These two foods get a boatload of press these days. But consumer beware: Many times reporters and “nutrition experts” repeat the same old mantra over and over. For years you heard eggs were bad, then the experts changed their mind. For years they said a high carbohydrate diet was good, then it was bad. And so on. Doesn’t anyone really know? Yes, but it is hard to cut through all the marketing hype.
Machete in hand, lets get down to what you need to know about red meat and salmon.
Salmon is one of the most popular and nutritious types of fish But an ongoing debate questions whether salmon should be classified as a meat
The answer depends on how you define meat your personal dietary preferences and even your religion.
This article looks at both sides of the argument in detail to settle the question of whether salmon is a meat or not.
The Case For Salmon as Meat
By the standard dictionary definition meat refers to the flesh of animals used for food. Under this broad definition salmon would be classified as a type of meat since it is the flesh of a fish used for consumption.
Additionally, some cultures and religions view fish as a form of meat. For example:
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Salmon and other fish with fins and scales are called “pareve” in Judaism. They are neither meat nor dairy, but they are still considered meat.
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Catholics often abstain from eating warm-blooded meat on Fridays during Lent, but may eat cold-blooded seafood including salmon.
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Pescatarians exclude all meat and poultry from their diets but will eat fish and seafood.
So for groups like these, salmon falls under the meat category and is distinguished from vegetarian foods.
Nutritionally, salmon is a great source of many nutrients typically found in meat, like protein, vitamin B12, niacin, and iron. It also provides heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids not found in other meats.
The Case Against Salmon as Meat
On the other side of the debate, some definitions of meat exclude fish and seafood.
For example, some view meat as only coming from warm-blooded animals like mammals and birds. Under this definition, salmon would not qualify as a meat since fish are cold-blooded.
Various types of vegetarian diets like veganism also prohibit all animal flesh, including fish.
And health-wise, salmon offers a very different set of nutrients compared to land-based meats like beef, pork, and chicken. It is much lower in saturated fat and high in omega-3s, which is why health organizations specifically recommend eating fish like salmon.
Religious and Cultural Definitions
Religious and cultural definitions further muddy the waters on classifying salmon. Here are some examples:
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In Hinduism, fish is considered a non-vegetarian food. However, beef and pork are often avoided while fish is permitted.
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In traditional Jewish kosher rules, scaled fish with fins like salmon are pareve and seen as a separate category from meat.
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Islamic law views fish in a separate food category from land meat, with distinct rules for preparation and consumption.
So interpretation varies – while these faiths allow salmon, they view it as occupying a different place than land-animal meats.
Nutritional Breakdown of Salmon versus Beef
The stark nutritional differences between salmon and a meat like beef further highlight why they don’t belong in the same food category:
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Salmon is much lower in saturated fat and calories than beef. A 3 oz serving of salmon contains just 1 gram of saturated fat and 130 calories, versus 4 grams and 192 calories for beef.
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Salmon provides anti-inflammatory omega-3 fatty acids. Beef does not contain these heart-healthy fats.
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Salmon is one of the best sources of vitamin D, while beef does not contain significant amounts.
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Beef provides more than double the amount of iron (3 mg vs. 1 mg) and zinc (5 mg vs. 1 mg) compared to salmon.
So while both foods provide protein and important nutrients, their nutritional profiles and health implications differ quite significantly.
Personal and Dietary Preferences
At the end of the day, whether you consider salmon to be a meat or not comes down to your personal preference and dietary needs.
For those abstaining from meat for ethical reasons, salmon would likely be avoided entirely. However, from a health perspective, salmon offers numerous benefits thanks to its rich nutrient profile.
Those with specific diet patterns like pescatarians or flexitarians may still view salmon as its own separate category that is permitted alongside vegetarian foods.
If you are simply looking to reduce your consumption of red or processed meat for health, swapping beef or pork for salmon can be an excellent way to still get high-quality protein while boosting heart health through omega-3s.
So the semantics of whether it fits into the “meat” group matters less than choosing salmon for its multitude of nutritional benefits.
The Bottom Line
There is no universally accepted answer on whether salmon should be categorized as a meat. However, here are some key takeaways:
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By the broad dictionary definition of meat from animal flesh, salmon would qualify. But some definitions exclude fish entirely.
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Various cultures and religions have specialized definitions that may or may not consider fish as meat.
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Nutritionally, salmon has a vastly different nutrient profile from land meats like beef, making separate food grouping reasonable.
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No matter what you call it, salmon is an extremely healthy food, rich in protein, omega-3s, vitamin D, B vitamins and minerals.
So the debate on classifying salmon as a meat rages on. But what matters most is making nutritious food choices that fit your personal dietary needs and restrictions. With its long list of science-backed health benefits, salmon is a smart choice no matter which food group you assign it to.
Salmon is supposedly chock-full of healthy omega-3s, and you can’t eat enough of it. Right?
Most of the salmon you get in restaurants is farmed because it is cheaper than wild caught. Since September 2004, U. S. supermarkets have been required to label salmon as farmed or wild. Many supermarkets carry just farmed salmon because the wild caught can cost $20 a pound or more.
What are you getting when eat farmed salmon?
Where does the chemical contamination come from? Some, like the PBDEs, have become ubiquitous in the environment. Others tend to be concentrated in the food fed to farmed fish.
Farmers feed their fish fish flakes, which are made from corn, cereal grains, oil, ground fish (and sometimes ground cow parts), and other things, like red dye to make them look more orange.
Aquafarms are like feedlots for fish, but they are in the water. There is a lot of talk about how aquafarming may be polluting the oceans and, by extension, the wild fish. We do know that farmed fish have to be given antibiotics and are exposed to stronger pesticides than their wild relatives because they have to live in crowded tanks. Sulfa drugs and tetracycline used to prevent infectious disease epidemics are added to food pellet mixes.
In the wild, salmon absorb carotenoids from eating pink krill. In the aquafarm, their color comes from canthaxanthin, a synthetic pigment manufactured by Hoffman-La Roche. 5.
It is an unnatural diet which causes the farmed salmon’s omega-3 levels to drop way off. An important thing to remember from this conversation is that farm-raised fish has a lot more omega-6 fats that cause inflammation than wild fish.
A lot of the long-term illnesses people have today, like arthritis, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, obesity, stroke, lupus, and cancer, are caused by inflammation.
When you get hurt or germs on you, your body responds with inflammation to clean up and heal. Inflammation was made by nature to be a useful way to deal with stress on the rare occasions you will need it in life. Mankind was originally a hunter-gatherer society and he routinely ate lots of omega-3s which kept inflammation in check.
But today, we eat far too many omega-6s. Since you thought you were being healthy, how many salads have you eaten in the last 20 years? The salad dressing probably had vegetable oil in it, which is high in omega-6s. So, too, are many fried foods and convenience foods. So our omega-6/omega-3 balance is way off. Researches mostly agree that if you eat the Standard American Diet, your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is 20:1. The hunter-gatherers of long ago had something much closer to 2:1 or 1:1.
When you’re constantly irritating your body, white blood cells multiply and begin to attack organs and tissues. Inflammation takes on a life of its own and becomes a permanent condition. This type of chronic inflammation often has no outward symptoms that conventional medicine will detect for you. There are times when you might not know you have a problem until you get Crohn’s disease or have a heart attack. But in the meantime your body looks around for something to help you – and it chooses cholesterol.
To hit a golf ball in a tile bathroom is a bit like having inflammation in your blood vessels. Lots of nicks. The body quickly calls for Band-Aids and a nurse to arrive. The nurse comes in the form of cholesterol to cover the cuts and make them feel better. Now you know that the omega-6s in your salmon and salad dressing are making your cholesterol level go up. Too often, conventional medicine prescribes a statin drug to merely stifle the body’s ability to produce cholesterol. Better to look at why the body needs so much cholesterol and lessen the need.
Red meat is supposedly bad for you because it is full of saturated fat and “gives you cholesterol. ” There are two very fundamental facts to keep in mind:
People who said beef was bad for your health didn’t think about what happens when you feed grain to the animals we eat, like chicken, fish, and red meat. Grain causes a dramatic reduction of omega-3 fatty acids in the American diet. You could say saturated fat is a modern man-made creation. The much-maligned saturated fat that is naturally found in eggs and red meat has been eaten by people for hundreds of years. It has no strong links with disease, while industrially produced trans fats do.
Cholesterol levels are also wrongly blamed on naturally occurring saturated fats. Blood vessel lining gets irritated by foods high in omega-6 fatty acids or arachidonic acid, like farm-raised salmon or beef raised for a profit. This makes the body’s immune system send white blood cells and other fighters to the scene of the crime.
Many people became aware of the shameful way animals raised for food end their lives as early as 1906, when Upton Sinclair wrote the classic book The Jungle. Some would say it hasn’t gotten much better.
In 2006, Michael Pollen wrote a great book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma, in which he talked about a modern-day feedlot and how it affects folks’ health.
“Cows raised on grass take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet. The modern meat industry has made it its mission to shorten a beef calf’s time on earth.” In 14 months, a steer can gain 1,100 pounds by eating a lot of corn, protein and fat supplements, and a bunch of new drugs. The feedlot is like a city built on America’s huge amount of extra corn, or corn plus the different medicines that ruminants need to be able to handle corn. … Cows fed corn get fat quickly. But it’s clear that this corn-fed meat is not as good for us as grass-fed meat because it has more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids. More and more studies show that many of the health issues linked to eating beef are actually issues with corn-fed beef. Modern day hunter-gathers who subsist on wild meat don’t have our rates of heart disease. In the same way that ruminants are not well suited to eating corn, people may not be well suited to eating ruminants that eat corn. … The economic logic behind corn is unassailable, and on a factory farm there is no other kind. Calories are calories, and corn is the cheapest, most convenient source of calories on the market. Of course, the same industrial logic—protein is protein—made it seem like a good idea to feed rendered cow parts back to cows until scientists found out that this was spreading mad cow disease. … Compared to all the other things we feed cattle these days, corn seems positively wholesome. And yet it too violates the biological or evolutionary logic of bovine digestions. … Virtually all of the cows are sick. Between 15 and 30 percent of feedlot cows are found at slaughter to have abscessed livers; Dr. Mel told me that in some pens the figure runs as high as 70 percent. … Most of the antibiotics today end up in animals feed. … In this new man-made environment, new acid-resistant strains of E. coli have evolved. What’s wrong with these bugs is that they can get rid of the acid in our stomachs and then kill us. ”6.
There is a very clever way that Pollen shows how the health of these animals is directly connected to our own health. More and more studies show that many of the health issues linked to eating beef are actually issues with corn-fed beef. Pollen says, “Just like ruminants haven’t evolved to eat grain, humans may not be well adapted to eating animals that are fed grain.” ”.
“Nutrition experts” blame the rise in heart disease on red meat because of saturated fat. But other cultures who ate meat from grass-fed cattle didn’t know what heart disease was. There is nothing wrong with red meat itself; what’s bad are the commercial cattle that are fed grains and have 20 times as many omega-6s as omega-3s.
Harvard researchers published a landmark study in 2010 [i] that found eating processed meats like bacon, sausage, and deli meats is linked to a 24% higher risk of heart disease and a 19% higher risk of type 2 diabetes. People who ate unprocessed red meat, like beef, pork, or lamb, did not have a higher risk of heart disease or diabetes, the researchers found.
Processed meats contained, on average, 4 times more sodium and 50% more nitrate preservatives. This means that differences in salt and preservatives, not fats, may be to blame for the higher risk of heart disease and diabetes seen with processed meats but not with red meat that has not been processed, the study’s authors wrote. Dietary sodium (salt) is known to increase blood pressure, a strong risk factor for heart disease. Nitrate preservatives have been shown in animal studies to raise the risk of atherosclerosis and lower glucose tolerance. These effects could make people more likely to get heart disease and diabetes.
For the first time, it’s clear that the research establishment needs to look at natural meats and meats that have been tampered with as two separate things. You cant paint em all with the same brush of blame.
Additionally, conditions in big feedlots are also breeding grounds for E. coli and superbugs, especially in the resulting hamburger where a single animal infected with E. coli can contaminate tens of thousands of pounds of ground beef.
The hormones fed cattle for growth are also very suspect. Kids are thought to be hitting puberty earlier than ever before because they eat so many hormones from cattle and chicken raised for food.
Corn fed, commercial beef also has lower levels of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA). You may have seen that health food stores sell CLA to help people lose weight. The meat of grass fed cattle contains CLA; the meat of grain-fed cattle does not. It is thought this is one of the many links in the obesity epidemic.
Why Isn’t Fish Considered Meat?
FAQ
Is a fish considered a meat?
Do vegetarians eat salmon?
Is fish considered meat in the Bible?
Why is fish not considered meat for Lent?
Is salmon considered meat?
Salmon is classified as a type of meat just like beef, pork, or chicken. This specific type of fish has a scaly exterior with white flesh beneath.
Is fresh salmon safe to eat?
Yes, salmon is a source of omega 3, the fatty acid is responsible for acting in the prevention of cardiovascular diseases, making the heart strong and healthy. Just be careful to analyze the supplier to make sure it doesn’t have any contamination.
Is salmon a fish?
Salmon is considered a fish since they can be found in both fresh and saltwater, though most varieties of salmon are found in saltwater, therefore meaning that they are in fact considered a fish. Salmon is a common type of fish consumed in a variety of ways.
Is salmon considered white meat?
Salmon is considered white meat and is classified as a member of the oily fish species, containing oils and essential nutrients making it a great option for those following certain dietary preferences, as they can incorporate their oil and vitamins through this type of animal protein.
What is the difference between salmon and red meat?
Both salmon and red meat can be used in similar ways when cooking with them, you can grill, broil, stir fry, and more. Arguably many would agree that red meats such as beef are more versatile in a variety of recipes compared to salmon.
Should you eat salmon or red meat?
Eating fish like salmon is exceptional, because it’s high in good fats, tasting rich and oily when cooked with your favorite seasonings to suit your preference. On the other hand, red meat packs a tender and juicy flavor when singed and marinated with your choice of herbs and spices.