Summer means salmon turning up in many of our favorite places, from your backyard grill to your lunchtime salad.
But with salmon, pay attention not just to where it lands, but where it comes from.
Wild or farm?
As a consumer, you have a choice between wild-caught salmon or farm-raised salmon ““ aquaculture, which took hold in the United States starting in the 1970s as natural salmon stocks began to dwindle.
It’s important to recognize that there are differences between wild salmon and farmed salmon, largely “because they have different diets,” said Karah Stanley, a dietitian with the St. Elizabeth Physicians Weight Management Center.
“Farm-raised salmon is given a diet that is processed, high-fat feed in order to produce larger fish,” Stanley said, “while wild salmon, naturally, eats organisms in its environment.”
Why the choice matters
The difference in diet manifests itself in the fat content on your table. Farmed salmon has considerably higher fat content compared with wild salmon.
That’s good in the case of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, which have well-documented health benefits, including your brain development, blood pressure and immune system. But saturated fat isn’t desirable, and farmed salmon, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, is 20 percent higher in saturated fat.
“The higher fat content also means that it is higher in calories overall,” Stanley said. “Wild salmon is higher in iron, zinc and potassium.”
More pieces to the puzzle
There are other concerns with farmed salmon. “Farmed salmon contains more contaminants due to the water they live in and food they eat,” Stanley said. Still, the level of contaminants found in most farmed salmon still falls within acceptable federal government standards.
Some also have raised concerns about potential carcinogens in farmed fish vs. their wild-caught counterparts.
Another real-world factor is cost. Wild salmon is uniformly more expensive than the farmed variety.
Stanley, who recommends one to two weekly servings of fatty fish, such as salmon, said at the end of the day, don’t be frightened away from farmed catches.
“The main takeaway here is that salmon, farm-raised or wild, is healthy,” she said. “If you can afford wild salmon, which is more expensive, then that’s a better option due to having less contaminants. But farmed salmon is still healthy.
