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Salmon (wild Baltic)
Salmon (wild Baltic) (Salmo salar), One to two times a month for young people and in pregnancy; farmed salmon is a different fish for this purpose.. The national eating advice, why it applies, the rules that matter when you catch it, and what the kitchen changes about the numbers.
Where it lives
Wild Baltic salmon spawn in a short list of rivers — the Tornio and the Simojoki are the great Finnish ones, with smaller runs in northern Estonian and Latvian rivers — and spend their feeding years in the open Baltic before returning. Almost every element of that life cycle is regulated: sea quotas at EU level, coastal fishing windows, river-by-river permits and closures.
Why the advice says what it says
Wild Baltic salmon is fatty, long-lived and feeds high in a Baltic food chain, which is the exact recipe for accumulating dioxins and dioxin-like PCBs. It is one of the species the Finnish and Swedish derogation in EU contaminant law was written for. The comparison that matters most to a shopper is with farmed salmon: farmed fish are raised on controlled, monitored feed and harvested young, and their dioxin load is far below that of a wild Baltic fish. "Salmon" on a menu is therefore two quite different foods depending on where it came from, and the national advice applies to the wild Baltic one. Wild Baltic salmon carries a second, purely ecological problem that has nothing to do with eating it: M74, a thiamine-deficiency syndrome that kills yolk-sac fry in some year classes and has been documented in Baltic salmon since the 1970s. It is one reason wild runs are managed as tightly as they are.
The advice
| Who it applies to | What the advice says | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Children, young people and people of reproductive age | Salmon caught in the Baltic Sea: at most one to two times a month. | Finnish Food Authority (Ruokavirasto) |
| People who are or may become pregnant | Sweden's food agency advises no more than two to three times a year for Baltic herring, wild Baltic salmon and trout from the Baltic, Vänern and Vättern. | Swedish Food Agency (Livsmedelsverket) |
| Anyone wanting oily fish without the advisory | Farmed salmon and farmed rainbow trout carry no equivalent frequency restriction. | Reasoning from the feed and harvest-age difference above |
The rules
What the rule book says about this fish, described by instrument rather than printed as a number:
- Salmon fishing is among the most tightly regulated activities in the region. River permits are river-specific, often day-specific and often numerically capped.
- Autumn closures protect the spawning run; coastal fishing near river mouths has its own separate windows.
- In Finland, hatchery-reared salmon and trout are marked by clipping the adipose fin. A fish with an intact adipose fin is a wild fish and in many waters must be released.
- Sea quotas are set annually at EU level, and the recreational rules follow the stock assessment rather than tradition.
In the kitchen
The dioxins are in the fat, and in a salmon the fat is concentrated in the skin, the layer directly under it, the belly flap and the dark muscle along the lateral line. Removing the skin and the belly flap and grilling or roasting on a rack so the fat drips away measurably reduces what you eat. Cold-smoking and gravlax do not: both keep every gram of fat in the fillet.
This is a reference page, not a fishing licence and not medical advice. Minimum sizes, closed seasons, bag limits and licence prices are set per country and per water body and change most years, so no number for them is printed here — each species page says which instrument sets the rule and where to look up the figure for the water you are standing on. If a clinician has given you a fish frequency or a contaminant instruction, that instruction outranks anything on this page.
Nutrition figures
| Per 100 g, raw | Amount |
|---|---|
| Energy | 142 kcal |
| Protein | 19.8 g |
| Fat | 6.3 g |
| Carbohydrate | 0 g |
| Fibre | 0 g |
| Salt | 0.1 g |
| Published row | Wild Atlantic salmon, raw |
Related published rows:
- Farmed Atlantic salmon, raw — 208 kcal per 100 g
- Salt-cured salmon — 182 kcal per 100 g
- Smoked salmon — 117 kcal per 100 g
Typical round weight for the calculator: 2.0–9.0 kg.
Eating advice: Finnish Food Authority and Swedish Food Agency national advice on Baltic and inland fish. Contaminant ceilings and the Baltic derogation: Regulation (EU) 2023/915; weekly tolerable intakes: EFSA methylmercury (2012) and dioxins/dioxin-like PCBs (2018). Nutrition figures: USDA FoodData Central rows published on this site. Checked 2026-09-06.
Frequently asked questions
Is farmed salmon safer than wild Baltic salmon?
For dioxins, yes, and it is not close: farmed fish eat controlled feed and are harvested young, while a wild Baltic salmon has spent years accumulating from the sea. That is why national advice restricts Baltic-caught salmon by name and does not restrict farmed salmon.
Fish in the same advice group
Baltic herring
Small herring freely; large herring over about 17 cm is limited for young people and in pregnancy.
Sea trout
The same Baltic fatty-fish reasoning as salmon; heavily protected as a fish.
European eel
The fattiest fish here and a critically endangered species — an occasional delicacy at most.
Baltic sprat
A short-lived oily fish; no size-based advisory of its own.
All species compared
The full table, grouped the way the advice groups it.
Eat the fish, log the fish
TempoLife tracks what you actually ate against the same food data linked on this page, so a fish meal shows up in your omega-3, vitamin D and salt totals without a second thought.