Last updated on April 12th, 2017
Just when you thought it was safe to feed salmon fillets to your pet mouse, along comes a study entitled, “Chronic Consumption of Farmed Salmon Containing Persistent Organic Pollutants Causes Insulin Resistance and Obesity in Mice.”
You have to wonder how many mice are chronically dining on salmon, farmed or wild. It’s more likely that if a mouse fell in the water, a salmon would eat it. That would be a better meal than most farm-raised salmon ever get.
It’s hard to imagine the mouse winning the battle. At the very least, it would need SCUBA gear and a tiny but powerful spear-gun. Even then, it would be a near run thing.
My money would be on the fish.
The researchers took the suspense out of it by feeding the mice salmon that was already filleted. It wasn’t very sporting, but that’s science for you: a mouse-eat-salmon enterprise.
They found that mice fed very high fat diets with salmon and typical western diets with salmon suffered more insulin resistance, visceral obesity, and glucose intolerance than mice fed those same diets without salmon. However, the negative effects were lessened by feeding the mice cleaner fish. That is, when the salmon they were eating had reduced amounts of POPs (persistent organic pollutants), the mice accumulated less visceral fat and exhibited better insulin sensitivity.
Farm-raised salmon is typically much more contaminated than wild-caught salmon, which is why I only eat wild-caught. Canned salmon is usually wild-caught; I’ve never seen any that wasn’t.
The point of this study seems to be that eating fish that contain high concentrations of environmental contaminants is bad for mice, and by extension, for people. It’s a daring claim, but one backed with scientific evidence.
So, just like people, mice should only eat clean, wild-caught salmon.
How they get the can open will be the focus of future research.
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