Repeating the Farmed Salmon PCB Smear ... Again

Over at US News and World Report, environmental blogger Maura Judkis is passing along a list of "10 Risky Foods," that have been compiled by Sprig, one of those helpful environmental groups trying to create some hysteria in the wake of the recent peanut butter recall.

As it turns out, we've dealt with this issue before, most recently in January. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there's a greater risk from PCBs from salted butter, homemade brown gravy and -- wait for it -- roasted chicken. Mitigating the risk further is the fact that Americans consume so little seafood, setting up a situation where overall diet of Americans would be better off if they consumed more, not less, fish.

Facts About Salmon and PCBs

Over the past few days, newspapers in both Canada and the U.S. have been passing along the results of a study that claims that killer whales living off the coasts of Washington state and British Columbia are slowly being poisoned by PCBs carried by wild salmon stocks in the region. Though the study obviously doesn't refer to the farmed Atlantic salmon produced by facilities in Chile and British Columbia, the folks at SOTA thought it was important to put some facts into play that activists often obscure when it comes to this issue.

Though the use of PCBs has been banned since the 1970s, they still persist in the food chain to this day, though at steadily decreasing levels. But as the chart from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer sourced from the U.S. FDA shows, the level of PCBs in salmon found in supermarket seafood sections and served in restaurants is lower than you find in a staple like salted butter or other common dinnertime fare like meatloaf, chicken breast and even brown gravy. Please keep this in mind whenever you hear media reports about this issue.