One more:
https://www.toplinefoods.com/wild-caught-salmon/Omega-3 fatty acids and Omega-6 fatty acids are both necessary to human life, and like many vital nutrients we are incapable of making them ourselves. They have to come from the things we eat. Omega-6, among other things, causes an increase in blood clotting and inflammation. It comes from the seeds and oils of corn, soybeans, sunflower, and wheat. These are the ingredients that find their way into everything we eat in our modern diet; from the grains themselves to anything cooked or processed with their oils, like cookies, crackers, and fast foods. Because animals also eat these fatty acids instead of producing them, Omega-6 is also extremely high in the meats that we feed primarily on grains; including factory farmed beef, chicken, and pork.
Omega-3 suppresses blood clotting and inflammation, and comes from foods like walnuts, flaxseeds, cold water fish, and grass-fed anything. Now that grain fed meats are dominating the market, all these sources are relatively obscure. Neither of these fatty acids is necessarily bad for you, but they’re supposed to work together; in a healthy, natural diet, humans have roughly a 1:1 or even a 4:1 ratio of Omega-3 to Omega-6. The average American is nowhere close; with an average ratio somewhere around 1:20! Eating cold water fish like salmon can help restore the balance, and the list of potential benefits is staggering. Medline has a list of 28 different health problems which reputable scientific research has concluded could be improved by increased intake of Omega-3, and 23 more that still need to be verified. Take a look at the highlights:
• Fish oil can reduce triglycerides by 20-50%, reducing the risk of heart disease. It can prevent people from developing heart disease in the first place, and help prevent those who have heart disease of dying from it.
• Consuming fish once or twice a week can reduce the risk of stroke by up to 27%
• Fish oil can slow or even reverse the hardening of coronary arteries
• It also lowers cholesterol
• Omega-3’s anti inflammatory properties relax blood vessels and reduce high blood pressure
• The same properties can help relieve arthritis or menstrual pain.
• Fish oil can slow or even reverse some of the effects of osteoporosis
• Childhood asthma is less prevalent when mothers consume fish oils late in pregnancy; children who have asthma do better and need less medication when they add fish oil to their diet.
• For those with Bipolar disorder, fish oil can reduce both the severity and frequency of episode of depression. There is some research which suggests that fish oil is effective in improving other cases of depression as well.
• Teens and young adults with mild symptoms of psychosis can reduce their chances of developing a full psychotic illness by taking fish oil.
• Fish oil may reduce the risk of certain cancers
In addition, a lot of early research investigating how Omega 3 fatty acids could improve ADHD, aggressive tendencies, Autism, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, dyslexia and schizophrenia are available at Nutritional Healing; Omega-3 Fatty Acids and Mental Health.
Because of all these great benefits, the American Heart Association officially recommends eating at least 7 ounces of fatty fish a week; they also say that salmon is a preferable choice because it is especially high in Omega-3 and low in mercury compared to other fish. If you’ll remember, the EPA agreed that four meals of 8 ounces of wild-caught salmon per month was fine, even in its most conservative estimation. However, if you tried to meet the AHA’s minimum with farm-raised salmon, you would be taking in almost 4 times the EPA’s maximum. If you don’t want to be forced to choose between risking cancer and risking heart disease, wild-caught salmon is literally the only way to go. And that’s assuming they’re identical in nutritional value.
The Big Mistakes
Let’s start off with why raising salmon in farms is not actually helping to reduce over-fishing. You would think that if half of the market’s salmon are coming from farms, that’s half of the market’s salmon that don’t have to come from the ocean; a bit of an improvement, right? Well, there’s unfortunately one very critical hole in that logic, which salmon farmers are struggling to overcome.
King Salmon Fishery
Salmon are carnivores. It takes on average 5 pounds of seafood to raise one pound of salmon. According to one biologist quoted on the Pure Salmon Campaign, “one sea loch [contains] 25 times as many farm salmon as there are wild salmon for the whole west coast of Scotland”. If there was really enough salmon chow in the oceans to support those kinds of numbers, wouldn’t there be that many salmon occurring naturally?
Even salmon farmers realize that they can’t continue on this path. “Our biggest challenge,” said an executive quoted in the Los Angeles Times, “is to find substitute grains for fish meal and fish oil.”
Really? Because we would have guessed that their biggest challenge would be to market a product fed on the same grains that have destroyed the Omega-3 ratio of every other factory farmed animal in the States, driving health conscious Americans to buy salmon in the first place and make their entire industry possible. But that’s just us.
Wild-caught salmon has an Omega-3 to Omega-6 ratio of up to 19:1, farm raised salmon has a ratio of about 2:1, which is lower than our optimum ratio! Only if you ate nothing but farm raised salmon for every meal, which no one would consider safe, would you even come close to your ideal balance. There is absolutely no comparison.
Author
Topic: Omega 3 and Farmed salmon (Read 13222 times)