Mercury Levels in Tuna

[ruaidhri]

Tuna. I like it; don’t you? I like it in casseroles. I like it in sandwiches. And, I especially like tuna sushi. Well, now I wonder if I should eat any tuna or large fish. Why? Because it appears much of the tuna we buy is contaminated with mercury. What’s really scary is that the amount of contamination is often greater than FDA established safety standards. And, to make matters even worse, it appears the FDA is covering up this contamination to protect the fishing industry.

Below is a link to an article published in the December 13, 2005, issue of the Chicago Tribune. I’m not copying it because it is five pages long and is best read through the link.

www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0512130114dec13,1,2843261.story?page=1&coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

So, for those that don’t want to wade through all five pages, what does the Tribune article say. First, it reminds us how mercury levels in tuna first came on the radar screen back in 1970 when a chemistry professor in upstate New York tested a can from his pantry. He discovered that it contained levels of toxic mercury far above U.S. safety limits. He called his local newspaper and the news soon spread around the world. The FDA was embarrassed and conducted its own test, which confirmed the Professor’s findings. The FDA declared the mercury contamination an anomaly and after recalling and dumping 12 million cans of tuna declared that the problem was solved and it was safe to tuna.

Well, apparently, that was a lie. What’s surprising is that no one tested the lie. People went back to eating tuna as if nothing had happened. Now, 30 years later studies have shown that canned tuna still contains mercury oftentimes in levels matching the professor's findings. The Tribune charges that the tuna industry has failed to adequately warn consumers. Federal regulators, the Tribune charges have caved into heavy lobbing by the industry and resisted including the fish in their mercury advisories.

”When the Food and Drug Administration updated its mercury warning last year, it arbitrarily classified canned light tuna as low in mercury to "keep market share at a reasonable level," one agency official told an FDA advisory panel, according to transcripts of the meeting.”

Under pressure the government recommended that children and pregnant women eat canned light tuna. They claim it generally contains less mercury than canned albacore (a much larger fish and, therefore more prone to mercury contamination). But, now we discover that this isn’t exactly true and the FDA knows it. While it’s true that skipjack (a smaller sized tuna) is less contaminated that isn’t all that goes into the cans labeled “light” tuna. Apparently, tens of millions of cans of light tuna sold each year are made with a species (Yellowfin, which is also a large fish) that contains as much toxic mercury as albacore.

So, what does mercury do to humans? It can harm children's developing brains and cause neurological problems in adults. It’s damn dangerous. What’s worse is that it’s not only tuna that’s contaminated. Mercury levels are high in all large fish. Fish is supposed to be the healthy food. Now, I like fish. While I won’t stop eating fish altogether, I will limit myself to one meal a week.

While the article is long and somewhat repetitive I did find it a good read.

What pisses me off is that my government purposely lied to consumers to protect the industry. Apparently dollars are far more important than pregnant women, children and the population as a whole.

What’s your opinion?

[Jay]

What’s surprising is that no one tested the lie.

I don't really find it all that surpising, actually. Of course you have to stop and ask yourself WHY no one tested the lie, but I've found that the general mentality amongst the average consumer is "well they're telling me it's okay, so it must be". Perfect consumer whores, in other words.

What’s your opinion?

My opinion might seem somewhat naive and childish, but I think that there's too many people in the world just looking out for the benefit of Number One (themselves). I'd suggest a mandatory firing and re-hiring of all the people involved in covering up this information. It's unfortunate that the only thing in the world that really matters to corporate businesses is money, but that's never going to change unless someone has the facilities to keep a very close eye on them.

[Loc]

I've made a bit of an effort (and it was, I've found fish absolutely disgusting since I was about 7) to start eating fish recently, starting with salmon and have been hearing all sorts of stories about it causing cancer and other illnesses.

My opinion of this is that there should be a big shakeup in the fishing industry, I won't pretend to know all the facts about the devastation a big reform could cause to many countries who rely on this as a main source of income/food but having such standards is intolerable.

I'm pretty annoyed that they would lie though, that's showing how little they care for the people eating this stuff.

[setrict]

Just for more information on the subject. I was curious as to why Tuna was affected, and whether or not the mercury contamination is a recent issue or has always been that way. From the reports I've read, environment conditions can increase mercury content - but samples from 100 year old museum fish indicate large predator fish have always had high mercury content similar to todays tested fish. It's not a new problem.

According to one source I read, a child weighing 45lbs can eat about 1.6oz of Albacore tuna a week and stay within the FDA guidelines. A serving size is about 2.4oz according to the can I have set aside for lunch.

If you use the same methodoloy for a 180lb adult you could safely eat 4 servings a week going by the serving size label on the can. I like tuna, but 4 servings of anything a week is probably more than I'm going to eat - especially on a continuing basis.

The problem in my opinion is two fold. First, most of us pay little attention to listed serving sizes, and secondly the product manufacturers take advantage of that fact to bypass the intent of the labeling mandates. Looking at my tasty Mtn Dew, it has 31g of sugar rocking in at 10% RDA and 110 calories.... per serving. My mind equates a serving with the bottle size mainly, and I suspect many people do. I consumed 77.5g sugar, and 275 calories.

I'm really mixed on this because I think we are victims of our own gluttony. You can kill yourself by simply drinking to much water too (around 4 gallons/day to shut down your cells for lack of salt) - but I see no need for the goverment to step in and force danger/warning labels on bottled water.

An issue that concerns me more is packaging. Almost all of our food packaging is oil/plastic based. As these plastics age, they release oils into the food. Try leaving water in a cleaned plastic soda bottle for a week or so, and then tasting the water. I've personally noticed a different taste when compared to a glass bottle. I used to make fun of the expiration dates on bottled water... now I know why they exist.

References:
http://www.pbs.org/now/science/mercuryinfish.html
http://seafood.ucdavis.edu/Pubs/mercury.htm

[NERD]

For years pregnant women were advised not to eat tuna- because the unborn fetus is the most susceptible to the effects of mercury in tuna, and if the child was to be born with defects, it would be easy to pinpoint the cause, and almost certainly a public outcry would've followed.

It's not just tuna though, like ruiadhri mentioned, but a problem with all large fish.

It would be interesting if someone had done some research about this in Japan, the country that consumes most tuna in the world, not to mention other fish.

And setrict, I believe high mercury level in fish has been there since the Industrical Revolution, which is more than a hundred years ago. Mercury is also far more dangerous than petroleum/oil/plastic, even in small doses, in human body. Besides, if packaging turns out to be a problem, we have an alternate method to get around the problem. With mercury level in large fish, even if we were to somehow stop the flow of mercury into the water, which is impossible, the mercury will be still present for decades.

The people have a way of denying things even when it is so obvious, it's right in front of you. Maybe that was the problem with FDA. Or maybe they really thought the fishing industry was more important than the public health. Either way, it's quite disturbing.

[Idlethought]

High doses of anything is toxic to you. Just cut down how much fishy fish fish you eat. By alot lol. Stick the real meats like beef, swine, and poultry baby.

[mugen]

I'm sorry but i don't really see the problem. maybe women and small children should avoid eating fish because it may cause health risks for them. But when i look at Japan, where fish is very popular, and see that they are the healthiest people because of this (according to many scientists), i honestly don't see the problem with consuming large (within boundries) amounts of fish. edit- i'm talking about adults here.


maybe i'm biased because my sister studies nutrition, and I am sick about hearing about the bad sides of everything i eat. even the "healthy" stuff.

It can harm children's developing brains and cause neurological problems in adults.

this would explain the craziness in japan though

[RDClip]

I find this pretty damn ironic. Fish is the best kind of meat that a human can eat. However, from the wonders of human progess, we are poisoning our own food. Food is supposed to be one of those things that people are supposed to be able to enjoy without thinking about their kids growing up deformed or developing cancer because something they ate had some chemical in it.

[Balain]

Well I remember a few years I was in some lecture about nutrional facts and stuff like that. The doctors were saying you should limit Tuna to once or twice a month and Salmon to no more than once a week

[General_Admission]

What’s your opinion?

Buy/eat wild fish. Stay away from farm raised.

[mugen]

Buy/eat wild fish. Stay away from farm raised.

actually the wild fish has mercury not the farm raised :)

[more cheerios]

Well, I don't think it's a serious problem right now. Hell, if this was a serious problem, don't you think half the maritimes would be dead by now?

[c-rex]

As an oceanography major I've sat through enough classes on water quality on how it affects fish to put me off seafood entirely (the fun fact is stuff like arsenic can remain in the ocean for thousandsa of years before it is filtered our and concentrations in fish tissue can exceed 10^6 or 10^7 for various elements).

First off:
Cold water wild fish are the healthiest. This has to do with the downflow and creation of bottom currents and sea ice. Long story short the metals spend the least time in the water column at this point so the fish get the least exposure. Wild salmon is normally safe.

Farm Raised vs Wild:
Farm raised, sure it has less metals in but the fish literally live in shit filled water. Say Fish A is on the top and voids his bowls, the farmers have these guys packed in so tight that he voids them onto Fish B who voids his on Fish C and so on and so forth. The death of fish in farms due to parasites, bacterial and fungal infections is several orders of magnitude above that of wild fish. You're better going with the wild fish and eating a little mercury than getting some nasty worm or fungus from farm fish. Some of the nasty parasites will burrow through your skin and into your blood stream when you handle the raw fish before cooking it. Or god help you if you eat that shit raw.

Higher Food Chain Fish (aka Tuna aka Stuff that eats other Fish):
These guys have more metal in them since they spend all day eating other fish that have metals in them. Not really a good choice.

Scavengers (Shrimp, Lobster, Crab)
I love this stuff, I really do. But these are the worst things you can eat. These are dudes feeding off the dead body of the high metal content tuna all day. They win the award hands down for more dangerous elements in them, killer fungi, etc. Ever since I took GeoSci 222 I can't bring myself to eat shrimp and lord I used to love shrimp.

However than being the said the press is over reacting. Most of the proffs I've talked to say that the chemical levels aren't too bad. Assuming you have fish once a week cancer or whatever will get you long before the mercury does. Keep the high level stuff (tuna, scavengers) to as little as possible. If you do eat a lot of seafood try to stick to cold water stuff lower down on the food chain. If you live in Japan you're fucked.

My two cents.

[drdan]

I don't like the word "contaminated". They use that word in a way that makes you think that the tuna was mercury free and then all of the sudden someone "contaminated" the tuna with mercury. Tuna, and most/all fish have mercury in them natuarlly because of the environment they live in.

[Anders]

Companies that produce industrial waste are all the same. If it is not against the law to dump waste into the environment, they're going to. No matter what kind of damage they do to wildlife such as fish or livestock, they will continue doing it because they can get away with it, and it's cheaper to dump than to process. While fish may naturally have traces of these harmful elements without waste pollution, with the added pollution, the levels are much, much higher. Research Mercury poisoning in Japan on google. Look at the toxin levels in all of the great lakes in North America.
Regardless if you see fish as being completely free of toxins naturally or not, pollution does have a serious effect. I don't know what else to call it but contamination.

As for the government lying to the public, It happens quite often. During the great depression, people had a distrust in the banking system in the US. President FDR used deception to get the public to trust the system again. He used his fireside radio programs to tell the public that he has a commission investigating all of the banks in America. After the banks were checked out, they could re-open and it would be safe to put your hard earned money back in the bank. There was no commission, but the people believed it. When banks started to re-open, people's trust in the system was restored. Now there was no real threat to public health and safety in that lie, but unfortunately there are more examples. More recently, "Mad Cow" disease was discovered in the US. While no doubt entire herds of cattle were slaughtered to contain the disease, all jr. had to do was declare beef safe to eat again and we all trusted him. Do you really think "Mad Cow" disease is gone just because the media doesn't hunt down cases? What about CWD in deer? Has that been wiped off the map?
I'm not saying that we should all run out and buy biohazard suits and eat only sterilized foods, (although the suits would be kind of cool for the shock value) but we shouldn't take everything the government and media tells us for the truth. Sometimes, and perhaps most times it is what they don't tell us that is really important.

[General_Admission]

actually the wild fish has mercury not the farm raised :)

You would be wrong.