Life or Something Like it

I was always under the impression that salmon was good for you & I never really bothered to research it, but after coming across the following article I may need to re-evaluate my opinion.

From www.fishinghurts.com:

Top 10 Reasons Not to Eat Salmon

1. Salmon Are Smart
Fish are smart. Oxford University scientist Dr. Theresa Burt de Perera recently discovered that fish learn even faster than dogs. Fish learn from each other, have long-term memories, and can recognize one another. They gather information by eavesdropping, and some species even use tools, which, until recently, was thought to be a uniquely human trait. Like the dogs and cats with whom we share our homes, they also like to play, investigate new things, and hang out with friends.

2. Arsenic and Old Waste
Mmmm, want a plate full of poison? Fish have extremely high levels of chemicals such as arsenic, mercury, PCBs, DDT, dioxins, and lead in their flesh and fat. You may even get industrial-strength fire retardant with that catch of the day. The chemical residue found in salmon flesh can be as much as 9 million times that of the water in which they live.

3. Harm at the Farm
Four-fifths of the United States’ most popular fish flesh, salmon, consumed in the U.S. is farm-raised. These fish, who are raised by the millions in cages made of nets in coastal waters, are killing off wild fish populations as well, since it takes 5 pounds of commercially caught fish (species not eaten by humans) to produce 1 pound of farmed fish.

4. Sea Lice Aren’t So Nice
No one wants to wear a “death crown,” but thanks to chronic sea lice, a parasite that eats down to the bones on a fish’s face, salmon commonly suffer this condition. Salmon also routinely go insane and sustain sores and other injuries from intense crowding, as they are made to live their entire lives with as many as 27 fish in a space the size of a bathtub.

5. Slammin’ Salmon
No, we’re not talking about a baseball player—but fish farmers do often use bats to beat large salmon to death. All methods used to slaughter fish are grotesque and cruel. Fish have their gills slit while they are still alive, and smaller salmon are often packed in ice and left to slowly suffocate or freeze to death.

6. Open Waters Are Open Sewers
Everybody loves the Big Apple, but would you eat something fished out of the city’s sewer system? According to the Norwegian government, the salmon and trout farms in Norway alone produce roughly the same amount of sewage as New York City. The massive amount of raw sewage, dead fish corpses, and antibiotic-laden fish food sludge settling below farmed salmon cages can actually cause the ocean floor to rot, destroying vital habitat for the already strained marine ecosystem and turning coastal waters into open sewers.

7. Breeding Brain Damage
Usually when Moms pass things on to their children, it’s a good thing—but when pregnant or nursing moms eat fish, they pass the toxins they consume on to their babies. Studies have also shown that children born to mothers who eat fish are slower to talk, walk, and develop fine motor skills and have weaker memories and shorter attention spans. Scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health have found that fish consumption can cause irreversible impairment to brain function in children, both in the womb and as they grow.

8. Don’t Forget About the PCBs
Feeling forgetful? There could be something fishy going on. Scientists have proved that people who eat only two servings of fish a month have difficulty recalling information that they learned just 30 minutes earlier. The culprit is high levels of mercury, lead, and PCBs in their blood. PCBs, synthetic chemicals polluting water and concentrated in fish flesh, act like hormones, wreaking havoc on the nervous system and contributing to a variety of illnesses beyond forgetfulness and vertigo, including cancer, infertility, and other sexual problems.

9. For Your Health
Would you like tartar sauce with those cancer-causing toxins? If you’re feeling green around the gills, salmon could be making you seriously ill. The Environmental Working Group estimates that 800,000 people in the U.S. face an excess lifetime cancer risk from eating farmed salmon. Plus, salmon flesh contains high amounts of artery-clogging cholesterol and fat.

10. Faux Fish
Fake it for salmon’s sake! Tempt your taste buds without tempting fate by trying faux fish. Your local Asian food mart or health-food store likely carries vegetarian mock seafood products that have all the flavor of the “real thing” but none of the contaminants or cholesterol.

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I felt pretty terrible when I woke up this morning. I had a headache, a bit of a stomach ache, and I was so exausted I could barely manage to get out of bed. My muscles felt a bit tighter as well. I know those are common symptoms of withdrawal, but I didn’t expect to experience them to this extent as I’ve never really been a big dairy consumer in the first place.

According to www.healthdiaries.com, dairy actually contains opiates:

Why is cheese so addicting? Certainly not because of its aroma, which is perilously close to old socks. The first hint of a biochemical explanation came in 1981, when scientists at Wellcome Research Laboratories in Research Triangle Park, N.C., found a substance in dairy products that looked remarkably like morphine. After a complex series of tests, they determined that, surprisingly enough, it actually was morphine. By a fluke of nature, the enzymes that produce opiates are not confined to poppies — they also hide inside cows’ livers. So traces of morphine can pass into the animal’s bloodstream and end up in milk and milk products. The amounts are far too small to explain cheese’s appeal. But nonetheless, the discovery led scientists on their search for opiate compounds in dairy products.

And they found them. Opiates hide inside casein, the main dairy protein. As casein molecules are digested, they break apart to release tiny opiate molecules, called casomorphins. One of these compounds has about one-tenth the opiate strength of morphine. The especially addicting power of cheese may be due to the fact that the process of cheese-making removes water,lactose and whey proteins so that casein is concentrated. Scientists are now trying to tease out whether these opiate molecules work strictly within the digestive tract or whether they pass into the bloodstream and reach the brain directly.

The cheese industry is miles ahead of them, having gone to great lengths to identify people who are most vulnerable to addiction. It dubs them “cheese cravers,” and tracks their age, educational level and other demographics so as to target them with marketing strategies that are tough to ignore. With a $200 million annual research and marketing budget, the dairy industry is not content to have you just sprinkling a little mozzarella on your salad. It is looking for those Americans who will eat it straight out of the package, whatever the cost to their waistlines or cholesterol levels.

At a “Cheese Forum” held Dec. 5, 2000, Dick Cooper, the vice president of Cheese Marketing for Dairy Management Inc., laid out the industry’s scheme for identifying potential addicts and keeping them hooked. In his slide presentation, which was released to our organization under the Freedom of Information Act, he asked the question, “What do we want our marketing program to do?” and then gave the answer: “Trigger the cheese craving.” He described how, in a partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the dairy industry launched Wendy’s Cheddar Lover’s Bacon Cheeseburger, which single-handedly pushed 2.25 million pounds of cheese during the promotion period. That works out to 380 tons of fat and 1.2 tons of pure cholesterol in the cheese alone. A similar promotion with Pizza Hut launched the “Ultimate Cheese Pizza,” which added an entire pound of cheese to a single pizza and sold five million pounds of it during a six-week promotion in 2000. The presentation concluded with a cartoon of a playground slide with a large spider web woven to trap children as they reached the bottom. The caption had one spider saying to another, ‘”If we pull this off, we’ll eat like kings.”

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