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Tuna the risks.
- Thread starter Loner
- Start date
J
jenscats5
Guest
Loner said:
There has been a TON of threads about this, literally....
Here's some:
http://www.elitefitness.com/forum/showthread.php?t=314142&highlight=mercury
http://www.elitefitness.com/forum/showthread.php?t=313433&highlight=mercury
http://www.elitefitness.com/forum/showthread.php?t=303970&highlight=mercury
J
jenscats5
Guest
An Article from Health Magazine:
"Most mercury is bound up underground or inside plants. But when it's released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels, it falls back to Earth and ends up in waterways and oceans. Bacteria make a meal of the metal; then these organisms are eaten by creatures like snails, which are eaten by small fish, which are eaten by larger fish -- each absorbing the mercury from the animals it follows in the chain.
In a little-publicized bulletin from 2001, known internally as the Do Not Consume list, the FDA said that children and women of childbearing age should avoid swordfish, shark, king mackerel, and tilefish (sometimes sold as snapper), because mercury levels in those fish are too high -- more than 1 ppm. That's the "action level": According to federal regulations, fish with levels above 1 ppm can't be sold. (Government data shows that many samples of these species contain levels as high as 6 ppm.)
In practice, however, the action level isn't enforced. The FDA simply doesn't know how much mercury is in the high-dollar fish popular in restaurants and at the nation's seafood markets, agency officials acknowledge. The FDA publishes what it believes to be average mercury levels for many of these fish, but EPA scientists say the data is fundamentally flawed and essentially useless.
That's because no one recorded the size of the fish when most of the testing was performed. Size is critical, because smaller, younger specimens tend to contain much less mercury than bigger, older ones.
Recent tests conducted by the National Marine Fisheries Service, the state of Florida, and the Mobile Register, an Alabama newspaper that has reported extensively on mercury contamination, indicate that such species as Chilean sea bass, fresh tuna, grouper, bluefish, amberjack, cobia, and redfish are often every bit as high in mercury as the swordfish and shark on the FDA's Do Not Consume list.
These contamination levels may help explain recent reports of Americans who eat fish once or twice a week but have mercury levels comparable to those of Alaska's Inuit people, who subsist almost entirely on fish and are thought to be among the most mercury-contaminated populations on Earth.
Alarmingly high levels are being reported all around the United States, mostly in upper-middle-class people who eat moderate amounts of fish. In Wisconsin, the state health department was stunned to discover two married lawyers with mercury levels 10 and 12 times as high as the EPA's safe level; they ate Chilean sea bass once a week. In Louisiana, a museum director who ate fresh tuna weekly had levels four times the upper limit.
"People with these high mercury levels are certainly not particularly hard to find," says Mahaffey, who last year won the EPA's highest scientific honor for her research. "We find them every time we start looking. I think it indicates they are much more common nationwide than we thought."
Last February, signs started going up at seafood counters across California, with "Warning" in prominent letters, a drawing of a fish, and the names of the four species on the FDA's hit list. The signs were brought in to satisfy Bill Lockyer, the state attorney general, who had filed suit against major grocery chains. He charged that the stores had been violating California's Proposition 65, which requires retailers to warn customers when they sell products containing chemicals known to cause reproductive harm or cancer. "The signs are a step in the right direction," Hightower says. "But we need to tell people how much mercury is in other kinds of fish."
Right now, no one can give people that information, because nobody knows for sure. But that may be about to change. The National Marine Fisheries Service has started testing 2,500 samples of fish from the Gulf of Mexico and plans to test in the Pacific and Atlantic as well. Results won't be known for at least a year, but if they show that mercury levels in other species top 1 ppm, the FDA will consider adding more fish to its Do Not Consume list, says David Acheson, M.D., chief medical officer of that organization's Center for Food Safety and Nutrition.
In the meantime, what are you supposed to eat? Mercury aside, seafood is good for you, as the American Heart Association has stated. It's low in saturated fat and high in omega-3 fatty acids, which Western diets sorely lack, says Alan Stern, a doctor of public health who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that studied the mercury issue. Fortunately, he says, you can get the benefits of seafood with minimal risk -- if you choose your fish wisely.
In many cases, the large ocean fish with the highest mercury levels also happen to be poor sources of omega-3s, for instance. Conversely, many of the best sources of those beneficial fatty acids, like salmon, are low in mercury. In addition, relatively small species such as flounder, sole, mullet, and sardines are known to be low in the metal, Stern says. Farm-raised fish also tend to have lower levels than their wild counterparts.
Hightower offers some homespun advice: "If the fish you're cooking is too big for your pot, buy a smaller fish, not a bigger pot." If you see a large, boneless hunk of fish at a seafood counter, be wary; she says it could only come from a very large fish. And if you frequent sushi restaurants, be aware that much of the menu is composed of large predators like tuna. (Some bluefin tuna has been shown to contain mercury at more than 10 ppm -- on par with many of the fish consumed by victims of the Minamata disaster.) If your levels are high, don't panic, Mahaffey says, especially if you haven't noticed symptoms. Mercury is excreted in hair, skin, nails, and feces, which means that the amount in your body is halved every 40 to 100 days. That assumes, of course, that you're not adding to your mercury burden by eating contaminated fish.
As for Will Smith, a couple years have passed since Hightower advised him to change his diet. Once so severely debilitated that he couldn't think clearly, he's feeling much better these days. He's back at work. He can watch television without getting dizzy, and he can remember where he's going when he gets in the car. The tremors are gone, and he can once again conquer complex mathematical computations.
As for fish, he won't go near it anymore. "
More info from Health Magazine:
"Tuna is awash in controversy, too. Tuna seems to be the perfect health food. It’s low-cal, low in saturated fat, and high in omega-3 fatty acids. What’s more, you can get canned tuna anywhere, and it’s cheap.
The problem is mercury, a toxic chemical that seeps into the sea as a byproduct of industry. Eating mercury-laden fish during pregnancy can harm a baby’s developing brain, causing learning disabilities. The FDA warns women not to eat shark, swordfish, king mackerel, and tilefish because they contain high levels of mercury. But consumer watchdogs say the agency should also warn women about tuna. Mercury levels in tuna have been below the FDA’s safety limit, but critics say the agency’s standards are too lax, and that women eat more tuna than the government claims they do.
"Fish is an excellent source of nutrition, especially for pregnant women," says Daniel Lasser, MD, an obstetrician at the Weill Cornell School of Medicine in New York City. Nevertheless, "We’re not 100-percent sure about how much is safe," he says."
"Most mercury is bound up underground or inside plants. But when it's released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels, it falls back to Earth and ends up in waterways and oceans. Bacteria make a meal of the metal; then these organisms are eaten by creatures like snails, which are eaten by small fish, which are eaten by larger fish -- each absorbing the mercury from the animals it follows in the chain.
In a little-publicized bulletin from 2001, known internally as the Do Not Consume list, the FDA said that children and women of childbearing age should avoid swordfish, shark, king mackerel, and tilefish (sometimes sold as snapper), because mercury levels in those fish are too high -- more than 1 ppm. That's the "action level": According to federal regulations, fish with levels above 1 ppm can't be sold. (Government data shows that many samples of these species contain levels as high as 6 ppm.)
In practice, however, the action level isn't enforced. The FDA simply doesn't know how much mercury is in the high-dollar fish popular in restaurants and at the nation's seafood markets, agency officials acknowledge. The FDA publishes what it believes to be average mercury levels for many of these fish, but EPA scientists say the data is fundamentally flawed and essentially useless.
That's because no one recorded the size of the fish when most of the testing was performed. Size is critical, because smaller, younger specimens tend to contain much less mercury than bigger, older ones.
Recent tests conducted by the National Marine Fisheries Service, the state of Florida, and the Mobile Register, an Alabama newspaper that has reported extensively on mercury contamination, indicate that such species as Chilean sea bass, fresh tuna, grouper, bluefish, amberjack, cobia, and redfish are often every bit as high in mercury as the swordfish and shark on the FDA's Do Not Consume list.
These contamination levels may help explain recent reports of Americans who eat fish once or twice a week but have mercury levels comparable to those of Alaska's Inuit people, who subsist almost entirely on fish and are thought to be among the most mercury-contaminated populations on Earth.
Alarmingly high levels are being reported all around the United States, mostly in upper-middle-class people who eat moderate amounts of fish. In Wisconsin, the state health department was stunned to discover two married lawyers with mercury levels 10 and 12 times as high as the EPA's safe level; they ate Chilean sea bass once a week. In Louisiana, a museum director who ate fresh tuna weekly had levels four times the upper limit.
"People with these high mercury levels are certainly not particularly hard to find," says Mahaffey, who last year won the EPA's highest scientific honor for her research. "We find them every time we start looking. I think it indicates they are much more common nationwide than we thought."
Last February, signs started going up at seafood counters across California, with "Warning" in prominent letters, a drawing of a fish, and the names of the four species on the FDA's hit list. The signs were brought in to satisfy Bill Lockyer, the state attorney general, who had filed suit against major grocery chains. He charged that the stores had been violating California's Proposition 65, which requires retailers to warn customers when they sell products containing chemicals known to cause reproductive harm or cancer. "The signs are a step in the right direction," Hightower says. "But we need to tell people how much mercury is in other kinds of fish."
Right now, no one can give people that information, because nobody knows for sure. But that may be about to change. The National Marine Fisheries Service has started testing 2,500 samples of fish from the Gulf of Mexico and plans to test in the Pacific and Atlantic as well. Results won't be known for at least a year, but if they show that mercury levels in other species top 1 ppm, the FDA will consider adding more fish to its Do Not Consume list, says David Acheson, M.D., chief medical officer of that organization's Center for Food Safety and Nutrition.
In the meantime, what are you supposed to eat? Mercury aside, seafood is good for you, as the American Heart Association has stated. It's low in saturated fat and high in omega-3 fatty acids, which Western diets sorely lack, says Alan Stern, a doctor of public health who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that studied the mercury issue. Fortunately, he says, you can get the benefits of seafood with minimal risk -- if you choose your fish wisely.
In many cases, the large ocean fish with the highest mercury levels also happen to be poor sources of omega-3s, for instance. Conversely, many of the best sources of those beneficial fatty acids, like salmon, are low in mercury. In addition, relatively small species such as flounder, sole, mullet, and sardines are known to be low in the metal, Stern says. Farm-raised fish also tend to have lower levels than their wild counterparts.
Hightower offers some homespun advice: "If the fish you're cooking is too big for your pot, buy a smaller fish, not a bigger pot." If you see a large, boneless hunk of fish at a seafood counter, be wary; she says it could only come from a very large fish. And if you frequent sushi restaurants, be aware that much of the menu is composed of large predators like tuna. (Some bluefin tuna has been shown to contain mercury at more than 10 ppm -- on par with many of the fish consumed by victims of the Minamata disaster.) If your levels are high, don't panic, Mahaffey says, especially if you haven't noticed symptoms. Mercury is excreted in hair, skin, nails, and feces, which means that the amount in your body is halved every 40 to 100 days. That assumes, of course, that you're not adding to your mercury burden by eating contaminated fish.
As for Will Smith, a couple years have passed since Hightower advised him to change his diet. Once so severely debilitated that he couldn't think clearly, he's feeling much better these days. He's back at work. He can watch television without getting dizzy, and he can remember where he's going when he gets in the car. The tremors are gone, and he can once again conquer complex mathematical computations.
As for fish, he won't go near it anymore. "
More info from Health Magazine:
"Tuna is awash in controversy, too. Tuna seems to be the perfect health food. It’s low-cal, low in saturated fat, and high in omega-3 fatty acids. What’s more, you can get canned tuna anywhere, and it’s cheap.
The problem is mercury, a toxic chemical that seeps into the sea as a byproduct of industry. Eating mercury-laden fish during pregnancy can harm a baby’s developing brain, causing learning disabilities. The FDA warns women not to eat shark, swordfish, king mackerel, and tilefish because they contain high levels of mercury. But consumer watchdogs say the agency should also warn women about tuna. Mercury levels in tuna have been below the FDA’s safety limit, but critics say the agency’s standards are too lax, and that women eat more tuna than the government claims they do.
"Fish is an excellent source of nutrition, especially for pregnant women," says Daniel Lasser, MD, an obstetrician at the Weill Cornell School of Medicine in New York City. Nevertheless, "We’re not 100-percent sure about how much is safe," he says."
PaganPunkstress
New member
thanks for sharing 
Solidrock1951
New member
Good article friend
J
jenscats5
Guest
big perm said:
You're welcome!!
ridethesnake
New member
My mom ate lots of tuna when she was pregnant with me and I turned out fine.
Wait. No I didn't, nevermind. Don't eat tuna.
Wait. No I didn't, nevermind. Don't eat tuna.
