Toxic Threats to Farmed Fish Food

Science reported that a worldwide assessment of the threat to the salmon market as a whole can be answered by the 13 persistent organic pollutants, including PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), known as one of the most toxic and environmentally persistent chemicals ever created.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) notes that PCBs (and there are dozens of trade names for them) don’t break down, can remain for long periods cycling between air, water and soil, travel long distances and can be taken up into the bodies of small organisms and fish.

“Studies in humans support evidence for potential carcinogenic and noncarcinogenic effects of PCBs,” it notes, but the list of potential health problems for humans and animals is frankly staggering. Sure, industries are now being regulated to more stringent laws, but once it’s out there, trying to take it back is no longer possible. The EPA site details a list of life-altering and hair-raising consequences PCBs can cause or impact:

Cancer	Immune system
Reproductive system	Nervous system
Endocrine system	Neurological effects

Keep in mind that PCBs are only one of many pollutants associated with farmed fish. One of the most treacherous is ethoxyquin, a chemical developed by Monsanto in the 1950s as a synthetic tire chemical. Ethoxyquin is found only in farmed salmon — not in wild.

It’s used as a rubber stabilizer, pesticide, preservative and antioxidant all in one, and is a suspected carcinogen that “caused chromosomal aberrations, holes and fractures in chromosomes” of human cells and “was chemically toxic, destroyed chromosomes and DNA,” according to a Norwegian newspaper review.

Because it prevents fat oxidation, it’s used in some animal feeds, including fish food. According to Nutraceutical Business Review, the European Food Safety Authority’s description of the chemical was pretty clear: Ethoxyquin is “considered to be toxic to aquatic organisms based on the acute toxicity data provided for fish, daphnia and algae.”

Article Source: Dr Mercola at Mercola.com  

The Healthy Aspects of Eating Fish

Gaskins says he believes women have been “scared off fish” because of the growing threat of mercury poisoning and adds that there’s low-level contamination in commonly eaten seafood such as shrimp and canned tuna. As healthy as it may have been to have fish on the menu at least twice a week 100 years ago, the growing problem of tainted waters has led to fish being contaminated by mercury and other pollutants.

But how does mercury get into the fish in the first place? Primarily, there are mercury “hot spots” where accumulation comes from chlorine production facilities, offshore oil-drilling platforms and coal-burning power plants. Scientific American notes that while mercury is a naturally occurring element found in plants, animals and elsewhere throughout the environment, human involvement in industrial endeavors for the last 150 years or so has “ratcheted up” the amount of airborne mercury.

It’s not a negligible amount — it’s substantial. Fish and many types of ocean life ingest the mercury — more specifically, methylmercury cysteine, the type found in seafood — until it finally reaches the humans who eat it. Live Science observes, “Mercury in humans may cause a wide range of conditions including neurological and chromosomal problems and birth defects.” Additionally:

“Once in the water, mercury makes its way into the food chain. Inorganic mercury and methylmercury are first consumed by phytoplankton, single-celled algae at the base of most aquatic food chains. Next, the phytoplankton are consumed by small animals such as zooplankton.

The methylmercury is assimilated and retained by the animals, while the inorganic mercury is shed from the animals as waste products … Small fish that eat the zooplankton are exposed to food-borne mercury that is predominantly in the methylated form. These fish are consumed by larger fish, and so on until it gets to humans.”

An example of how insidious toxic mercury contamination is has to do with larger fish, such as tuna, swordfish, shark, large bluefish and grouper, having exponentially more mercury in them because they eat smaller fish, and the contamination is cumulative.

Article Source: Dr Mercola at Mercola.com