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 The shaven headed Japanese ‘sushi master' bends over a choice cut of raw tuna. His head cocks slightly to one side as he sizes up the moist firm flesh. After a moment's meditation, he slices up the tuna into a dozen bitesize morsels with a series of blindingly swift knife strokes. The slivers of fish are then laid lovingly atop small mounds of fragrant oriental rice smeared with hot wasabi sauce.
Simple, clean and fresh, sushi is the epitome of 21st Century eating. Delicate fish, rich in essential oils, and nori seaweed loaded with minerals, are helping sushi to become the definitive lunch option for health conscious twenty- and thirty-somethings across Britain. Such is sushi's phenomenal growth in popularity that it's now outselling the traditional egg and cress sandwich in many city centre shops and eateries. Sushi is now tipped to become a national staple alongside sandwiches, sausage rolls and chicken tikka masala.
But as the young and upwardly mobile tuck into their ‘bento' boxes of sushi this lunchtime, they would undoubtedly be horrified to learn the truth that lies behind the clean lines of their sliced nori seaweed. The Daily Mail can reveal that far from being a healthy alternative to the sandwich, sushi comes loaded with calories and contains a frightening cocktail of industrial chemicals, heavy metals and pesticides. These lower intelligence, reduce fertility and can lead to cancer. Rising sushi consumption is also leading to the destruction of some of the world's last great sea fisheries and helping despoil the pristine lochs of western Scotland.
"If you eat a meal of salmon sushi more than twice a year you will increase your risk of cancer," says Professor David Carpenter, an environmental health scientist at the University at Albany, New York. "The contaminants found in fish often overpower its beneficial effects. People think that they are improving their health by eating sushi but they are in fact poisoning themselves."
Sushi, whether it's bought from a supermarket or a themed high street restaurant, is a simple food made from rice steeped in vinegar and topped with raw tuna or salmon. Its staple ingredients are often rolled up inside a wrap of nori seaweed to produce the oriental equivalent of the sausage roll. These rolls are then sliced into bite-size pieces, allowing them to be eaten with chopsticks. It's these that are becoming increasingly popular in Britain. They are clean, pop easily into the mouth, and offer an air of sophistication unmatched by the humble sandwich.
These rolls are often sold in packs known as ‘bento' lunchboxes. The dinky little boxes also contain chopsticks, a tiny bottle of soy sauce, a heap of pickled ginger and a blob of hot creamy wasabi sauce. At first glance it looks the embodiment of healthy eating. What could be better for you than rice, fish and seaweed?
But these sushi boxes can be extremely high in salt and calories. A single California roll can easily contain 400 calories and 2 grammes of salt. Many lunch boxes contain several rolls, so it's easy to over indulge on carbs, fat and salt without realising it. Compared to an egg and cress sandwich, which weighs in at around 250 calories, a sushi box is hardly a slimmers delight.
"The problem arises," says Professor Tim Lang, a food policy expert at City University in London. "Because we're trying to bolt sushi on to our national diet which is full of highly processed food that's already high in salt and fat. Sushi comes from a culture that is inherently healthy. You can't just bolt sushi on to our way of life and expect to get the same benefits."
To capitalise on the ever increasing desire for Japanese food, sushi bars are springing up in towns and cities across the country. All serve up the same metropolitan style of eating where speed, simplicity, and cleanliness are to the fore. They also offer the reassurance of seeing your food lovingly prepared in front of your eyes by sushi chefs. But, like the bento boxes, such themed restaurants are only the final link in a long chain that begins in the polluted salmon lochs of Scotland and the filthy seas of southern Europe and the far east.
A fish processing plant in southern Spain is as far as it's possible to get from a city centre sushi bar. The stench of old fish and diesel fills the air. The incessant hum of machinery and the whine of giant mechanical saws are so powerful that they almost shake your teeth loose.
Every half hour or so a truck roars into the factory laden with tuna from the warm polluted waters of the Mediterranean. Dozens of white-clad workers rush to attention and start toiling alongside conveyor belts liberally covered in tuna blood. Each worker grabs a five foot long fish and slices open its pinkish belly before reaching inside and ripping out its innards. Blood and a thin greenish fluid spatter over the workers. Within a few minutes the fish has been turned into a frozen rectangular block of tuna, ready for the sushi bars and supermarkets of Britain, America and Japan.
In the intensity of the processing factory the workers can be forgiven for overlooking the odd fish infested with parasitic worms. Spotting their tiny larvae is even more difficult, if not impossible. But such an oversight can be very uncomfortable indeed for a sushi lover.
After tucking into a California roll made from worm infested tuna, a diner will probably notice nothing for a few hours. If she is sensitive to worms, as many people are, initial queasiness will swiftly lead to severe stomach pain and vomiting. Thankfully modern processing means that the worm larvae are extremely unlikely to spread inside the victim so the problems generally clear up within a day or so.
In extreme cases though, the worms will trigger anaphylaxis, a potentially lethal allergic reaction. It causes the blood pressure to fall and the skin and membranes to swell so badly that the throat becomes ferociously itchy and eventually blocked. Vomiting and diarrhea are often followed by collapse and death, either from obstruction of the airways or through heart and lung failure.
"Eating sushi again could kill me," says Hannah Elliott, a 35-year-old sales account manager from Buckinghamshire. She suffered a severe allergic reaction to cod when she was 18. Now, contact with any kind of fish or sushi, and even its smell, triggers an immediate and potentially fatal anaphylactic shock.
"I can't go near sushi or even through the door of a sushi bar," says Hannah.
"Contact with it makes my whole face balloon. My eyes clamp shut and my mouth fills with lumps. Very quickly I start to choke. Panic makes my heart race and my blood pressure goes through the roof. It's terrifyingly quick and I may have only a few minutes to inject myself with adrenaline or die.
"The parasitic worm may be part of the problem. The doctors aren't sure."
In the long term, catching worms from sushi is likely to be the least of your worries. Tuna and salmon are loaded with mercury and a cocktail of extremely nasty industrial chemicals such as the dioxins, pesticides, and PCBs. These have spent decades moving up the food chain and are now found in disturbingly high amounts in oily fish such as tuna and farmed salmon. When you eat sushi, you are not just indulging in a tasty morsel of fish but also sampling the toxic wastes of the global chemicals industry. And once eaten, these poisons stay in the body for decades, reducing fertility and steadily weakening the immune system and potentially causing cancer.
Professor David Carpenter's team at the prestigious Universities of Cornell, Indiana and Albany, recently studied the levels of these poisons in salmon from around the world. His work was published in the prestigious journal Science and makes for disturbing reading. Out of the 15 poisons detected in frighteningly high amounts, 13 are carcinogenic.
These poisons have also been linked to falling sperm counts, rising birth abnormalities, testicular and breast cancer, endometriosis, and early puberty. And if all that wasn't enough, some scientists worry that they may be acting as "gender benders" by making young boys more feminine and girls more masculine, which may also affect sexual orientation later in life.
They found terrifying levels of these pollutants in farmed salmon, especially those from Scotland. Professor Carpenter's team was so stunned by the findings of their study - which remains the biggest and most comprehensive carried out to date - that they recommended that people only eat farmed salmon at most twice a year. And the problem may become even worse.
"Fish may soon become too unsafe to eat," warns Professor Carpenter.
Professor Carpenter's findings are brushed off by the Scottish Salmon Producers' Organisation, which represents the interests of the industry. They do not dispute the high levels of poisons found in the fish, but say that the benefits of eating salmon outweigh the risks. They refused to comment further.
Like salmon, tuna sushi is often touted for it's healthiness because it's rich in the omega three fatty acids. But it is also loaded with a particularly toxic form of mercury. In adults the most common effect of methylmercury poisoning is paresthesia, a sensation of prickling, tingling or creeping on the skin. People may also feel sick and generally off-colour and suffer blurred vision. Children are particularly vulnerable. Mercury can reduce their intelligence and lead to a host of behavioural problems.
"I know of one group of people who ate lots of high class fish such as sushi believing that it was good for their health," says Professor Carpenter. "Then their hair began to fall out and their bodies' started to go numb and their fingers began to tingle. Their children had lower IQs and became abnormally hostile.
"The mercury levels in their body had become so high that they had in effect poisoned themselves. When they reduced their fish and sushi consumption the symptoms reversed," says Professor Carpenter.
Disturbing though Professor Carpenter's findings are for fish lovers, the environment may be paying an even higher price for our new found love of sushi. And as the cost of sushi falls and becomes increasingly widely available, that price is likely to increase.
Every year thousands of dolphins and untold numbers of turtles, sharks and seabirds drown in tuna nets. Several species of tuna have already been driven to the edge of extinction. The mighty bluefin - the one you see smiling on cans of tuna worldwide - has been almost eaten off the planet. And as the bluefin has become rarer, other less noble species of tuna are being targeted by fishermen. Marine biologists fear that all will eventually be driven to the edge of oblivion.
Salmon farming can cause massive environmental problems too. The fish are farmed in giant open-water ‘battery cages' in lochs all along the west coast of Scotland. To keep them healthy the fish have to be doped with chemicals to ward off infection and parasites. Dozens of chemicals, many classified as marine pollutants, are approved for use in the farms. Marine pollution from Scotland's salmon farms is now estimated to be twice that of the human population.
But the biggest environmental problem posed by the farms, say the critics, is the sheer voracious hunger of salmon. They consume vast quantities of ‘fish chow'. This is made from young fish caught in the open seas. Vast areas of ocean have now hoovered clear of these young fish. Without these small prey species, bigger fish such as cod, herring and mackerel go hungry.
All of these problems has led some experts to conclude that the pleasures gained from eating sushi comes at too high a cost. Lissa Goodwin, a marine biologist at Plymouth University and spokeswoman for the charity Marine Connection, says: "Sushi is being marketed as a healthy alternative to the sandwich but in reality it comes with high levels of industrial contamination and a significant environmental cost."
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