Is Shrimp Healthy For You?

Shrimp pond after harvest

Shrimp is the second most commonly consumed seafood in the United States behind only tuna. Many people believe shrimp is healthy for you. Researchers often point to the “low fat” value of shrimp. The low fat diet myth created in the 1980′s has been debunked by many scientific studies such as the Harvard Nurse’s Health Study. Shrimp may be low in fat, but T. Colin Campbell‘s research teaches us that it’s not the animal fat that we need to watch out for, but the animal-based protein. However, food producers are still keen to convince people of the health value of these little guys.

replacing beef with shrimp isn’t healthy eating

The United States has the worst rates of heart attacks in the world, and we are eating hundreds of 1.3 billion pounds of shrimp per year. It’s hard to imagine how much more we could possibly eat. Studies that look to answer the question: is shrimp good for you, subtract beef or eggs from a test subject’s diet and replace it with shrimp. When you remove two of the most hurtful foods from a person’s diet, you will see measurable increases in health markers. It’s almost impossible to eat something worse than ground beef with ammonia. These studies seem very persuasive, However, if they added shrimp to a whole foods plant-based diet, they would create a much different picture.

chemicals used to produce shrimp

Is shrimp healthy for you? Locavore gives us many solid reasons why you really don’t want to eat shrimp:

…a dry [shrimp] pond should be prepared by spreading urea and superphosphate to encourage plankton growth. Once the pond has been filled with brackish water, generally pumped from a nearby creek, it is typically covered with diesel oil to kill off any insect larvae. The water is then treated with piscicide – a substance that poisons any competing aquatic life- such as chlorine or rotenone; the latter has been strongly linked to Parkinson’s disease in humans…
The adulteration of shrimp does not end at the pond… shrimp are routinely soaked in a solution of sodium tripolyphosphate, or STPP, a suspected neurotoxicant, still legal in the United States, that prevents seafood from drying out in transit and boosts product weight. Borax, best known as a hand cleaner and insecticide, is used to preseve the color of shrimp in some countries. The most unscrupulous countries use caustic soda to chemically burn tiger shrimp a customer-pleasing pink.

The list of toxic chemicals used in shrimp production:

Urea
Superphosphate
Diesel oil
Piscicides (Chlorine, Rotenone)
Pesticides
Antibiotics (including Chloramphenicol and Nitrofurans)
Antibiotic resistant bacteria
Sodium tripolyphosphate (STPP)
Borax
Caustic soda

Excerpts from the book Bottom Feeder by Taras Grescoe. Lets not forget that most of the shrimp in the World is produced in China where some of the World’s worst pollution happens:

Comments About Is Shrimp Healthy For You?

// 4 comments so far.

Chandelle // November 16th 2009
Wow, that picture is worth a thousand yucks. I posted this one to Facebook. I haven’t eaten shrimp in years but it’s good to be reminded of all the really gross reasons to keep on keepin’ on.
Greg // November 25th 2009
When I first stopped eating meat, I tended to waver when it came to fish. A lot of reporters like to write about how healthy fish oil is. My father was a commercial fisherman until fishing died; there’s simply not enough fish left in the ocean for people to eat.
Anyone who spends time reading about farmed fish and shrimp will very quickly realize how gross the entire process is.
I was wondering where that Facebook traffic came from, thanks for posting it.
Sage // June 27th 2010
Urea is not a “toxic chemical.” In fact your body makes it on a regular basis. It’s a key ingredient in Urine and it’s relatively harmless.
This post is just as one-sided and full of false propaganda as posts from people on the opposite end of the spectrum who endorse meat. This is a gross exaggeration.
How do you explain people who eat diets high in beef, eggs and/or shrimp and live to be in their 70′s and 80′s? I guess they’re just super-human aliens who can somehow withstand the flood of live-destroying chemicals that get pumped into meat by the gallon every day.
Misinformation is misinformation; it doesn’t matter if you’re on the “good” side or the “bad” side. Ever seen those Truth commercials regarding cigarettes? They were just as dishonest and one-sided, which is deplorable regardless of the positive message they intended to convey.
Greg // June 27th 2010
Thanks for taking the time to comment Sage. Taking a critical look at the way we eat is one of the hardest things any of us ever has to do. My greatest concern with the heavy use of Urea, a fertilizer, is the extensive damage it causes to the environment in runoff. Toxic algae blooms have been devastating the gulf of Mexico for decades before the most recent oil spill.
I spent some time working in a hospice where every client was dying a painful death from the many forms of cancer. The scientific evidence has been mounting for a number of years that our reliance on a meat-based diet laden with chemicals and pesticides has been contributing to the raising number of cancers in the western world. The evidence suggesting a link between heavy meat consumption and heart attacks is even more compelling. If you’d rather eat shrimp from the oil soaked gulf or from shrimp farms with, at best, questionable practices, that’s your choice. We choose the safer path for our family, but it’s a choice each of us has to make for themselves.
Since none of the chemicals are required to be on the label of the food product we buy, we really have no way to know what was put into our food.

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