More reasons to eat your fish...
...assuming you plan to eat those species from responsibly managed stocks and/or culture operations.
There currently is a tremendous amount of hype surrounding mercury levels, especially methyl mercury, in fish. A recent article ran in Florida's St. Petersburg Times and an earlier in the NY Times that have drawn a fair amount of criticism from those scientists who deal with fish and human dietary issues. Again, the net conclusions tend to be that most fish tissue remains "clean" enough that the benefits of eating seafood (essential fatty acids, relatively lean sources of protein, etc.) outweigh the presence of toxic contaminants by a wide margin in spite of popular-press hype. This is even preached by my friends within the EPA. Some critics are very critical of consumption advisory levels themselves. Even though I live in Ohio, a place that acknowledges its consumption advisories err on the side of conservatism (comfortably more so than the national advisory levels), I still recommend you eat your seafood with a mindful eye to your local consumption advisories for locally caught fish. For those wanting some detail...
...the articles:
Reports warn of mercury levels in tuna
High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi
With an obvious agenda, but here's some retort from Seafood.com:
SEAFOOD.COM NEWS [PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX] - January 23, 2008 - NEW YORK, Today in a New York Times story claiming sushi-grade tuna is "tainted" with "high mercury levels," health reporter Marian Burros omitted critical information about government standards for mercury levels in fish and seriously misinterpreted their meaning. These errors are significant enough, according to the nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom, to warrant a complete retraction.
"The Times has published a completely irresponsible piece of 'science' journalism," said Center for Consumer Freedom Research Director David Martosko. "The mistakes are too serious to paper over with a series of quiet corrections. The Times should do the responsible thing and retract the whole article."
The Times neglected to inform readers that the Food and Drug Administration's methyl mercury "Action Level" (1.0 part per million) includes a generous ten-fold safety cushion. FDA has written that the Action Level "was established to limit consumers' methyl mercury exposure to levels 10 times lower than the lowest levels associated with adverse effects."
In reality, the highest-mercury sample reported by the Times (1.4 ppm) contains less than one-seventh the amount of mercury that might be a cause for health concern.
The Times mistakenly claimed that consumers eating a fixed number of pieces of sushi tuna will "reach what the Environmental Protection Agency calls its weekly reference dose." In fact, EPA writes that "reference doses" are meant to identify levels that are "likely to be without an appreciable risk of deleterious effects during a lifetime."
By definition, it's not possible for anyone to exceed a reference dose with a single week's worth of exposure.
The Times also omitted information about safety margins built into the EPA's mercury reference dose. Like the FDA's Action Level, that reference dose incorporates a ten-fold safety factor. In the example of the highest-mercury sample identified by the Times, a consumer would actually have to eat 26 pieces per week -- over an entire lifetime --before accumulating the lowest level of mercury in his or her body associated with adverse health effects in scientific studies.
The Times wrote that "mercury enters the environment as an industrial pollutant." In fact, virtually all the mercury in tuna (an ocean fish)enters the environment naturally through undersea volcanic activity.
The Times wrote that "methylmercury [is] the form of mercury found in fish tied to health problems." In reality, the medical literature contains no documented cases of mercury toxicity from eating fish in the United States; the only cases recorded anywhere occurred more than 40 years ago in Japan as the result of an industrial spill.
"Yellow(fin) journalism like this does a great disservice to ordinary consumers," added Martosko. "Study after study shows that the documented health benefits of eating fish far outweigh any hypothetical risks. I know the Times is losing money and cutting costs, but maybe they shouldn't have cut back on their scientific research budget."
Copyright (C) 2008 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mercury scare is based on bad science, with advocates who don't want certain facts to come to light
SEAFOOD.COM NEWS by John Sackton - Jan 25, 2008 - Despite very good efforts, NFI has not been able to make much of a dent in the media frenzy over the issue of mercury in tuna sushi. The idea that rich New York sushi lovers at the top restaurants may be poisoning their precious bodies by eating bluefin is just too good a media story to let facts get in the way.
But the facts show this story to be totally false. The falsehood is not that some samples may test higher than 1 ppm for methyl mercury. The falsehood is that this matters in any way to public health.
To review the facts that make this whole debate so wrong, I went back to a good article written by Vital Choices - a very environmental and health conscious seller of organic and wild seafoods. Over a year ago, they wrote an excellent summary of the science behind the mercury scares, and why they thought it was wrong.
The commentary, by Craig Weatherby in their newsletter in December 2006, says that bizarre judgments by government bodies have put bad science at center of the mercury-seafood fight.
The following are some excerpts from that article:
Mercury levels in the oceans are naturally occurring, and have not changed significantly over the past hundred years.
Environmental organizations have leveraged legitimate concerns about fish-borne mercury's potential threat to children to help force tighter restrictions on mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants.
This strategy has impacted the policy debate very effectively, despite persuasive evidence that coal-related mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants in the US account for only a tiny percentage of mercury emissions worldwide, and no more than a very minor amount of the methyl mercury measured in ocean waters.
In fact, most of the methyl mercury in ocean waters comes from forest fires and undersea volcanoes and geothermal vents.
Evidence for the natural origins of most oceanic mercury comes from measurements of mercury levels in preserved fish from the 1870s and early 1970s, which show that the concentrations of mercury in ocean fish have, if anything, decreased over the past 120 years.
Where coal plant mercury emissions matter most is in local lakes and rivers, where coal plant emissions have had a greater impact. Unfortunately, some advocacy groups seek to achieve a worthy end--reduced mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants--via exaggerated mercury-in-fish concerns that may put public health at risk by suppressing seafood consumption.
Bad science was used in setting the FDA and EPA standards
The ongoing battle over safe levels of seafood consumption rests in large part on the hotly disputed evidence that the US FDA relied on in setting the maximum allowable mercury levels in fish, which the US EPA also used to establish fish-intake guidelines for pregnant/nursing mothers and young children.
In the late 1990s, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asked the quasi-governmental National Research Council (NRC) to undertake a review to help the agency set seafood intake guidelines for pregnant/nursing mothers and young children. The NRC issued a report in 2000.
Of the three relevant epidemiological (human population) studies conducted to date--in the Faroe Islands, New Zealand, and the Seychelles Islands--the NRC chose to rely exclusively on the Faroe Islands Study, solely for reasons of expediency.
In fact, the NRC admitted it could find no methodological flaws in the Seychelles Study, before dismissing it as irrelevant to the task of setting baseline mercury intake standards.
The NRC rejected the Seychelles Study because its failure to find evidence of harm made it much less useful as the basis for the panel's task of setting mercury blood-level standards: a bizarrely unscientific stance.
The NRC committee's position was predicated on the literally baseless assumption that the as-yet-undetermined level at which mercury damages brain development must lie below the relatively high mercury intake levels of the children in the Seychelles Study.
A biology 101 student who proposed this absurd paradox as a scientifically credible position would flunk out. We should expect better from supposedly authoritative institutions entrusted with serious public health decisions.
Independent academic scientists at the Seafood & Health '05 conference considered the Seychelles Study--which found no harm to children despite eating extremely fish-heavy diets--the best-designed and most credible of the three available investigations.
Even the seriously flawed Faroe Islands Study, which is cited, selectively, by consumer and environmental advocacy groups, found only a minuscule possibility of minuscule effects on brain performance. In fact, the alleged adverse effects were so small that they fell within the margin of statistical error.
The flawed Faroe Islands Study
The Faroe Islands Study suffers from flaws so serious many expert observers believe that they render it unreliable as a basis for supporting the EPA's fish-intake safety standards.
The Faroe Islands Study involved a population whose seafood consumption consists largely of Pilot whale: a predatory marine mammal that, unlike most commercial fish species, is very high in mercury and PCBs and very low in mercury-blocking selenium.
These facts alone made the NRC report authors' decision to use the Faroe Islands population as a model for setting mercury standards appear dubious, to say the least.
Government and advocacy orgs ignore superior Seychelles study
The Seychelles Study, which the National Research Council (NRC) chose to ignore, was conducted by researchers from the University of Rochester, and was scientifically superior to the Faroe Islands Study in critically important respects.
The Seychelles Study has found no evidence of damage to children after 12 years of follow up, even though they eat 10-12 times more fish than American children and the average mercury content of the fish they eat is closely comparable to the average mercury content of America's most commonly consumed species.
As Seychelles Study lead author Gary J. Myers said upon its release in 2003, This study indicates that there are no detectable adverse effects in a population consuming large quantities of a wide variety of ocean fish. These are the same fish that end up on the dinner table in the United States and around the world.
One reason that the Seychelles Study found no harm from very heavy fish consumption could come down to the mercury-blocking effects of selenium, which is abundant in almost all commercial fish. There is ample evidence that dietary selenium prevents the body from suffering damage from dietary mercury.
As University of North Dakota mercury-selenium expert Dr. Nicholas Ralston told Environment News Service in 2005, Commercial ocean fish are uniformly rich in selenium and therefore protect humans from any mercury toxicity [from fish consumption].
While commercial fish are very rich in this essential mineral, selenium is very scarce in the Pilot whales that made up most of the seafood diet in the Faroe Islands, where children are alleged to have suffered very subtle mental deficits.
The conclusions are inescapable. The EPA and FDA mercury standards are flawed. Holding to these standards hams public health, because it contributes to holding down fish consumption, which public health advocates see as highly beneficial to the U.S. population.
The controversy about mercury in fish is fueled by politics and environmental movements.* That is why these advocates consistently reject the implications of better science in determining at what point methyl mercury intake becomes a risk.
The website mercuryfacts.org has additional information.
*I'm a little squeamish regarding the negative connotations the writer is obviously conferring upon "environmental movements." While I approach all things with extreme skepticism, I do tend to belong to my own brand of emotion-free, evidence-driven environmentalism.
There currently is a tremendous amount of hype surrounding mercury levels, especially methyl mercury, in fish. A recent article ran in Florida's St. Petersburg Times and an earlier in the NY Times that have drawn a fair amount of criticism from those scientists who deal with fish and human dietary issues. Again, the net conclusions tend to be that most fish tissue remains "clean" enough that the benefits of eating seafood (essential fatty acids, relatively lean sources of protein, etc.) outweigh the presence of toxic contaminants by a wide margin in spite of popular-press hype. This is even preached by my friends within the EPA. Some critics are very critical of consumption advisory levels themselves. Even though I live in Ohio, a place that acknowledges its consumption advisories err on the side of conservatism (comfortably more so than the national advisory levels), I still recommend you eat your seafood with a mindful eye to your local consumption advisories for locally caught fish. For those wanting some detail...
...the articles:
Reports warn of mercury levels in tuna
High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi
With an obvious agenda, but here's some retort from Seafood.com:
SEAFOOD.COM NEWS [PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX] - January 23, 2008 - NEW YORK, Today in a New York Times story claiming sushi-grade tuna is "tainted" with "high mercury levels," health reporter Marian Burros omitted critical information about government standards for mercury levels in fish and seriously misinterpreted their meaning. These errors are significant enough, according to the nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom, to warrant a complete retraction.
"The Times has published a completely irresponsible piece of 'science' journalism," said Center for Consumer Freedom Research Director David Martosko. "The mistakes are too serious to paper over with a series of quiet corrections. The Times should do the responsible thing and retract the whole article."
The Times neglected to inform readers that the Food and Drug Administration's methyl mercury "Action Level" (1.0 part per million) includes a generous ten-fold safety cushion. FDA has written that the Action Level "was established to limit consumers' methyl mercury exposure to levels 10 times lower than the lowest levels associated with adverse effects."
In reality, the highest-mercury sample reported by the Times (1.4 ppm) contains less than one-seventh the amount of mercury that might be a cause for health concern.
The Times mistakenly claimed that consumers eating a fixed number of pieces of sushi tuna will "reach what the Environmental Protection Agency calls its weekly reference dose." In fact, EPA writes that "reference doses" are meant to identify levels that are "likely to be without an appreciable risk of deleterious effects during a lifetime."
By definition, it's not possible for anyone to exceed a reference dose with a single week's worth of exposure.
The Times also omitted information about safety margins built into the EPA's mercury reference dose. Like the FDA's Action Level, that reference dose incorporates a ten-fold safety factor. In the example of the highest-mercury sample identified by the Times, a consumer would actually have to eat 26 pieces per week -- over an entire lifetime --before accumulating the lowest level of mercury in his or her body associated with adverse health effects in scientific studies.
The Times wrote that "mercury enters the environment as an industrial pollutant." In fact, virtually all the mercury in tuna (an ocean fish)enters the environment naturally through undersea volcanic activity.
The Times wrote that "methylmercury [is] the form of mercury found in fish tied to health problems." In reality, the medical literature contains no documented cases of mercury toxicity from eating fish in the United States; the only cases recorded anywhere occurred more than 40 years ago in Japan as the result of an industrial spill.
"Yellow(fin) journalism like this does a great disservice to ordinary consumers," added Martosko. "Study after study shows that the documented health benefits of eating fish far outweigh any hypothetical risks. I know the Times is losing money and cutting costs, but maybe they shouldn't have cut back on their scientific research budget."
Copyright (C) 2008 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mercury scare is based on bad science, with advocates who don't want certain facts to come to light
SEAFOOD.COM NEWS by John Sackton - Jan 25, 2008 - Despite very good efforts, NFI has not been able to make much of a dent in the media frenzy over the issue of mercury in tuna sushi. The idea that rich New York sushi lovers at the top restaurants may be poisoning their precious bodies by eating bluefin is just too good a media story to let facts get in the way.
But the facts show this story to be totally false. The falsehood is not that some samples may test higher than 1 ppm for methyl mercury. The falsehood is that this matters in any way to public health.
To review the facts that make this whole debate so wrong, I went back to a good article written by Vital Choices - a very environmental and health conscious seller of organic and wild seafoods. Over a year ago, they wrote an excellent summary of the science behind the mercury scares, and why they thought it was wrong.
The commentary, by Craig Weatherby in their newsletter in December 2006, says that bizarre judgments by government bodies have put bad science at center of the mercury-seafood fight.
The following are some excerpts from that article:
Mercury levels in the oceans are naturally occurring, and have not changed significantly over the past hundred years.
Environmental organizations have leveraged legitimate concerns about fish-borne mercury's potential threat to children to help force tighter restrictions on mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants.
This strategy has impacted the policy debate very effectively, despite persuasive evidence that coal-related mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants in the US account for only a tiny percentage of mercury emissions worldwide, and no more than a very minor amount of the methyl mercury measured in ocean waters.
In fact, most of the methyl mercury in ocean waters comes from forest fires and undersea volcanoes and geothermal vents.
Evidence for the natural origins of most oceanic mercury comes from measurements of mercury levels in preserved fish from the 1870s and early 1970s, which show that the concentrations of mercury in ocean fish have, if anything, decreased over the past 120 years.
Where coal plant mercury emissions matter most is in local lakes and rivers, where coal plant emissions have had a greater impact. Unfortunately, some advocacy groups seek to achieve a worthy end--reduced mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants--via exaggerated mercury-in-fish concerns that may put public health at risk by suppressing seafood consumption.
Bad science was used in setting the FDA and EPA standards
The ongoing battle over safe levels of seafood consumption rests in large part on the hotly disputed evidence that the US FDA relied on in setting the maximum allowable mercury levels in fish, which the US EPA also used to establish fish-intake guidelines for pregnant/nursing mothers and young children.
In the late 1990s, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asked the quasi-governmental National Research Council (NRC) to undertake a review to help the agency set seafood intake guidelines for pregnant/nursing mothers and young children. The NRC issued a report in 2000.
Of the three relevant epidemiological (human population) studies conducted to date--in the Faroe Islands, New Zealand, and the Seychelles Islands--the NRC chose to rely exclusively on the Faroe Islands Study, solely for reasons of expediency.
In fact, the NRC admitted it could find no methodological flaws in the Seychelles Study, before dismissing it as irrelevant to the task of setting baseline mercury intake standards.
The NRC rejected the Seychelles Study because its failure to find evidence of harm made it much less useful as the basis for the panel's task of setting mercury blood-level standards: a bizarrely unscientific stance.
The NRC committee's position was predicated on the literally baseless assumption that the as-yet-undetermined level at which mercury damages brain development must lie below the relatively high mercury intake levels of the children in the Seychelles Study.
A biology 101 student who proposed this absurd paradox as a scientifically credible position would flunk out. We should expect better from supposedly authoritative institutions entrusted with serious public health decisions.
Independent academic scientists at the Seafood & Health '05 conference considered the Seychelles Study--which found no harm to children despite eating extremely fish-heavy diets--the best-designed and most credible of the three available investigations.
Even the seriously flawed Faroe Islands Study, which is cited, selectively, by consumer and environmental advocacy groups, found only a minuscule possibility of minuscule effects on brain performance. In fact, the alleged adverse effects were so small that they fell within the margin of statistical error.
The flawed Faroe Islands Study
The Faroe Islands Study suffers from flaws so serious many expert observers believe that they render it unreliable as a basis for supporting the EPA's fish-intake safety standards.
The Faroe Islands Study involved a population whose seafood consumption consists largely of Pilot whale: a predatory marine mammal that, unlike most commercial fish species, is very high in mercury and PCBs and very low in mercury-blocking selenium.
These facts alone made the NRC report authors' decision to use the Faroe Islands population as a model for setting mercury standards appear dubious, to say the least.
Government and advocacy orgs ignore superior Seychelles study
The Seychelles Study, which the National Research Council (NRC) chose to ignore, was conducted by researchers from the University of Rochester, and was scientifically superior to the Faroe Islands Study in critically important respects.
The Seychelles Study has found no evidence of damage to children after 12 years of follow up, even though they eat 10-12 times more fish than American children and the average mercury content of the fish they eat is closely comparable to the average mercury content of America's most commonly consumed species.
As Seychelles Study lead author Gary J. Myers said upon its release in 2003, This study indicates that there are no detectable adverse effects in a population consuming large quantities of a wide variety of ocean fish. These are the same fish that end up on the dinner table in the United States and around the world.
One reason that the Seychelles Study found no harm from very heavy fish consumption could come down to the mercury-blocking effects of selenium, which is abundant in almost all commercial fish. There is ample evidence that dietary selenium prevents the body from suffering damage from dietary mercury.
As University of North Dakota mercury-selenium expert Dr. Nicholas Ralston told Environment News Service in 2005, Commercial ocean fish are uniformly rich in selenium and therefore protect humans from any mercury toxicity [from fish consumption].
While commercial fish are very rich in this essential mineral, selenium is very scarce in the Pilot whales that made up most of the seafood diet in the Faroe Islands, where children are alleged to have suffered very subtle mental deficits.
The conclusions are inescapable. The EPA and FDA mercury standards are flawed. Holding to these standards hams public health, because it contributes to holding down fish consumption, which public health advocates see as highly beneficial to the U.S. population.
The controversy about mercury in fish is fueled by politics and environmental movements.* That is why these advocates consistently reject the implications of better science in determining at what point methyl mercury intake becomes a risk.
The website mercuryfacts.org has additional information.
*I'm a little squeamish regarding the negative connotations the writer is obviously conferring upon "environmental movements." While I approach all things with extreme skepticism, I do tend to belong to my own brand of emotion-free, evidence-driven environmentalism.