Fish A Good Neighbor but a Dangerous Food p1of 2

Extract from - Fish: A Good Neighbor, but a Dangerous Food

By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.

At the same time that the "Journal of the American Medical Association" has published a study recommending that women eat fish two to four times a week to cut the risk of stroke, other studies are suggesting that fish may be one of our most dangerous foods.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration released a warning
last week that pregnant women should not eat shark, swordfish,
king mackerel, and tilefish because they could contain enough
mercury to harm an unborn baby's developing brain.
Sadly, America's research system does nothing to prevent such
damaging and conflicting information from being carried in the
media worldwide. Well meaning mothers-to-be may find the
first study and increase their fish consumption while never seeing
the warning, which was published in many cities' newspapers,
buried as a filler story.

Fishing for largemouth bass
(Photo courtesy U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS)

Eating fish has not been safe for many years. As dwellers in our polluted oceans, fish absorb toxic substances into their flesh by eating smaller fish that are contaminated and by the simple act of breathing. A fish breathes by letting water stream into its mouth and through its gills. Those miraculous organs take oxygen from the water to sustain the creatures life. If the water is polluted, as many of our oceans, lakes and streams are, then those toxic substances become resident in their bodies, eventually becoming part of their flesh.

Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says that up to 12 ounces of other kinds of cooked fish can be eaten safely by pregnant women, many other scientists and environmentalists think that this is too much.

Mercury is a deadly chemical when ingested and nearly always results in damage to the central nervous system, producing babies with slower cognitive development skills and possibly brain damage.

I wonder how many of our children with attention deficit disorder or other cognitive dysfunction have been affected by mercury poisoning? It is estimated that 60,000 babies born each year are effected by mercury poisioning from their mothers' eating contaminated fish.

Fish that feed on the bottoms of our waterways are
particularly susceptible to contamination. Many of the
deadliest pollutants sink to the bottom of bodies of water
where these fish live and feed.

Harbor dredging can mix mercury contaminated
sediments into the water

(Photo courtesy U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)

For example, rain carries the chemicals from the land into the rivers, lakes and oceans where the chemicals lodge in the bodies of simple organisms such as plankton. The chemicals may not affect a single microscopic organism, but a small shrimp may consume millions of the poisoned plankton in a day.

A fish which eats many hundreds of the shrimp in a day will then receive not only the chemical dose that each shrimp absorbed from the water, but the magnified dose from the millions of plankton consumed by the shrimp as well. Another fish eats the smaller fish and so on until, for example, an eagle - or a human - eats a salmon. That salmon contains a hugely magnified dose of the poison, which will invariably affect the animal eating it.

In Santa Monica Bay in Southern California, bottom dwelling fish that are caught and eaten can be deadly. Between 1949 and 1979, Los Angeles dumped 1,000 pounds of DDT per day into the Bay. That poison, along with the rest of the waste we have been dumping since the 1930s, is still out there.

Today, a huge solid waste "doughnut" rests on the ocean
floor off Santa Monica Bay, covering two square miles.
Ocean currents continually bring this material up, poisoning
sea life and bathers. The U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency is embarking on a plan to address this problem,
but it is tricky. In the meantime, people are being poisoned.

Halibut and halibut filet
(Photo courtesy Always Fresh Fish)

Fish are contaminated in other ways as well. Popular fish such as halibut are in so much demand that very restrictive fishing limits have been established. In the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, some areas allow only a brief three weekends per year to catch halibut.

This means that for a 48 to 72 hour period, thousands of fishing boats are catching as much halibut as they can. When these hundreds of thousands of fish are brought to shore at the end of the weekend, the processing plants cannot keep up, so thousands of pounds of fish sit on the docks or in boats for days waiting their turn.

Some large factory boats freeze the fish at sea, but the smaller boats cannot. Much of the fish is not in very good shape by the time it is processed.

Fish in supermarkets are often kept at improper temperatures and many random tests have shown that a significant percentage of the fish in that display case are not fit for consumption.

But not all fish eaten are caught wild from our polluted waterways. A large proportion of the fish marketed today is raised on farms. Is that fish any safer? Not necessarily.

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