
'Sushi parasites' have increased 283-fold in past 40 years - elorant
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-03/uow-ph031520.php
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philshem
If parasites weren't bad enough:

> They found that one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were
> mislabeled. A piece of sushi sold as the luxury treat white tuna turned out
> to be Mozambique tilapia, a much cheaper fish that is often raised by
> farming. Roe supposedly from flying fish was actually from smelt. Seven of
> nine samples that were called red snapper were mislabeled, and they turned
> out to be anything from Atlantic cod to Acadian redfish, an endangered
> species.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/science/22fish.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/science/22fish.html)

> A piece of tuna sushi has the potential to be an endangered species, a fraud
> or a health hazard. All three of these cases were uncovered in this study.

[https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0007866)
and
[https://www.wired.com/2009/11/tunadna/](https://www.wired.com/2009/11/tunadna/)

~~~
dghughes
I'm not a fish eating person but I live in a fishing (and farming) region.
I've heard people from here who have gone away on vacation say often the fish
they are served is wrong. Usually it's a cheaper type substituted for more
expensive species of fish.

~~~
dependenttypes
This happens extremely often in Greece, targetting clueless tourists.

~~~
elorant
No, it doesn't. In tourists' spots in Greece the fish is served whole, not
filleted. There's no way you can order one thing and be served something else.
Also the menu regarding fish products isn't fixed. It depends on what is
available on any given day. What can and does happen occasionally is to be
served fish that isn't quite fresh.

~~~
yellowapple
Serving the fish whole doesn't address the problem that most people not
accustomed to being served a whole fish likely don't know what a salmon or
tuna or trout or tilapia or yellowtail or what have you actually looks like,
let alone be able to differentiate between them. Sure, maybe they'll figure
out some obvious cases (catfish are pretty distinctive, and anchovies/sardines
are typically served whole even in the "West"), and some freshwater fish like
salmon and trout might be recognizable to folks who've gone fishing at least
once in their lives, but otherwise there's a pretty good chance you can point
at a halibut, say "this is a tilapia", and get someone to believe you.

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csytan
From the article: "Despite their name, herring worms can be found in a variety
of marine fish and squid species. When people eat live herring worms, the
parasite can invade the intestinal wall and cause symptoms that mimic those of
food poisoning, such as nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. In most cases, the worm
dies after a few days and the symptoms disappear."

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davycro
I thought all sushi had to be flash frozen to kill parasites. Is this a myth?

~~~
tyfon
You will still eat the worms, not that it is necessarily a bad thing. When I
go fish in the south of Norway I see these worms in maybe 1 out of 10 fish I
catch. I personally don't eat them but I don't think it's unhealthy as long as
they are dead.

Considering health and seafood, I'd be much more worried about is eating
Norwegian farmed salmon, that stuff is poison [1]. The amount of toxins has
not go down since this article was warning Norwegians.

I never touch it myself and the wild fish you catch close to the mares are
monsters compared to the fish that does not consume leftovers from feeding the
salmon.

[1]
[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&u=https%3...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vg.no%2Fforbruker%2Fhelse%2Fi%2FRLL6d%2Fleger-
og-professorer-ikke-spis-oppdrettslaks) (Google translate)

~~~
GordonS
I read something recently about AquaStorm, which aims to move fish farms out
of the fjords and into deeper sea water, with the purported benefits of
avoiding sea lice and disease. Do you have an insider opinion on this?

~~~
tyfon
I'm not an insider, just a Norwegian that consumes seafood :)

But that might help if they reduce the drugs they put in the feed. However I
think what needs to happen is that they stop poisoning public waters and move
everything to highly controlled on-shore facilities.

I would still be worried about heavy metals etc as the feed contains left-
overs from other fish like bones (high in toxins) and fatty tissues that
humans don't want to eat.

They take the "role" of the apex predator except for us and it's typical that
the higher you are in the food chain the more toxins build up.

~~~
ksec
As far as I know, most ( or at least All current export I know of ) _Farmed_
Salmon are Deep Sea type Farmed Salmon. The idea is instead of having the
possibility of them going to fresh water to spawn, they are kept at specific
region of deep sea and greatly reduce the chances of getting parasites.

So I am not entirely sure what the article is suggesting. May be for Salmon
that is not intend to be served as sushi? Because Freshwater Salmon doesn't
fit that bill.

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paulsutter
Where was the testing? After living in Japan I stopped eating sushi in the US.
It's always painful when someone asks me to recommend a "good sushi place"
here, I'm not sure what to say.

~~~
softwarejosh
personally I prefer US sushi places, local salmon in particular is an insanely
buttery and delectable slice of raw fish, Ive never understood the japanese
obsession with rice, it’s fine but salmon is better imo

~~~
beatgammit
What do you mean "Japanese obsession with rice"? That's literally what sushi
is (rice with vinegar and sugar). Sushi doesn't have to have fish on it to be
sushi, it can have vegetables or fruit or whatever else you want. If your
sushi place doesn't make good rice, it's literally a bad sushi place (though
it could be a good sashimi place if it has good fish).

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tomaszs
This article is a clickbait. The title tells about sushi parasites, but there
is no such thing.

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mirekrusin
I also heard that salmon farming is the biggest "consumer" of antibiotics, is
that true?

~~~
pvaldes
Not even remotely playing in the same league as chicken

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egberts1
That proverbial gas station sushi. There, I said it, mark me down. It was
worth it.

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scottlocklin
This is a horse shit study turned into click bait. It's a meta analysis (aka
they built linear regression models on top of reported numbers in papers over
a 37 year time span) and they explicitly state that it mostly applies to
cetaceans rather than human beings. There are other results in the paper that
indicate the methodology was flawed: aka other closely related, or
ecologically similar worm species didn't increase in the samples in the meta
data.

[https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mYokKOGyhQxKntSnogcm...](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mYokKOGyhQxKntSnogcm_ZFSzLMK-
aB7)

There's a larger lesson to be learned here, but at the moment stating the
obvious about mass media dipshits reporting on bad stats doesn't seem to be
appreciated.

