As commercial fishing operations continue to strip the world’s oceans of life, with one-third of fishing stocks collapsed
and the rest headed there by mid-century, fish farming is seen as a way
to meet the world’s growing demand. But is it really the silver bullet
to solve the Earth’s food needs? Can marine farms reliably satisfy the
seafood cravings of three billion people around the globe?
This article looks at aquaculture and its long-term effects on fish, people, and other animals.
With this industry regularly touted as a paragon of food production,
whether you eat seafood or not, you should know these nine key facts
about farmed fish.
1. Farmed fish have dubious nutritional value. The Omega-3 Levels are Not What You Think
Here’s a frustrating paradox for those who eat fish for their health: the nutritional
benefits of fish are greatly decreased when it’s farmed. Take omega-3
fatty acids. Wild fish get their omega-3’s from aquatic plants. Farmed
fish, however, are often fed corn, soy, or other feedstuffs that contain
little or no omega-3’s. This unnatural, high-corn diet also means some farmed fish accumulate unhealthy levels of the wrong fatty acids. Further, farmed fish are routinely dosed with antibiotics, which can cause antibiotic-resistant disease in humans.
2. The farmed fishing industry robs Peter to pay Paul. Small Prey Fish May be Driven to Extinction
While some farmed fish can live on diets of corn or soy, others need to eat fish – and lots of it. Tuna and salmon, for example, need to eat up to five pounds of fish
for each pound of body weight. The result is that prey (fish like
anchovies and herring) are being fished to the brink of extinction to
feed the world’s fish farms. “We have caught all the big fish and now we
are going after their food,” says the non-profit Oceana,
which blames aquaculture’s voracious hunger for declines of whales,
dolphins, seals, sea lions, tuna, bass, salmon, albatross, penguins, and
other species.
3. Fish experience pain and stress.
Contrary to the wishful thinking of many a catch-and-release angler, the latest research shows conclusively that fish experience pain and stress. In one study,
fish injected with bee venom engaged in rocking behavior linked to pain
and, compared to control groups, reduced their swimming activity,
waited three times longer to eat, and had higher breathing rates. Farmed
fish are subject to the routine stresses
of hyperconfinement throughout their lives, and are typically killed in
slow, painful ways like evisceration, starvation, or asphyxiation.
4. Farmed fish are loaded with disease, and this spreads to wild fish populations.
Farmed fish are packed as tightly as coins in a purse, with twenty-seven adult trout, for example, typically scrunched into a bathtub-sized space.
These unnatural conditions give rise to diseases and parasites, which
often migrate off the farm and infect wild fish populations. On Canada’s
Pacific coast, for example, sea lice infestations are responsible for mass kill-offs
of pink salmon that have destroyed 80% of the fish in some local
populations. But the damage doesn’t end there, because eagles, bears,
orcas, and other predators depend on salmon for their existence. Drops
in wild salmon numbers cause these species to decline as well.
5. Fish farms are rife with toxins, which also damage local ecosystems.
You can’t have diseases and parasites infecting your economic
units, so operators fight back by dumping concentrated antibiotics and
other chemicals into the water. Such toxins damage local ecosystems in
ways we’re just beginning to understand. One study
found that a drug used to combat sea lice kills a variety of nontarget
marine invertebrates, travels up to half a mile, and persists in the
water for hours.
6. Farmed fish are living in their own feces.
That’s right, fish poop too. Farmed fish
waste falls as sediment to the seabed in sufficient quantities to
overwhelm and kill marine life in the immediate vicinity and for some
distance beyond. It also promotes algal growth, which reduces water’s
oxygen content and makes it hard to support life. When the Israeli
government learned that algal growth driven by two fish farms in the Red
Sea was hurting nearby coral reefs, it shut them down.
7. Farmed fish are always trying to escape their unpleasant conditions, and who can blame them?
In the North Atlantic region alone, up to two million runaway salmon escape into the wild each year. The result is that at least 20% of supposedly wild salmon caught in the North Atlantic are of farmed origin.
Escaped fish breed with wild fish and compromise the gene pool, harming
the wild population. Embryonic hybrid salmon, for example, are far less
viable than their wild counterparts, and adult hybrid salmon routinely die earlier than their purebred relatives. This pressure on wild populations further hurts predators who rely on fish like bears and orcas.
8. See: the Jevons Paradox.
This counterintuitive economic theory
says that as production methods grow more efficient, demand for
resources actually increases – rather than decreasing, as you might
expect. Accordingly, as aquaculture makes fish production increasingly
efficient, and fish become more widely available and less expensive,
demand increases across the board. This drives more fishing, which hurts
wild populations. Thus, as the construction of new salmon hatcheries
from 1987 to 1999 drove lower prices and wider availability of salmon,
world demand for salmon increased more than fourfold during
the period. The net result: fish farming cranks up the pressure on
already-depleted populations of wild fish around the world.
9. When the
heavy environmental damage they cause is taken into account, fish
farming operations often are found to generate more costs than revenues.
One study
found that aquaculture in Sweden’s coastal waters “is not only
ecologically but also economically unsustainable.” Another report
concluded that fish farming in a Chinese
lake is an “economically irrational choice from the perspective of the
whole society, with an unequal tradeoff between environmental costs and economic
benefits.” Simply put, aquaculture drives heavy ecological harms and
these cost society money. In the U.S., fish farming drives hidden costs
of roughly $700 million each year – or half the annual production value of fish farming operations.
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