People love our sweet, tangy Organic Dried Tart Cherries!

They make delicious snacks, and add colorful flavorful spark to sauces, salads or cereal … and offer bountiful health benefits as well.

For a limited time, we’ll include a 10 oz. bag of our Organic Dried Tart Cherries – a regular $16 value – with a qualifying purchase.

Dont wait ... this offer ends at midnight PDT on Saturday August 16, 2008.
 

Click here for full rules.

Environmental
Stewardship Program

Vital Green™ is our pioneering environmental program, designed to do 3 things:

1) Fight global warming by offsetting the impacts of shipping.

2) Enable recycling of foam shipping cubes via our innovative FREE program.

3) Support seafood sustainability and promote a green partnership with our customers.

To learn more, and get instructions for recycling foam shipping cubes from Vital Choice, visit our Vital Green™ page.

We’re pleased to announce another all-natural, certified-sustainable Shrimp delight!

Wild Oregon Pink Shrimp are renowned for their sweet, delicate flavor and firm texture.

Their small size and pre-cleaned, pre-cooked preparation makes them ideal for fast meals like salads, omelets, or pasta.

We think you'll be pleased by their fine flavor, extra ease, all-natural status, and sustainable provenance.

Silver Salmon - also known as Coho - is the unsung culinary star of Alaska's wild harvest. 

Our Silver Salmon is wonderfully moist, despite having less fat and fewer calories than Sockeye or King.

(Although Silver is 30% leaner than Sockeye, it offers just as many omega-3s ... about 2,000 mg per 6 oz portion.)

Unlike our Sockeye and King, Vital Choice Silver Salmon portions come with the skin on one side, which helps keep them moist on the grill.

Certified Kosher by EarthK.

If you haven't tried our Wild Red Sockeye Salmon you're in for a treat, because it tastes much fresher than standard supermarket brands.

The rich, red color of the meat and oil is unlike any you're likely to have had before.

Our minimal processing methods ensure that you'll get the maximum amount of nutrients naturally abundant in Sockeye Salmon.

These include omega-3s, vitamin D, and astaxanthin: the super-potent carotene-class antioxidant that gives the oil brimming in every can of Wild Red its bright orange-red color. (The liquid in standard canned Salmon is pallid and watery by comparison.)
 

Choose Skinless-Boneless Wild Red, or Traditional Style with skin and soft edible bones for extra flavor and ample calcium.

Both kinds are available with salt (less than is added to most brands) or without added salt ... and several varieties come in EZ-Open pull-tab tops.

“You are providing a wonderful health-giving service to the planet with your business. And it is a pleasure to bring this information to my audience. It is also a pleasure to snap open these little cans of salmon and have an instant healthy meal!”

-- Christiane Northrup, M.D.

You’ve probably heard that the omega-3 fatty acids in fish and fish oil may reduce the risk of stroke.

Current evidence suggests that eating baked or broiled (not fried) fish at least once a week appears to reduce the risk of stroke by about 25 percent. Eating fish more than four times a week seems to reduce stroke risk a bit more.

And these positive findings have now been bolstered by the intriguing outcomes of a new brain-scan study.

Scientists from Harvard and Finland recruited 3,660 people age 65 and older, who agreed to complete diet questionnaires and undergo two brain scans, taken five years apart (Virtanen JK et al. 2008).

Key Points People who eat fish frequently were 26 percent less likely have the brain lesions left by “silent”, undiagnosed strokes. Fried fish eaters did not have lower rates of brain lesions, probably due the high levels of omega-6 fats in deep-frying oils. Eating fried fish frequently may raise the risk of stroke by 44 percent.

Last December, a dense, 10-square-mile pack containing billions of stinging medusa jellyfish rode warm currents to Ireland.

These Mediterranean jellyfish had rarely been sighted in large numbers so far north, until shortly before the turn of the 21st century.

After arriving in bays north of Belfast, Northern Ireland, they stung some 120,000 farmed Salmon to death. (See “Jellyfish Swamp Irish Salmon Farm”.)

While the slaughter was unintentional on the part of the jellyfish, it seemed a sobering harbinger for the fate of our fragile seas.

Sadly, that odd occurrence may represent only the tip of an ecological iceberg, built out of overfishing and global warming.

Research on this topic is sparse, but one of the few studies – a literature review – was authored by Claudia E. Mills, Ph.D.

Dr. Mills works at the University of Washington’s zoology lab in Friday Harbor, San Juan Island … a two-hour ferry ride from our backyard in Bellingham.

As she wrote in a landmark 2001 paper, “Massive removals of fishes from ecosystems might be expected to open up food resources for gelatinous predators, which seems in some cases to be what has happened.”

 “Over recent decades, man’s expanding influence on the oceans has begun to cause real change and there is reason to think that in some regions, new blooms of jellyfish are occurring in response to some of the cumulative effects of these impacts.” (Mills CE 2001)

This concern is one reason we’ve begun to offset the global warming effects of our shipments – see our VitalGreen™ page – and why we only sell fish and shellfish that are harvested sustainably.

Now, recurring blooms in the Mediterranean are raising concern that they represent another “canary in the coalmine” sign of mankind’s negative impacts – an early warning we’d be wise to take seriously.

Spanish finding raises red flag

In recent years, jellyfish blooms have driven vacationing bathers out of warm Mediterranean waters and back onto white-hot summer beaches.

Last November, Spanish scientists expressed alarm over the large numbers of medusa jellyfish –the so-called “mauve stinger” – growing off Spain’s Costa Brava, primed to bring misery to its beaches this summer.

Significantly, their study revealed the unprecedented finding that medusa jellyfish were growing throughout the year … not just in the summer.

The jellyfish that have swarm Spanish beaches in recent summers can reach the size of a dinner plate, and their purple tentacles contain chemicals that deliver a nasty sting.

If someone get enough stings, or suffers from sensitivity to the stings, they can be seriously injured, scarred, or even killed.

In summer 2006, the Red Cross reported treating more than 10,000 jellyfish stings in Spain’s eastern Catalonia region.

And last year in Australia, more than 30,000 people were treated for stings … twice the number treated in 2005 (Rosenthal E 2008).

This summer the jellyfish were kept further out to sea for a time, thanks to runoff from heavy spring rains in Europe.

But as of late July, the stinging jellyfish had begun to swarm Mediterranean shores, including the Côte d'Azur, the west coast of Italy, Sardinia, parts of Italy's east coast, and much of the southern and northern coastlines of Spain.

As a consequence, beaches have been filled with hot, frustrated, fearful vacationers.

Recently, some 300 people on Barcelona beaches were treated for stings, and several were taken to hospitals.

The Portuguese Man o' War (Physalia physalis), whose sting can be fatal, is crowding Spain’s northern coast at Cantabria and Asturias, and winds have blown some ashore (Rosenthal E 2008).

Officials in Cannes and Monaco have installed booms and nets on several beaches, and authorities in Antibes employ a “jellyfish Hoover” boat to patrol the coastline and suck up any invaders.

But the risk of injury by jellyfish is not the biggest concern.

The steadily increasing numbers of jellyfish in seas worldwide signal undesirable changes in sea life driven by human activity.

Human impacts may boost jellyfish blooms

Marine biologists attribute the swarm of icky invertebrates to two main factors:

• Warming oceans allow jellyfish to grow year-round and promote a glut of plankton – the favored food for jellyfish.
• A decline in natural predators like tuna, dolphins, and turtles.

The primitive but persistent creatures consist almost entirely of water, and are filling a vacuum created by ...

The results of a new study affirm the idea that consuming fish or fish oil frequently can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and consequent injuries or death.

It’s long been known that people in fish-loving Japan have much lower rates of heart disease, compared with Americans and most Europeans.

The same is true of Iceland and other countries where fish consumption is high.

Rates of coronary heart disease and heart-related deaths remain very low in Japan despite major shifts toward American-style diets and lifestyles: an anomaly called the “Japanese paradox”.
 

Key Points Comparison of Japanese, white American, and Japanese American men affirms heart benefits of omega-3s. Results eliminate genetic differences as explanation for Japan’s low heart disease rates. Americans of Japanese and white descent suffer similar rates of heart disease, compared with Japanese men living in Japan.

Japan’s reduced heart risk rates linked to fish, not genes

An international team from Japan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Hawaii examined blood samples and health records of Japanese men, white American men, and Japanese-American men (Sekikawa A, et al. 2008).

The results showed that the Japanese men had omega-3 blood levels two times higher than white Americans or Japanese-Americans, and that the Japanese men had the lowest levels of atherosclerosis (dangerous arterial plaque).

Lead author Akira Sekikawa from the University of Pittsburgh made two important points in a press release:

• “Our study suggests that very high levels of omega-3 fatty acids have strong properties that may help prevent the buildup of cholesterol in the arteries.”
• “Our study shows [that the] much higher intake of fish observed in the Japanese may have strong anti-atherogenic [plaque-preventing] effect.” 

Dr. Sekikawa's team examined blood and health data from 868 men between 40 and 49 years of age.

Of these, 281 were born and living in Japan (Japanese), 306 were white men born and living in the U.S. (white American), and 281 were men of Japanese ancestry born and living in the U.S. (Japanese-American).

To rank the men’s risk of atherosclerosis, the researchers measured the intima-media thickness (IMT) of the carotid artery, which provides a pretty good indication of the presence and severity of atherosclerotic plaque.

The Japanese men had the lowest levels of atherosclerosis, as measured by their carotid arteries' IMT.

And the Japanese advantage held steady after the researchers accounted for other plaque-promoting factors such as higher cholesterol levels, blood pressure, cigarette smoking, higher body mass index, and diabetes.

The Japanese-Americans and the white Americans had similar levels of LDL cholesterol, but the white American men had significantly higher levels of the riskiest form of cholesterol (large VLDL) and significantly lower levels of the most protective kind (large HDL).

The team’s conclusion summarizes their finding succinctly:

“Very high levels of marine-derived omega-3 fatty acids have anti-atherogenic [plaque-preventing] properties that are independent of traditional cardiovascular risk factors and may ...

People love our Organic Dried Tart Cherries!

They make delicious snacks, and add colorful flavorful spark to sauces, salads or cereal.

And these sweet, tangy treats offer bountiful health benefits as well. (See “Tart Cherries top the list”, below.)

For a limited time, we’ll include a 10 oz. bag of our Organic Dried Tart Cherries – a regular $16 value – with a qualifying purchase.

• No Added Sulfur

• Certified Kosher OU
• Certified Organic by Oregon Tilth, Inc.  

To learn more about our Organic Dried Cherries, click here.
 

Don’t wait too long ... this tasty offer ends Saturday, August 16, 2008.

How to get your free Organic Dried Tart Cherries

It’s easy to snag our tangy, certified-organic cherries:

1. Fill your Cart to $170 or more.
2. Enter the Gift Code CHERRY08 where indicated under your Cart.
3. Click Checkout. (The Cherries will not appear if you click "Update Quantities".)

Then, proceed through the Checkout process as usual … the free Cherries will appear in your Cart after you submit your shipping address. 

Like all Vital Choice orders that total $99 or more, you will also receive Free Shipping.

Enjoy your tasty, healthful gift treats!

Cherries top healthful-foods lists

Berries and other colorful fruits have been linked to bountiful health benefits, which is why the USDA recommends ...

This simple dish is perfect for a summer picnic, and can be doubled easily.

Today's recipe especially easy made with our wild Oregon Pink Shrimp, which are pre-cleaned and cooked. Or, use our Pacific Spot Prawns, which take only a few minutes to cook.

Orzo is rice-shaped pasta from Italy. If you prefer, use orechiette (ear-shaped), tortellini, or another small, shaped pasta.

Orzo and Shrimp Salad with Asparagus

Adapted from a recipe by Foxflairfarm, found at allrecipes.com.
Serves 4

1 lb. (½ bag) wild Oregon Pink Shrimp, thawed (or 16 Spot Prawns, shelled)

1 clove garlic, minced

2 tablespoons organic extra virgin olive oil

2 quarts water

8 ounces orzo or orechiette pasta

1 pound fresh asparagus, trimmed and cut into 1 inch pieces

2 tablespoons organic extra virgin olive oil

2 green onions, chopped

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

2 teaspoons honey mustard

2 tablespoons minced fresh basil

Sea salt and organic black pepper to taste

• In a skillet over medium heat, cook the garlic in 2 tablespoons of olive oil, stirring frequently to ...