News Coverage
How safe is the salmon you eat?
Published July 29, 2003
In the northwest, salmon is a popular dinner treat. But how safe is that salmon you buy in the grocery store?
When Nancye Benson buys salmon, she knows exactly what she wants. "Wild salmon," she explained. "I would always buy wild over farmed." But Nancye's in the minority, for the fact is, unlike the wild salmon sold at Wild Oats Market, nearly 80 percent of all salmon sold in stores has been raised on a farm.
Atlantic salmon are raised in floating net pens where they are fed pellets of concentrated nutrients, unlike wild salmon that swim and feed freely in the ocean.
It is the fish feed that has come under fire in a new report released by the "Environmental Working Group" that cites elevated levels of PCB's or polychlorinated biphenyls, a known carcinogen, in some farmed salmon.
The salmon is processed in such a way that when fish oil is fed to the farmed salmon, the PCB's are in very high concentrations.
The report, based on ten samples, including three from Portland area grocery stores, shows that in farmed fish, PCB levels were 27 parts per billion.
By contrast, wild salmon averaged about 5 parts per billion of PCB.
Current FDA limits are about 2,000 parts per billion, so the levels in both wild and farmed salmon are acceptable.
While the fish samples fell well under current FDA standards, the Environmental Protection Agency has much stricter PCB limits for fish.
Still, the fact that PCBs are passed along the food chain concerns many fish biologists like John Thorpe.
"They don't go away and what we collect from the ocean goes into fish feed and into pen reared salmon, or it could be eaten by a wild fish in the ocean ," explained Thorpe. "And it just keeps cycling around - probably going to be a problem."
That's a problem consumers will need to remember when they shop for salmon.
The new report calls on the government for more in-depth, long-term studies on farm-raised salmon.