A wellness expert has criticized America’s food culture after making a surprising discovery about Trader Joe’s salmon.
Emily Pesch is a gut health professional who regularly shares tips for looking and feeling good on TikTok, where she has amassed more than 498,000 followers.
Recently, the health and wellness guru, based in Austin, Texas, traded her advice for criticism as she decried food practices in the US.
In a now-viral video, which has been viewed more than 918,000 times to date, Emily wondered why America had a slew of unnecessary additives in its food.
Emily admitted she was frustrated when she discovered that the frozen farmed salmon she bought from the supermarket chain contained ‘red dye number five’, a known cancer-causing chemical.
Wellness expert Emily Pesch has criticized America’s food culture after making a surprising discovery about Trader Joe’s salmon
The viral clip was captioned: “Keep your number five red dye out of my salmon, thank you!”
Emily explained that she bought some farmed salmon at Trader Joe’s, and admitted that while she usually opts for wild-caught fish, she was on a budget this week.
‘I’m sorry, but why are we such a country? “I bought this salmon from Trader Joe’s and not wild salmon because it was a little more expensive and I’m going out of town mid-week so I wasn’t sure if I would be able to cook it,” she said at the beginning of the clip.
She noted that she went for the “cheaper” option, adding that she knows she would have had to spend a lot of money.
Emily held the label up to the camera and added, “I’m looking at the ingredients [and it says] “Atlantic salmon and color added.”
“This is the second salmon I’ve had in the last two months that has had color added to it.
“There’s no need for you to add color to my salmon so I can eat it. Why are we doing this?’
People on the Internet flooded the comments section, expressing their own frustrations about finding food coloring in their food.
In a now-viral video, which has been viewed more than 918,000 times to date, Emily wondered why America had a slew of unnecessary additives in its food.
People on the Internet flooded the comments section, expressing their frustration at finding food coloring in their food
One person said: ‘Reposting because I don’t know why either.’
Someone else wrote, “I pay twice as much for salmon from Whole Foods for this reason.”
Another user added: ‘Pickles added color too – I always read the labels now!’
“I feel the same way,” one user commented.
Farmed salmon has recently been shown to be bad for the environment and human health.
This is because salmon are often farmed in crowded environments, making the spread of disease more likely.
They are also known to contain high levels of chemicals, which have been linked to a range of health problems.
In the clip, Emily noted that the piece of salmon she purchased contained “red dye number five,” but experts note that a different dye is often used in farmed salmon (stock image)
In the clip, Emily noted that the piece of salmon she purchased contained “red dye number five,” but experts note that farmed salmon often uses a different dye.
According to Aquaculture Stewardship Council: ‘Astaxanthin is added to the feed of farmed salmon because they need these nutrients, but cannot hunt for krill and shrimp like wild salmon.
‘It’s part of the process of raising healthy salmon. There is no before or after, because there is no part of the farming process that calls for dyeing salmon.”
Wild-caught salmon is often the fish of choice due to its low levels of contaminants.
A representative from Trader Joe’s told DailyMail.com: ‘Trader Joe’s products do not contain artificial colors. Instead, we only use colorants derived from naturally available products such as plants (e.g. beets, beta-carotene, turmeric, annatto and paprika) and minerals (e.g. titanium dioxide or ferrous gluconate).
‘To understand what Color Added means for farmed salmon, we must first explain wild salmon. Wild Salmon naturally feed on organisms in the wild. These organisms, along with naturally occurring molecules called carotenoids in their bodies, provide astaxanthin to the salmon, giving the wild salmon its natural red or orange-red color.
‘For farmed salmon, only feed is provided, therefore they do not get the same carotenoids naturally from the environment, so the farms must add astaxanthin to the feed (which occurs naturally in plants and animals) so that the color is the orange you see today sees. Without this the salmon would be pale brown.’