Experts say humans don’t produce all the essential elements the body needs to function, and catfish may be the answer to one deficiency.
Yvonne Denkins, assistant professor at the School of Veterinarian Medicine, is working to develop catfish feed that will contain omega-3, a fatty acid essential to humans.
Omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids are necessary for humans to live, Denkins said. They make hormones that turn on and off bodily functions such as metabolites. Omega-6 stimulates functions such as blood thickening for blood clots, and omega-3 stops the blood thickening. They work against each other to maintain a human body’s equilibrium.
If there is too much of either unsaturated fat the inbalance will cause overproduction in the body, Denkins said. Too much omega-6 can cause too much blood thickening, leading to heart disease, for example.
The ideal ratio for a balanced diet is to have a two-to-one ratio of omega-6 to omega-3, Denkins said, but western diets actually give people a ratio of 20 to one in favor of omega-6.
Omega-6 is more often found in foods than omega-3, Denkins said.
The American Heart Association recommends people consume about two grams of omega-3 per day, and Denkins said she is working to produce a catfish with more omega-3 because it is the more difficult unsaturated fat to obtain.
Americans consume catfish the most out of all seafood, Denkins said.
Catfish grown commercially on farms do not naturally contain significant amounts of omega-3, Denkins said, but wild catfish contain some omega-3 because they eat dark, leafy vegetables and algae in the wild, which contain the acid. Omega-3 is also found in flaxseed oil, some vegetable oils and cold-water fish such as tuna, salmon and mackerel, according to MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia.
“The saying’s true —— ‘you are what you eat’,” Denkins said.
Denkins said she chose to work with catfish because they are a “very clean source of fish” – they eat only vegetation, unlike salmon, which are carnivorous fish and are fed ground fishmeal in salmon farms.
“A lot of people think they’re being health-conscious by eating salmon, but in 2000, the Environment Protection Agency issued a warning against farm-raised salmon because they were toxic,” Denkins said.
Salmon ingest the essential omega-3 acids in the fishmeal, which is high in omega-3, but they also ingest pollutants.
“They had ten times as much poison as in normal fish,” Denkins said, of high mercury and other toxin levels found in salmon.
Denkins is working with Haring’s Pride Catfish farm in Wisner, about an hour and a half southeast of Monroe.
Hannah Haring Sharp, co-owner of Haring’s Pride Catfish, said the new omega-3-rich catfish may spike catfish sales, which were affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
“About 50 percent of our catfish sales were in New Orleans,” Sharp said. “Those businesses are not open or running. There’s a lot of catfish farms going out of business and hurting from catfish imports from Vietnam and China. These countries don’t have labor costs and high overheads, so their prices are lower.”
Denkins said she plans to test market the new type of catfish filets in major grocery stores to see if people buy it.
“If you’re going to start something like this, why not start in the largest market possible?” Denkins said.