Salmon in the UK

[Isthmus]

Hey,

I have some questions re salmon (as a UK resident). I am living in the South East, and I find it difficult to find wild salmon. The only salmon seems to be farmed / from Scottish Lochs. The only time I can get wild salmon is when I go to a big Sainsbury's, where they sell packaged wild Alaskan salmon fillets which are great. This isn't much of a solution as it's not very near me and I don't get there often.

I wanted to know if Loch salmon is relatively bad, it is farmed right? And also if any other UK residents can get hold of wild salmon, and if they can then where / how?

Thanks a lot!

[TylerDurden]

I've only ever been able to get raw wild salmon on very rare occasions from 1 or 2 fishmongers(c. 18 quid a kilo). This meant I had to visit the relevant shops on a Tuesday or forget about it, as they would be fishing on Monday for each new catch,  and the best seafood always disappeared by wednesday latest.

Loch salmon, afaik, is farmed salmon. Sometimes they raise them "organically " on organic grainfeed, but that's unhealthy too.  My preference is to buy seafood that is genuinely wild such as raw mackerel, raw swordfish, raw kingfish and the like. I also buy raw wildcaught mussels/scallops/oysters from fishmonger's at local, open-air  farmers' markets but I no longer buy those from fishmonger's shops as they are always farmed in such shops.

[Isthmus]

Alright, thanks for your reply TylerDurden. It's a shame because I really enjoy salmon. I'll just have to stick with when I can get it from Sainsbury's or do some scouting around my local fishmongers.

[Isthmus]

What do you think about Organic Farmed Salmon?

[TylerDurden]

What do you think about Organic Farmed Salmon?

Waste of time - it's almost always fed on grains, however organic, or processed fish pellets and the like. An RPF member did once show me a youtube video of a fish-farm which was an exception, but I have no idea how to contact such farms.

[aLptHW4k4y]

Why is it a problem if it's fed on grains or fish pellets?
In the end as I can see farmed and wild have essentially the same nutritional composition (unless you consider the little bit more Omega 6 in farmed a significant difference).

farmed: http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/finfish-and-shellfish-products/4258/2
wild: http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/finfish-and-shellfish-products/4102/2

[TylerDurden]

Those 2 are very vague tables.  The point is that raising animals on foods which are not part of their natural diet will inevitably cause the resulting meat to be extremely unhealthy.

[aLptHW4k4y]

Are there studies that support this claim?

[CitrusHigh]

You will learn grasshopper lol

The moment a creature starts deviating from the set of foods written in to its genes complications will arise. One has a certain range of foods that are nourishing and life giving, this is why diets are peculiar to each person, we've all 'evolved' to consume this or that set of foods. This is why health is a personal journey, because you have to find out what your own peculiar set of life giving foods are.

[TylerDurden]

http://www.westonaprice.org/modern-foods/is-something-fishy-going-on

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11999769   (PAHs also are created via cooking, so it is extremely disturbing to find them in raw, farmed salmon as well). Hmm, that needs an article on rawpaleodiet.com, along with another fact.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1281301/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3179488/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16251623

[aLptHW4k4y]

Thanks for the links. So all studies seem to be about how farmed salmon is bad because of pollution, not because it's fed grains/fish meal?

[TylerDurden]

The scientists don't seem to have had the intelligence to check whether the SFAs/PUFAs etc. were actually healthy. That said, the 2nd link described PAHs. Not sure whether those were pollutants or just simply signs of inflammation.

[aLptHW4k4y]

The scientists don't seem to have had the intelligence to check whether the SFAs/PUFAs etc. were actually healthy.

I agree, but until they do some research on this I don't think we can say farmed fish is incredibly unhealthy because it's not fed its natural diet.

[TylerDurden]

I agree, but until they do some research on this I don't think we can say farmed fish is incredibly unhealthy because it's not fed its natural diet.

There is plenty of scientific evidence that grainfed meats are unhealthy, so it is reasonable to state that farmed fish would be similiarly unhealthy.

[CitrusHigh]

Alp, presumably you believe that raw foods are healthy for us, and cooked and otherwise denatured foods are not, so why would it be different for any other creature whether it was a salmon or a grizzly bear?

The pellets that these fish are fed are highly refined and denatured, that is, they have no vital life force and contain things like corn, soy, chicken feathers, factory chicken meal, food colorings and a whole host of other unsavory items. You're trying to be skeptical or perhaps remain objective, and you should run down the info, but we have already satisfied ourselves that this is not a quality food.

[TylerDurden]

I think it's reasonable to use some common-sense if there is no immediate scientific data available. Fortunately, in the case of cooked foods, there are now many tens of thousands of studies done on the harm caused by cooking.