Earn tangible rewards for seasonal shopping, with your very own Vital Choice Holiday Bonus!

From now through December 24, 2007, orders that exceed $100, $200, and $300 will receive increasing rewards.

The free gifts include embroidered Vital Choice Aprons, the acclaimed cookbook "Salmon", and our new Super-Antioxidant Organic Trail Mix.

Just enter the gift code HOLIDAY during checkout. For details and restrictions, click here.

Like all Vital Choice orders totaling $99 or more per delivery address, all Holiday Bonus orders include Free Shipping!

Need last minute ideas for the holidays?  Give the gift of great taste and good health!

Each Vital Choice Gift Pack includes a handsome, personalized gift card.

NOTE: Order persishable Gift Packs (flash-frozen fish) by Wednesday, December 19, to help ensure arrival before Christmas. (All perishables ship by 2nd Day Air.)

If you choose a Gift Pack containing non-perishable items, upgrade the entire gift order to 2nd Day Air.

Want to let your gift recipients choose for themselves? Our Gift Certificates offer a great option!

People seem to really love our Wild Sockeye Salmon Sausage, which comes in three succulent varieties: Savory Country Breakfast Style, Spicy Italian, and NEW Chorizo Style.

The ingredients couldn’t be simpler: just Wild Alaskan sockeye salmon, 100% organic herbs and spices, organic arrowroot, natural sea salt, and water. For tips on how to cook 'em from straight from the freezer, see our Web site.

“I just tried your new Country breakfast sausage for the first time … they are wonderful! I never thought a salmon sausage would be this good. Thanks!” — Dr. Bruce Felgenhauer

Boasting a rich golden color, these scrumptious, oven-ready steaks are infused with delicate alder wood smoke flavor — and cook fully from frozen in mere minutes!

Sablefish is rarely seen in standard fish markets, and this buttery, flaky, white fish boasts its own rich texture and mind-blowing flavor—and even more omega-3s than wild salmon!

And for those who prefer it, we also offer irresistible, certified Earth Kosher natural-style sablefish.

Our wild Alaskan Sockeye Salmon offers special appeal to those—like many of us here at Vital Choice—who like their wild salmon firm and flavorful.

These sustainably harvested fish are a super-healthy source of protein, rich in long-chain omega-3 essential fatty acids, and potent natural antioxidants.

And sockeye is a nearly unrivalled food source of bone-saving, cancer-curbing vitamin D, with a whopping 1,100 IU per 6-oz serving, or nearly triple the US RDA.

Our flash-frozen portions come vacuum-sealed for superior quality and convenience. Certified Kosher by EarthK

Which came first: the egg or the omega-3 enriched egg?

The omega-3 enriched egg, of course, since all eggs used to be full of omega-3s when the chickens that laid them foraged for a living, scratching and pecking in backyards and farms.

These chickens lived -- almost entirely -- on green leaves and bugs. And the omega-3s in those green leaves and bugs were concentrated in their eggs for the same reason that omega-3s are concentrated in the breast milk of women: to support the brain development of the next generation – chicks, in this case, instead of infants.

When we humans interrupted this process and ate those eggs, we ingested almost as many omega-3s (including long-chain DHA and EPA) as we would from the same amount of many species of fish. Which -- considering the importance of eggs in human diets around the world – must have made quite a contribution to our omega-3 intake.

Only recently came the egg as it is laid today, by chickens fed a diet of corn and other grains in large, commercial operations.  This egg still has significant amounts of omega-3s, including DHA (it’s still an egg after all), but only a fraction of that in a truly free-range egg. 

What a seismic shift this represents in our food supply! How much has this one, altered food contributed to the many illnesses that have been linked to a deficiency of omega-3s?

 

About Susan Allport As well as being an occasional contributor to Vital Choices, Susan Allport is an award-winning writer who contributes to The New York Times and other publications and authored the acclaimed book about omega-3s, titled The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed From The Western Diet and What We Can Do To Replace Them (University of California Press, 2006).   Susan is the author of two other highly praised books – The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging, and Love, and A Natural History of Parenting – and has appeared on Oprah & Friends Radio and NPR’s "Science Friday" and "The Splendid Table".  For more, visit susanallport.com.

Artemis Simopoulos, the president of The Center for Genetics, Nutrition and Health in Washington, DC and a lioness in the field of omega-3 research, was the first person to recognize this dramatic change in eggs.

In the late 1980s, a few years after Simopoulos first realized that the green leaves of plants contain significant amounts of the parent omega-3 fatty acid ALA (and after a conference in Washington at which she and other attendees realized that the food supply, in general, had shifted away from omega-3 fatty acids and towards omega-6s), she thought back to her childhood in Greece and the chickens that wandered up and down the hills in the search for food.

One of the plants they were eating was purslane, she knew, a plant she had already shown to be especially rich in ALA. And so she had the idea of comparing the eggs of these free ranging chickens with chickens fed a commercial diet.

Simopoulos knew just where to find such eggs: on her family’s farm on the southwestern tip of the Peloponnesus where chickens forage for themselves and are, rarely, if ever, fed. On her next trip back to Greece, she collected some of these eggs and boiled them for five minutes before packing them in her luggage and carrying them back to the United States, to a laboratory at the National Institutes of Health. “You can’t bring uncooked food into the country” as Simopoulos told me recently.

This was the very first time that eggs produced under completely natural conditions had ever been analyzed, Simopoulos also told me. And the first time they had been compared with commercial eggs.

The results are not surprising, given what the two sets of birds were eating. But they are still astonishing ...

The body makes vitamin D when sunrays hit bare skin, with lighter skin absorbing more D-making rays, and darker skin accepting less due to UV-blocking pigment.

Wild Alaskan Salmon is the richest food source of vitamin D, by far, with a 3.5 oz serving of Sockeye – the kind of wild Salmon richest in vitamin D – providing almost seven times more than D-fortified milk, which is the average American’s primary food source. (There are 687 IU of vitamin D in a 3.5 oz serving of Sockeye Salmon, but only 100 IU in 8 ounces of milk.)

Key Points Finns findings link higher levels of vitamin D to reduced diabetes risk. Germans connect lower levels of vitamin D to breast cancer danger. African-American women need vitamin D far above the current RDA.

Outright vitamin D deficiency can lead to general ill health, and even the average American blood level has been linked to an increased risk of certain cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and osteoporosis.

Higher vitamin D levels linked to lower diabetes risk

The idea that vitamin D reduces the risk of type 2 diabetes enjoys considerable evidentiary support, which falls short of conclusive but demands further research.

Like diabetes itself, vitamin D deficiency correlates with impaired beta-cell function and insulin resistance – two hallmarks of diabetes diagnoses – in animal and human studies.

Results of a 17-year epidemiologic study – the type which follows a group’s diet and health status over time – show that people with the highest blood levels of vitamin D were the least likely to develop diabetes, and vice versa

The Finnish study began in 1978 and involved 4,423 men and women aged 40 to 69.

Researchers collected blood samples and information on the participants’ lifestyle habits, diets, health status, and prescriptions.

During 17 years of follow-up, the risk among those with the highest blood levels of vitamin D was 40 percent lower compared to the participants with the lowest blood levels.

The risk was calculated after adjusting for age and sex and accounting for the season when each volunteer’s blood was drawn. (The seasonal adjustment was necessary because ...

Evidence has been growing that wild Salmon stocks are threatened by sea lice spawned in Salmon farm pens.

And the startling results of a new study, published in the journal Science, indicate that the farm-spawned pests could wipe out Canada’s wild Pink Salmon population within 10 years.

We’ve reported on this problem before: See “Sea Lice Grow Drug Resistant”, “Court Vindicates Claim that Fish-Farm Lice Kill Wild Salmon”, and “Farmed Salmon Seen Spreading Sea Lice”.

Farm-raised Salmon are prone to infestations of fish-killing parasites called sea lice, and their pens can become breeding ground for the pests, which are particularly deadly to young fish. 

Young wild Salmon encounter sea lice when they swim down river to the sea. The parasites bite the fish, creating open wounds and killing many of the juvenile fish.

This is a natural phenomenon, and usually leaves most of the baby fish unharmed.

The problem becomes much more serious when young wild Salmon have to swim past Salmon farms, and are exposed to thick swarms of the ...