New Nutrition Data Provides Comprehensive Look at Wild Alaska Seafood
New nutrition data for commercially important Alaska seafood species is now available on a new technical resources webpage, providing industry members, researchers, marketers, and consumers with the first publicly available source of systematically collected nutritional information for seafood harvested exclusively from Alaska waters.
More than 600 individual fish representing 11 commercially significant species were collected from fishing grounds across the state and analyzed to develop the dataset. This dataset represents the nutrition values for raw species – the nutritional values for cooked species can be found in this database (internal link).
This unprecedented sampling effort brought together a broad cross-section of Alaska’s seafood industry, including harvesters and processors of varying sizes and specializations. The resulting dataset provides a valuable baseline for understanding the nutritional composition of wild Alaska seafood and can serve as a foundation for future research and expanded sampling.
Eleven Fish, One Stone
This project was funded by NOAA’s Saltonstall-Kennedy (SK) grant program. The national SK program is an annual competitive funding opportunity for projects that promote, develop, and market U.S. marine fisheries.
ASMI partnered with the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (ADEC) to secure the SK grant. In collaboration with ADEC, samples were tested for contaminants and analyzed for nutrition content. Contaminants tested for included heavy metals, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and radionuclides amongst others
Overall, Alaska seafood species were low in these contaminants and high in nutritional value – the full results from the contaminant testing can be found on ADEC’s website (external link).
Building a Reliable Nutrition Baseline
The new dataset provides an opportunity to strengthen the nutrition information available to consumers. The USDA FoodData Central Foundation Foods database (external link) has accepted the project’s pollock data as the official nutrition information for wild Alaska pollock and is reviewing the remaining species for potential inclusion.
Making this information more widely available helps provide consumers with a clearer picture of the nutritional value of wild Alaska seafood and supports seafood as a nutrient-dense choice that can fit into a wide range of diets.
Importantly, this project establishes a baseline rather than an endpoint. Future sampling and research can build on this work by expanding the number of species, geographic areas, and individual samples represented in the dataset.
Using Data in the Wild
The data can now be used by seafood companies, researchers, nutrition professionals, marketers, and others who need defensible, systematically generated nutritional information about Alaska seafood.
For Alaska’s seafood industry, the result is a stronger foundation for communicating the nutritional value of wild Alaska seafood—and a valuable resource for the researchers and industry professionals working to better understand and promote the seafood harvested from Alaska’s waters.
The breadth of industry participation was critical to the effort: thank you to NOAA Fisheries, ADFG, ADEC, Exact Scientific Services, Inc., and the many Alaska harvesters, processors, and other seafood industry members who contributed fish and expertise to make this project possible.
