The EssentiaList

Salmon leaping at Willamette Falls, Oregon City, OR

By Catherine Haug, July 13, 2014

Fish has long been my favorite food (beginning with lutefisk when I was a toddler). Growing up here in the Flathead, land-locked Kokanee salmon is another favorite, along with native cutthroat trout and other native trout. As native fish, these are the most sustainable we can get here in the NW Montana

(NOTE: lake trout is not native, and they are out-competing our native bull trout, which to me is very very sad, but that’s another article).

If you are not a fisherman, what are your best sustainable (and healthful) fish and seafood you can buy in the store?

• If your main goal is healthful fish, definitely avoid farmed fish, as they are not fed their natural diet and may carry disease. Many are treated with antibiotics in their feed, and are likely exposed to PCBs;
• If sustainable seafood is your main goal, the Center for Food Safety (1) provides guidelines and recommendations; read on.

See also my 2016 posting: Dietary fish & seafood: Which are/are not healthful.

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Field of Wheat

By Catherine Haug, July 12, 2014 (Photo, right, from Wikimedia Commons)

I recently posted an article, Butter (and other saturated fats) is a Health Food, based on an article in the New York Times (3) by researcher Dr. Fred Kummerow, who has been studying the effect of different lipids (including fats and cholesterol) on health for 80 years. He concludes that science made the wrong conclusions from early studies on saturated fats (beginning in the 1940s), when they pointed the bad finger at saturated fats. At the time, these scientists did not know what we know today, when they made their erroneous conclusions.

For example, early research involving saturated fats were actually using trans-fats made by hydrogenating unsaturated fats; this research led to the beliefs that dietary saturated fats lead to heart disease. They mistakenly assumed the hydrogenation was complete, and that’s where they went wrong. Had they used actual saturated fats like butter or coconut oil, they would have gotten very different results.

So, if saturated fats are not the problem we’ve all believed they are, than what is the problem? (more…)