The Trouble with Eating Fish Today

Since then, setbacks have varied: Farmed salmon production exceeded the amount of wild-caught salmon in 1999; nearly 3 million Atlantic salmon reportedly escaped from farms in British Columbia, Washington, Maine and Scotland in 2001, the same year infectious salmon anemia forced Maine salmon farmers to slaughter over 1 million fish.

From the traces of illegal antibiotics found in an Asian shrimp farm in 2002 to the gross violations of the Clean Water Act in a Maine-based salmon farm in 2003, and certainly the toxicology tests revealing farmed salmon to be one of the most toxic foods in the world — more than five times more toxic than any other food tested — clearly the industry as a whole has some explaining to do.

The guidelines for clean-eating seafood are the same for everyone as they are outlined for pregnant moms: Fresh-caught Alaskan salmon, sardines, mackerel, herring and anchovies are your best bets in regard to healthiest seafood. Some people might think farmed fish must be the healthiest and most environmentally responsible choice, but in many respects, fish farming, aka aquacultured fisheries, aren’t much different from the land-loving CAFOs — concentrated animal feeding operations.

One of the worst problems is salmon pens placed next to wild salmon runs, which seriously threatens the viability of wild-caught salmon, especially since the farmed variety are often carrying diseases such as infectious salmon anemia virus, and that’s just one of several.

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Harmful Effects of Eating Certain Fish

Monterey Fish explains that the above ocean fish should be avoided, and includes King mackerel, barracuda, marlin, conger eel, jacks and Gulf of Mexico tilefish. Similarly, steer clear of certain wild freshwater fish, as well, including whitefish, pickerel, pike, walleye and lake trout due to potential mercury contamination. However, here’s an interesting twist to the narrative.

In some cultures, fish is on the menu far more often than in the U.S., especially Japan, a relatively small nation entirely surrounded by water. In fact, it’s consumed four to five times more there than in the U.S. The people have regularly consumed the largest tunas they could catch for centuries, so it’s very likely they accumulated large amounts of methylmercury, apparently without causing problems. But there’s more:

“A number of studies have found that the essential element selenium, high amounts of which are found in ocean fish, sequesters mercury, thus neutralizing its toxic effects. This may be the reason why studies have never shown an epidemic of child developmental problems in coastal populations whose diets have been comprised in large part of seafood.”

Further, the omega-3 fatty acids in healthy seafood, namely fresh-caught Alaskan salmon, sardines, mackerel, herring and anchovies, are essential for your overall health. If you do not eat fish for whatever reason, I recommend that you take a quality supplement to supply it.

My best recommendation is krill oil, which is animal based and contains the highly crucial EPA and DHA omega-3s your body needs. EPA and DHA are important for your heart and brain, cellular and mitochondrial function, bone health and mood regulation, as well as for healthy fetal development and pregnancy.

On the other hand, methylmercury poses the greatest threat to the nervous system while unborn babies and newborns are developing — their brains, immune and nervous systems and retinas, in particular. It easily penetrates the placenta, where the mercury concentration in red blood cells may be 30 percent higher than in those of the baby’s mother.

Article Source: Dr Mercola at Mercola.com  

The Healthy Aspects of Eating Fish

Gaskins says he believes women have been “scared off fish” because of the growing threat of mercury poisoning and adds that there’s low-level contamination in commonly eaten seafood such as shrimp and canned tuna. As healthy as it may have been to have fish on the menu at least twice a week 100 years ago, the growing problem of tainted waters has led to fish being contaminated by mercury and other pollutants.

But how does mercury get into the fish in the first place? Primarily, there are mercury “hot spots” where accumulation comes from chlorine production facilities, offshore oil-drilling platforms and coal-burning power plants. Scientific American notes that while mercury is a naturally occurring element found in plants, animals and elsewhere throughout the environment, human involvement in industrial endeavors for the last 150 years or so has “ratcheted up” the amount of airborne mercury.

It’s not a negligible amount — it’s substantial. Fish and many types of ocean life ingest the mercury — more specifically, methylmercury cysteine, the type found in seafood — until it finally reaches the humans who eat it. Live Science observes, “Mercury in humans may cause a wide range of conditions including neurological and chromosomal problems and birth defects.” Additionally:

“Once in the water, mercury makes its way into the food chain. Inorganic mercury and methylmercury are first consumed by phytoplankton, single-celled algae at the base of most aquatic food chains. Next, the phytoplankton are consumed by small animals such as zooplankton.

The methylmercury is assimilated and retained by the animals, while the inorganic mercury is shed from the animals as waste products … Small fish that eat the zooplankton are exposed to food-borne mercury that is predominantly in the methylated form. These fish are consumed by larger fish, and so on until it gets to humans.”

An example of how insidious toxic mercury contamination is has to do with larger fish, such as tuna, swordfish, shark, large bluefish and grouper, having exponentially more mercury in them because they eat smaller fish, and the contamination is cumulative.

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Silent Health Benefits of Eating Fish

Although lead study author Audrey J. Gaskins, a research associate at Harvard, speculates that seafood might improve semen quality and egg release for ovulation, scientists can’t really say exactly what the mechanism is for the improved pregnancy rates in regard to higher fish consumption.

She notes, however, that if eating fish has anything to do with bringing couples together, it’s more of a behavioral pathway rather than a causal one. A reader commenting on the article suggested that it’s the selenium that may have something to do with the “baby-making merit” of eating seafood, and cited a study published in International Journal of General Medicine, which observes:

“A significant development in the last 10 years in the study of human infertility has been the discovery that oxidative sperm DNA damage has a critical role in the etiology of poor semen quality and male infertility. Selenium (Se) is an essential element for normal testicular development, spermatogenesis, and spermatozoa motility and function.”

Scientists in this study found that among 690 men suffering from idiopathic asthenoteratospermia (reduced sperm motility), who’d been given a combined supplement of 400 units of vitamin E and 200 μg of selenium daily for at least 100 days, 52.6 percent of the men (362 of them) had “significantly improved” sperm motility, morphology or both. There were also 75 cases of “spontaneous pregnancy.”

A case-controlled study in the U.K., published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, targeted the selenium status of women with a history of recurrent miscarriage and found evidence that selenium deficiency was also a factor when study participants who couldn’t carry a pregnancy to term were compared to women who’d had little or no trouble becoming parents.

While the researchers found that the “difference was seen in hair samples but not serum samples and therefore may not represent a simple nutritional deficiency,” there was also a “significantly greater proportion of women in the control group who ate cereals, vitamin supplements and liver or kidney.”

That said, it’s interesting to note that, according to Nutrition Data, while a 3.5-ounce (100-gram) piece of cooked beef liver contains 57 percent of the daily value or Reference Daily Intake (RDI) of selenium, the same amount of wild-caught Alaskan salmon provides 67 percent of the RDI in selenium.

Article Source: Dr Mercola at Mercola.com  

Why Start or Continue Eating Eggs

Instead of focusing on the faulty science that made you worry unnecessarily about consuming too much cholesterol, there are numerous reasons to go ahead and enjoy them. They're loaded with vitamins and minerals; in fact, just one boiled egg imparts these very good-for-you nutrients, in terms of the Reference Daily Intake (RDI):

6 percent of the RDI in vitamin A	5 percent of the RDI in folate
7 percent of the RDI in vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid)	9 percent of the RDI in vitamin B12
15 percent of the RDI in protein	15 percent of the RDI in vitamin B2
9 percent of the RDI in phosphorus	22 percent of the RDI in selenium

In addition, eggs contain a healthy amount of calcium, zinc and vitamins D, K, E and B6, as well as healthy fats. Lutein and zeaxanthin are important antioxidants that build up in the retinas of your eyes. This effectively protects your vision by inhibiting the development of cataracts and macular degradation, two of the world's most common and serious eye ailments.

Along with the high amounts of vitamin A, your vision is further defended with every egg you eat. Fuller reiterated that other nutritional advantages come through "micronutrients like carotenoids (for eye health), arginine (for healthy blood vessels) and folate (for healthy pregnancies and heart health)," according to the University's news release.

 

Article Source: Dr Mercola at Mercola.com