You May as Well be Eating Doughnuts

Ahoy there! How's traffic in cyberspace today? Glad you could scoot down for a few minutes to enjoy a mug of coffee and a virtual treat with me. Say...here's part of an email I received from Dr. Al Sears about fish. Personally, I'm trying to eat more. 

"Most people are shocked when I tell them the truth about their tilapia. After all, it’s fish. It’s supposed to be good for you. 

Salmon is still the most popular fish, but tilapia is gaining on it because it has a mild taste and it’s inexpensive.

But here’s the thing: Eat the tilapia you get at the supermarket and you get the same amount of “bad fats” as a typical doughnut!

The tilapia served as the “Catch of The Day” in restaurants across the country is usually farm-raised. And farm-raised tilapia has more omega-6s than bacon, doughnuts and commercially-raised hamburger meat. 

Instead of being good for your heart, it’s flooding your body with inflammation – the main culprit behind heart disease. And on top of that, tilapia is pumped full of gender-bending hormones.

The Real Dark Side Of Fat

It’s not that omega-6s are necessarily bad for you. They are essential fatty acids that your body needs. But we get so much of them that our bodies often have an unhealthy ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s.

In fact, the average American has an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of 20:1. Your ideal ratio should be 2:1 in favor of omega-3s. So, you need to eat foods that are high in omega-3s to balance out the omega-6s.

Unfortunately, farm-raised tilapia isn’t a great source.

The omega-6 to omega-3 ratio in farm-raised tilapia is a whopping 11:1. Farm-raised tilapia has less than half a gram of omega-3s per 3.5 ounces of fish. That’s probably the lowest you’ll find in any fish… even farm-raised salmon has 12 times more omega-3s and farm-raised trout has 2 times more. In contrast, wild-caught salmon has 22 times more omega-3s than tilapia.

What makes tilapia so bad for you? It’s the corn diet the fish are fed. Most wild caught fish eat greens – or other fish that eat greens – which supplies them with omega-3s.

Corn, however, is loaded with omega-6s. When the fish eat the corn, they convert the omega-6s into arachidonic acid, the main cause of dangerous inflammation in the body.

This is a problem, since Americans ate 475 million pounds of tilapia last year. So the fish that was once a nice treat here in Africa, is now the most popular farm-raised fish in the United States.

Fish Undergoing Sex Changes

The fact that tilapia has too much omega-6 and not enough omega-3 fatty acids is reason enough not to waste your time eating it. But, did you also know that young tilapia are pumped full of hormones that turn them all into males?

You see, farm-raised tilapia are kept in enclosed ponds and breed like crazy. It takes them just two to three months to mature and then they breed once a month. You might think this overabundance of fish would be good, but it causes overcrowding in the ponds and ends up stunting the growth of the fish.

So, the producers get an uneven harvest – some small, deformed fish and some larger fish (generally the male ones).

In many cases, fish farmers use polyethylene vinyl acetate to stimulate growth and breeding in both males and females. It’s what is used to make plastic tubing.

On fish farms, in order to get a uniform “catch” of larger tilapia, they feed the stock the hormone 17 alpha-methyltestosterone, which turn all the fish into males.

This lets the fish farmers produce bigger fish in a shorter period for higher profits. No wonder this fish is becoming more popular every day. It’s inexpensive. And its mild, white meat appeals to many consumers.

The hormone treatment is the chosen method used by tilapia farmers worldwide. That means that just about all tilapia sold in supermarkets here in the U.S. are fed methyltestosterone.

There aren’t any long-term studies to tell if this hormone is safe in humans eating tilapia. But the hormone itself is toxic to the liver and has been taken off the market in Germany.

This steady diet of corn and hormones just isn’t the diet nature intended.

Before the days of modern industry, your fish had abundant supplies of omega-3s. They dined on seaweed or algae and other fish below them in the food chain that ate these plants.

But these days, even some salmon has little to none of these essential fats. Farm-raised fish are fed corn, soy, those fish flakes that you feed the fish in your aquarium, and other unnatural foods.

There was even an episode of the “Dirty Jobs” TV show where they showed a U.S. fish farm feeding the tilapia the waste product of a different farmed fish.

It’s no wonder they don’t have any omega-3s… these fish don’t ever eat their native diet.

The benefits are practically endless when your body gets enough omega-3s. Many of my own patients have not only reversed disease, but also improved their mental and emotional lives as well. Omega-3s are a family of healthy fats that you can’t make, so you must take in so they can:

• Help maintain normal inflammatory response in your joints and body

• Facilitate healthy brain communication

• Maintain healthy heart rhythm

• Stabilize blood sugar levels

• Maintain your immune system

• Help you keep healthy lung function

• Keep your brain sharp and accurate

Find The Best Fish For Your Omega-3s

Don’t abandon fish altogether. They are still a great source of omega-3s. Here are the omega-3 to omega-6 ratios of some of the most popular fish we eat, and how that compares to farmed tilapia:

Omega-3 to Omega-6 Ratio of Wild-Caught and Farm-Raised Fish
Wild Salmon	13:1
Pollock	12.5:1
Freshwater Salmon	7.5:1
Herring	6.5:1
Tuna	5:1
Trout	2:1
Farmed Catfish	1:11
Farmed Tilapia	1:11

Avoid Apex-Predator Fish. While tuna (albacore and bluefin) has good amounts of omega-3s, you should avoid it because it tends to contain high levels of toxins like mercury. Overall, stay away from top-of-the-food-chain fish like tuna, shark, swordfish, tilefish, and king mackerel because of their mercury levels. If you want to eat tuna, skip the albacore and stick with light tuna.

Choose Smaller Fish. Try to choose smaller fish that are lower down on the food chain. They don’t typically eat other fish and fewer toxins get stored in their flesh. Good choices are herring, salmon, sardines, anchovies, trout, halibut, and haddock.

Buy Wild-Caught Fish. Farm-raised fish are simply fed an unnatural diet and become diseased and inflamed. The potential health risks could cost your body in the long run.

Because farm-raised fish don’t have lots of room to swim and are prone to disease, they are often given antibiotics as well as preservatives and commercial dyes to give them a healthy color.

For example, farm-raised salmon doesn’t get enough astaxanthin to turn it the nice pink color that you would see with wild salmon, so it is injected with dye. At your supermarket you will often see “color-enhanced” in small print under the farm-raised salmon sign.

Wild salmon, on the other hand, get their pink color by eating little sea creatures like krill that have natural astaxanthin. I prefer wild-caught salmon of the Pacific Ocean.

But, to tell the truth, wild-caught fish is not the clear-cut choice it used to be. When about 300 streams across the U.S. were tested, one hundred percent of the fish were found to be contaminated with mercury. It’s gotten that bad.

So today, supplementing with a good quality fish oil that is purified of contaminants is a sensible way to make sure you get enough to reap the health benefits."

Wow! Watch out for farmed tilapia, eh! Nong and I tend towards wild salmon when we can catch it at our nearest supermarket, eh. I bake it in foil with some garlic, pepper, light soy sauce and 'herbs de Provence'. Tasty!

See ya, eh!

Bob