The Great Salmon Scam

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 12, 2000 | by Linda Joyce Forristal

Before you dine again on salmon, here's food for thought: The lovely pink flesh of those inviting fillets often is artificial, the result of color additives rarely revealed to unwary consumers.

It all started innocently with a delicious salmon dinner after a day's sightseeing in the Canadian Maritimes. By midnight, I was itching inside and out, as if every blood vessel were dilated. Three days later, another salmon meal provoked an even worse reaction. That's when I discovered farmed salmon contain food dyes.

Salmon forage the oceans feeding on colorful crustaceans, plankton and algae, which naturally impart a beautiful shade of pink to their flesh. But when salmon are farmed, their flesh is an insipid color -- one few consumers would choose. Salmon growers add two red food dyes -- canthaxanthin (pronounced "can tha zan thin") and its cousin astaxanthin (pronounced "as ta zan thin") -- to make their catch more appealing.

Today, 95 percent of Atlantic salmon is farmed, including most Irish, Scottish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Tasmanian, Chilean and Canadian salmon. Chilean farmers raise both the Atlantic and Pacific species in thousands of miles of deepwater fjords. (Many Chilean salmon farms are owned by Norwegian corporations.) Almost all farmed salmon is artificially dyed, a process sometimes euphemistically called "color finishing."

Several major chemical companies produce canthaxanthin and astaxanthin for color finishing, including Swiss chemical giant Hoffman La Roche and agricultural behemoth Archer Daniels Midland. Color finishing is big money, one of the largest costs associated with salmon farming. Farmed rainbow trout also get dyes in their feed -- the color-finished fillets often are marketed as a fictive species called "salmon trout" -- and canthaxanthin is fed to chickens to turn skin, flesh and egg yolks a pleasing yellow. Recently, food manufacturers began employing a 10 percent canthaxanthin powder as a coloring agent. The giant juice manufacturer Ocean Spray, for example, adds canthaxanthin to drinks such as Mega Melon and Pink Grapefruit juice -- and lists the ingredient on its label.

Unfortunately, few consumers realize that the lovely pinks of farm salmon are artificial. The FDA lists canthaxanthin as a noncertifiable color additive under 21 CFR Section 73.75 of the Federal Register. Astaxanthin, also a noncertifiable color additive, is listed under Section 73.35 of the same chapter. While these dyes generally are recognized to be safe, the Federal Register requires that color additives be declared on the label of any food -- which Ocean Spray does on its juices but fish sellers rarely do at market.

To be fair to the manufacturers of canthaxanthin or astaxanthin, there are no reports of documented allergic reactions. In fact, pure canthaxanthin is sold as an oral tanning agent -- tanning a willing consumer from the inside out when the canthaxanthin molecules attach to the subcutaneous layer of fat cells. There has been one reported death from aplastic anemia (failure of the bone marrow to manufacture red blood cells) attributed to the use of canthaxanthin as an oral tanning agent. The patient refused a life-saving transfusion -- but had reported a generalized itching.

The Federal Register discusses at great length the "cumulative exposure to canthaxanthin" and specifies that color additives should not exceed 80 milligrams per kilogram of finished feed. (The same is true for astaxanthin.) To date, the Federal Register makes no distinction between biologically produced or synthetically produced canthaxanthin or astaxanthin.

Researchers have raised other questions concerning farm-raised salmon. According to nutrition expert Artemis Simopoulos, wild salmon is a good source of omega-3 fatty acids vital nutrients for growth and development -- but the nutritional value of farmed salmon depends on the fish's diet. In her new book The Omega Diet, coauthored with Jo Robinson, Simopoulos writes that fish fed grain instead of fish meal will be "abnormally high in omega-6 fatty acids and low in omega-3 fatty acids -- not what you want."

According to Simopoulos, wild salmon living in their natural environment of rivers, lakes and oceans feed on smaller forage fish, algae and seaweeds -- good sources of omega-3s. Most commercial salmon feeds contain about 45 percent fish meal and 25 percent fish oil. Depending on market prices, the fish meal contains forage fish or poultry by-products (even feathers) and blood meal, with grains such as corn, soy and wheat used as a binder or filler. In addition, Consumer Reports has noted that half of the U.S. soy crop and one-third of the corn crop were genetically modified -- a shock to those who believe such foods are dangerous.

There are production as well as consumer issues surrounding salmon. Topping the list is the escalating controversy over mismanagement of marine fisheries in general, especially finfisheries. (Finfish, a term used to separate true fish from shellfish, refers to salmon, cod and halibut raised in a controlled environment.) Because wild finfish stocks have been weakened from overfishing, the U.S. Department of Commerce has been promoting a plan to subsidize and expand the domestic aquiculture industry.