Maddenation
Please Consume Beef?
Today I had a conversation about salmon with a guy I was playing volleyball against. Yup, during warm-ups we chatted about salmon and how we each eat it all the time (side note: I LOVE salmon, and sometimes eat it 3-4 times in a week, thanks to Costco - and indirectly thanks to farm-raised salmon : Side note: National Geographic had a very good and disturbing article on farm-raised salmon in last month’s issue). So the conversation turned alarming when the fellow told me of the new study that came out the other day showing farm-raised salmon have very high levels of PCBs, which are ‘probably’ carcinogenic. Darn. That means, according to some people, you shouldn’t eat salmon more than once a month. Funny thing is, I just saw some good morning show that had a doctor, specialist, nutritionalist, dietitian, expert or something who said that you shouldn’t eat it more than once a week. Hmmm. What to believe? What to eat?
The answer: I don’t know. And neither does the aforetomentioned expert. Seriously now. One minute omega-3 fatty acids are the rage, the next, they’re depositories for PCBs (right now I wish I could think of some funny/whitty fake acronym meaning for PCBs other than the real = polychlorinated biphenyls, oh well - maybe we could use it in Balderdash). And then there’s the new FDA dealio where companies have to label the amount of Trans Fats (aka partially hydrogenated fats and oils). I hate this one too. Not because I like oreos, but because I now search packaging for the words “partially hydrogenated” (insert Brando saying “The Horror” - from Apocolypse Now - I think). Man.
Is this problem with the media? Our nation? Me, the consumer? I can’t help but think that possibly this study was secretly funded by like the beef society or something. See, they’re feed up with salmon stealing the show and they’re own food product being listed in Webster’s as a synonym for ‘heartattack’. Is this then payback?
Who and what can we believe? All this ‘pop-science’ and these studies involving 8 people only is driving me crazy. By the way, did you get a load of the statistics used in the article? Amazing. I’ll reprint them here in case you missed it, or don’t feel like reading the whole article.
“From those figures the organization conducted what it says is the first cancer risk assessment of exposure to PCBs from farmed salmon. The assessment estimates that 800,000 Americans face an increased lifetime cancer risk of more than one in 10,000 from eating farmed salmon. About 10.4 million salmon-eaters face an increased cancer risk exceeding one in 100,000. That means farmed salmon carries a far higher cancer risk that the government usually tries to maintain: no more than one excess cancer for every million people exposed to a contaminant.”
Yup, those seem perfectly legit. WHAT? Dad, perhaps you can interpret. From what I can gather, more people still die of bee stings each year than die of salmon bites.
Another crazy issue surrounding this is the FDA vs. EPA regulations - who’s in charge of them? “Work out their differences?” How about finding some accurate information? And can I get some numbers showing PCB levels of chicken and pork and beef and tuna and shrimp and where are the PCBs coming from? Why is it concentrated in fat?
Please comment on any number of the ramblings writen above. Also, come up with a cool Balderdash thing for PCBs. Like “Please Consume Beef” - coincidence?
David • News • 08/02/03 • 4 comments
Comments
Dan • 08/03/03 • 10:58 AM:there are 2 certainties in life: death and dan borrowing money from you.
that said, you probably shouldn’t eat anything. it’s unhealthy because it’s got too much of something. gee wiz, man. i think you’ll be fine if you eat whatever you want, sometimes. without even knowing stats, eating salmon 4 times a week sounds a little too much.
these crazy stats and studies seems to be approaching the same level as the magazine-cover diet plans on shape magazine and probably sports illustrated (if not yet, soon). who cares. eat a hamburger one day, salmon the next, spaghetti the next, some chicken the next, maybe some eggs the next, throw in some cereal here and there, a pig once in a while, eat more vegetables, and voila (or is it viola? whatever it is, i mean “wah-la!”)! you’ve got a diet for life.
and don’t EVER eat bread. its carbs will kill you faster than things that kill quickly.
try soup. it’s like nothing bad.
Patrick • 08/03/03 • 4:21 PM:The thing is, even if you die earlier than you’d like to (I wonder how many people really die when they want to, besides suicides), you’ll never know if you would have lived longer if you would have just eaten differently. The state of nutrition science seems so infantile that I doubt our great-grandchildren will put much stock in what our generation has decided. They’ll look back and see the important beginnings of a knowledge of our food’s effects on us, but they’ll understand that we didn’t really know anything.
Uruguayans eat tons of meat. I don’t know the statistic nowadays, but I read recently that just after WWII, they had the highest per-capita beef consumption in the world, so they’re certainly still up there. And they don’t have higher incidences of heart attack. Lots of people live to ripe old ages (which is a problem, since they’re on the government payroll once they retire, and the government is terribly inefficient, and there’s like a 1:1 ratio of worker:retiree, but that’s another story). Now, I will say that there is no unnatural beef here. All the cows are happily wandering around eating grass until the day they’re slaughtered. No hormones, no close quarters. And they’re descended from hundreds of thousands of wild cows who colonized the place after Hernando Arias set a few free to see what would happen.
By the way, just from eating here in Uruguay for the past almost year, I’ve lost weight and am looking better. Because I don’t eat junk food, and all the food is pretty direct from the farm.
Dad • 08/03/03 • 10:32 PM:What’s so bad about “Poorly Carbonated Beverages?”
Dad • 08/13/03 • 11:09 PM:OK. Bad joke. Regarding the statistics, note that they speak of “lifetime risk,” meaning that 100,000 people eat salmon for 80 years in an isolated chamber and one gets cancer. Of course, they don’t really “know” this. They calculate it based on animal studies of PCBs and similar chemicals, and safety factors, and other calculations scientists make when they don’t have any more information. A more realistic estimate is sometimes made based on “Monte Carlo” techniques, where they use computer simulations to run thousands if not millions of cases, each with a different estimate of realistic exposure levels (not everyone eats the same amount of salmon every day) and susceptibility and contaminant level. Using this more realistic basis, risk levels are often much lower than those achieved in the “worst case scenarios” devised by the EPA.
I don’t know the number of bee-sting deaths, but I have heard it’s high (one article I saw put the number of bee-sting deaths at about 95 annually in the U.S.) Still, one in a million would be about 300 a year.
As to where the PCBs come from, they are chemicals used in electrical transformers to prevent arcing when switches are tripped. Used chemicals have been discarded for decades in such places as the Upper Hudson river, which the EPA has been trying to have corporations clean up for years. PCBs in the water get into the fish and accumulate in the fat because they are more soluble there. Once in the fat, there is no mechanism for discarding them, so they build up.
Anyway, I think salmon is still healthy. Check out Atlantic salmon, which I think has lower PCB levels (and is more expensive).
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