News Coverage
Farmed salmon has PCBs, study finds
CANCER CONCERNS: The FDA is working on new guidelines on how much of the fish to eat
Published August 4, 2003
The EPA says not to eat the fish more than every 2 months due to cancer-causing PCBs.
Americans consume so much salmon these days -- 70 percent of it farmed -- that it's now the third most popular seafood item in the country, after canned tuna and shrimp. Nutritionists and doctors say it's good for you, and the Food and Drug Administration says you can eat as much of it as you like. But a report released last week by the Environmental Working Group indicates otherwise. The nonprofit environmental research and advocacy organization tested 10 samples of farmed salmon bought at markets on the East and West Coasts. They found the salmon to be contaminated with cancer-causing PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, at an average level far higher than any other protein source.
These levels surpassed -- by three times as much -- those of any other seafood tested. In addition, the group said it found that farmed salmon had 16 times the PCBs found in wild salmon. The high levels do not exceed those set in 1984 by the Food and Drug Administration for commercially sold fish. But they are above the guidelines set by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1999 for recreationally caught fish. PCBs, an industrial byproduct, were banned by the United States in 1976.
The study has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. But two previous peer-reviewed studies of farmed salmon found similarly high levels of PCBs. Responding to the fresh findings, Dr. Terry Troxell, a toxicologist in the FDA center for food safety and applied nutrition, said, "Any time we have a standard that goes back to the '70s and '80s, it's time to review it." If consumers applied the latest study's findings to the environmental agency's 1999 guidelines, they might be wary of eating farmed salmon more than once a month. One sample contained such high PCB levels that the environmental agency's advice would be to eat it no more than once every two months.
"Until we hear differently from the FDA, we would assume that theirs are the regulations we need to follow," said Alex Trent, acting director of Salmon of the Americas, an organization of 80 salmon farmers in the United States, Canada and Chile. Kimberly Rawlings, a press officer for the FDA, said her administration was considering an update of the guidelines.
The Environmental Working Group, based in Washington and financed by private foundations, used the seafood industry's fish consumption data to report how many Americans regularly eat salmon. About 25 percent of Americans eat salmon; 23.1 million eat it more than once a month, 1.3 million people eat it once a week and 180,000 eat it more than twice a week.
From those figures, the organization conducted a cancer-risk assessment of exposure to PCBs from farmed salmon. The assessment estimates that 800,000 people face an increased lifetime cancer risk of more than one in 10,000 from eating farmed salmon, and 10.4 million people face an increased cancer risk exceeding one in 100,000.
Previous studies have shown that PCB levels in farmed salmon are higher than in wild salmon because of the fish meal they are fed. The meal, made mostly from ground small fish, has high levels of fish oil to fatten the salmon.
PCBs concentrate in fats. An ounce of farmed salmon has 52 percent more fat than an ounce of wild salmon, the Department of Agriculture says. In June, the National Academy of Sciences called for changes in fish farming and in human consumption to reduce exposure to PCBs.