The Healthy Thing is a curated guide to embodying total wellness with a strong focus on mind/body healing and living a clean and healthy lifestyle.

The importance of knowing where your fish is coming from

THT
Food & Drink

We all know the saying, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”, however I would like to know what fishing methods we are talking about here…

When it comes to eating fish, gone are the times that you can trust your local grocery store’s selection to be the best, healthiest, cleanest option for your seafood meal.  These days most seafood has been infection ridden, filled with pharmaceuticals, dyed with chemicals, and is unsustainably caught. It’s crucial to be in the know of healthy seafood practices and consumption and  not turn a blind eye as it can directly effect your health over time.

Farm raised fish, with the exception of a small handful of super healthy/clean/sustainable fish farms, are simply not healthy for human consumption- in fact, they could even be harmful to your body. Though buying certain types of wild-caught fish is far superior, it’s important to know what type of wild fishing method is used, where it was caught/which waters it is coming from, how the fish are handled post catch, toxicity, and more as it could be just as harmful to you. Here’s what you need to know [all citations for info below are at the end of this post]:

The 4-1-1 on farm-raised fish

  • They are fed things like pesticide sprayed corn, poultry litter, and even chicken feathers. Because this type of feed is not part of a fish’s natural food chain, the fish won’t produce the nutritional benefits, like omega-3’s, as a fish in the wild do.

  • Fish such as salmon and tuna are dyed with toxic chemicals to produce a more “natural looking” color.

  • They are kept in tight, overpopulated pens with no space to actually swim. The pens are flooded with so much disease, sea lice, and parasites that the fish must be fed antibiotics and pesticides to help mitigate the excess infection. [Which means yes, you are consuming those antibiotics. So next time you brag that you haven’t had antibiotics in years, think again if you’re eating farm raised fish.]

  • They are contaminated with significantly high amounts of PCBs [polychlorinated biphenyls], a cancer-causing chemical.

  • They can have double the fat of wild-caught fish.

  • Need one last reason not to eat farm raised? Look up a video or image of ‘fish farms” or “disease in farm raised fish”…that should gross you out enough to do the trick. I’ve seen detailed images of this and cannot bring myself to even look at it again, so I will not be sharing it on this page. It’s too disgusting.

Tips for choosing clean, fresh, sustainably wild-caught fish

  • The way wild fish is caught is super important. For example, longline catching and trawling is used in commercial fishing and is technically considered “wild caught” [you may have seen this on Seaspiracy]. Longline fishing is when up to 60 miles of line are cast out from sea floor to ocean surface, while trawling is when a large net is cast behind the boat and dragged. Both these methods catch anything and everything in between [aka “bycatch’] from sea turtles to dolphins, which are most often killed on board and thrown back into the water. This results in overfishing and is endangering ocean species.

  • Most large commercial boats don’t have cleanliness standards for their catch and once caught, fish can sit on board for days, weeks, or months. [So even though that fish may have been delivered to the supermarket this morning, depending where it came from and how it was caught, it could be weeks or months old, being frozen and half-way thawed several times along the way.]

  • Line-caught fish from a small fishery is the best place to buy fish from. They fish in small batches and the time from when the fish is caught to when it is either transported or frozen for direct-to-consumer sales is extremely minimal, usually only a few hours.

  • Though not perfect, the US has higher standards than Asian and African commercial fisheries [also seen in Seaspiracy] who use unsanitary measures, overfishing, and are active in literal slave labor.

  • Be aware of the waters where the fish is coming from. Some bodies of water contain extremely high amounts of pollution, disposed pharmaceutical drugs, and high levels of chemicals or metals. Not all waters are the same.

  • READ LABELS. In most fish at the market, under the catch method and species it will say “previously frozen”. That means the fish is not fresh and you have no idea how long it’s been sitting at the market for or how long it was previously frozen for. To avoid buying old fish, always ask the fishmonger when something was delivered.

  • Shop for in-season fish [yes, fish have seasons too] There are times when fish are at peak abundance. This article on Copper River Salmon explains it in a simple way.

  • Avoid, or eat extremely sparingly, fish high in mercury [article on that coming soon-ish].

  • Stay away from anything labeled “USDA Organic”. There are no organic standards for fish as of yet so that label means absolutely nothing and is a marketing ploy.

  • Look at the eyeball. It should be firm, bright, and clear not sunken and cloudy. My uncle is a chef and ever since I can remember he always told me the first thing to look at when buying a whole fish is the eyeball.

  • If the seafood shop or fish itself smells fishy, that’s not a good thing. Despite the fact that you are buying an actual fish, a fishy smell = old fish.

  • Click either link below to search the sustainability of your favorite fish depending on where it is from:

    https://seafood.ocean.org/seafood/browse/

    https://www.seafoodwatch.org/recommendations/search?query=:species;Halibut

Shopping recommendations:

These fisheries use small boats with 1-2 crew members, catch fish in small batches or even one-at-a-time, handle each fish individually with utmost care, and blast-freeze the fish within just a few hours of catching. I highly recommend the following:

https://www.shorelinewildsalmon.com

https://www.citizensalmonalaska.com

https://www.vitalchoice.com

https://sitkasalmonshares.com - Haven’t tried them yet!

FYI: I am a stickler for facts, statistics, studies, and solid research. I spend hours among hours researching, reading, emailing and asking for more information to provide the most accurate information. Also, everything is cited at the end of every post.

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Your body sometimes speaks through color

Your body sometimes speaks through color