Not all salmon are equally useful: How fish sellers deceive

Red fish wears this name not only because of the color of the meat. This fish is festive, elegant, expensive and unusually useful. However, let's choose from the entire assortment of salmon and pink salmon and let's take a closer look at the fish lying in the ice on the counter: will they really benefit health?

For which it is worth loving a family of salmon

Usually nutritionists say that fat is harmful. However, this does not apply to red fish. Its meat is saturated with unsaturated fatty acids - omega-3, - which it stores for its long migrations. In our body, such acids are built into the cell membranes, and especially in them need brain tissue and retina. Omega-3 is relatively easy to break down, supplying energy to mobile cells, for example, spermatozoa. Salmon meat consists of a well-assimilated dietary protein, which, given the almost complete absence of carbohydrates, gives an unexpectedly low caloric value. And an impressive list of vitamins and minerals, including magnesium and phosphorus, allows you to adjust metabolism, normalize the work of the endocrine glands and strengthen the bones.

However, the degree of beneficial effect of red fish on the body depends on the quality of the product, which is associated with the following points:

• freshness;
• way of breeding;
• biological age;
• recipe of preparation.

Fish is only the first freshness!

Delicacy stale on the counter, and it already had harmful substances that can provoke a common poisoning with vomiting, diarrhea, weakness and dehydration. In order not to buy a poison, make sure that the smell of the fish is fresh, the eyes are not dull, the scales shine, and the gills do not begin to acquire a greenish tinge. If you choose a fillet, press it with your finger: the dent on the quality product quickly aligns. It is worth evaluating and the color of the meat on the cut. Buyers often choose brighter specimens, believing that they are better, so manufacturers can deliberately tint the fish with a pink food coloring that can cause allergies. To avoid dyes, it is better to choose fish with the lightest meat, as it is in nature.

Salmon free or divorced on the farm - how to distinguish and what to prefer

To get as much commercial fish as possible, the fish farmers keep it in close cages, and antibiotics, hormones and a special fodder dye, canthaxanthine, are added to the food. These absolutely unnecessary ingredients can provoke a worsening of the liver, kidneys, heart and even the iris, give allergic reactions and reduce immunity. Fish, living in the wild, feed on shrimp and sprat. Hunting, she swims for a day tens of kilometers, which allows her to grow healthy and completely free from unnatural substances.

Wild fish can be distinguished by more developed fins, pale meat and a relatively modest size. Pink salmon in the Far East is still caught in the open sea, but Atlantic salmon is almost entirely grown in cages. It should be noted that the salmon bred in the US is genetically modified: genetics have worked on it in order to accelerate its growth.

How is the age of the salmon related to its quality?

The usefulness of salmon meat depends on the stage of development, which is only two: feeding and preparation for spawning. During feeding, red fish hunt, eat plenty and gain weight. At this time in its body there is an intensive formation of fatty acids and vitamins, which will be useful for the salmon during migration to the spawning ground. It is the salmon caught during the feeding period, it has delicious, maximally useful meat. And then it's time to go to spawn. Hundreds of kilometers of ocean open spaces, rapids, waterfalls, a strong counter flow of mountain rivers - all the accumulated is destroyed, giving the fish energy. Meat is rapidly losing quality, does not carry anything useful, in boiled or baked form more like a pâté. Determine the period of life of salmon can be by the color of the body. Walking fish keeps the silver-gray scales with dark specks, going to spawning gets a red shade. The males are jawed, and the males have pink spines.

Cooking salmon correctly

We will understand how the technology of cooking red fish affects our health. Salmon can be cooked at least nine different ways, which conditionally group by degree of harm and benefit.

1. The risk of infection with parasites exists when using raw and light-salted foods. It will be higher when using farm fish, because it lives crowded. To exclude the presence of parasites, in expensive institutions of Japanese cuisine, salmon is preliminarily frozen.
2. Overabundance of salt appears in fish with strong salting and canning. Such methods of preparation effectively eliminate possible parasites, but can damage the health of the kidneys.
3. Dietary recipes, sparing the stomach and other digestive organs, prescribe to boil fish, cook it for a couple or bake. But part of the vitamins will have time to collapse, and some soluble compounds will pass into the broth. To minimize losses, it is recommended not to boil fish for longer than 15 minutes, not allowing boiling, and turn the broth into a light fish soup.
4. Salmon loses a significant portion of vitamins, instead of being enriched by carcinogens during frying and smoking. Especially dangerous is the "store" version of smoked fish, in which the carcasses are not kept above the fire, but quickly impregnated with liquid smoke.