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Fish Facts for Families
By Beth Trask
Issue 145 November/December 2007
Ten-year-old Hannah loves seafood. Her favorite? Blue mussels. "I think a lot of kids would like them if they tried them," says this fifth-grader from Boston, Massachusetts. "Mussels are slimy, but they're not gross."
Increasingly, dieticians are encouraging parents to take Hannah's advice and serve more seafood to their kids. Long thought of as gourmet restaurant fare, seafood is now viewed as part of the solution to the surge in childhood obesity, and a source of vital nutrients for preventive health care. In fact, the American Heart Association advises families to regularly eat fish.1
There is little doubt that seafood, which is low in saturated fats, is one of the healthier sources of animal protein. It also provides vitamins and minerals, including iron, zinc, and vitamins A, B, and D. The omega-3 fatty acids found in varying concentrations in fish—oily fish, such as Atlantic mackerel, Atlantic herring, and sardines have some of the highest levels—are considered beneficial for the heart, and preliminary research suggests that consuming omega-3s during pregnancy can enhance infant brain development and vision and lengthen gestation.2
At the same time, seafood presents some of the more daunting food choices for families who care about the environment and are concerned about limiting their children's exposure to toxic pollutants. And many parents simply find cooking new seafoods for their children challenging—anything stronger-tasting than a frozen fish stick may be at risk of being rejected by sensitive young taste buds.
Understanding seafood contaminants
The ubiquitous can of tuna has become the focal point of the controversy over toxins in seafood. Enjoyed in sandwiches and casseroles by generations of children and adults, canned tuna, like many other seafoods, contains mercury, a toxic heavy metal that is harmful for fetuses and young children.3 A neurotoxin, mercury can impair the development of the brain and nervous system.4
While naturally occurring in the environment, mercury is also released through industrial pollution, notably from coal-fired power plants. It falls from the air in rain and other forms of precipitation, gets into surface water, and works its way into streams, lakes, and oceans. There, microorganisms transform mercury into its toxic form, methyl mercury, which fish absorb as they feed on aquatic organisms and other fish.5 The result is that almost all fish contain at least trace amounts of mercury, with the top predators—shark, swordfish, tilefish, king mackerel—having the highest levels. Moderate levels of mercury are found in a variety of popular fish, including snapper, Chilean sea bass, orange roughy, and striped bass. And depending on the type of tuna in the can—albacore, yellowfin, or skipjack—the mercury levels in canned tuna vary widely.6, 7, 8
Sadly, mercury is not the only pollutant that accumulates in seafood. Increasingly, our rivers, lakes, and oceans are depositories for industrial and agricultural pollutants, from PCBs to pesticides to flame retardants. Faced with myriad state and federal advisories that often conflict with each other, parents are left on their own to answer the question "How much and what type of seafood is safe for my children?"
The federal government's seafood advisory for mercury, which is jointly listed by the Food and Drug Adminis-tration (FDA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is based on an estimated body weight of an average-size American woman, but does not explain how to scale the recommendations to a child's body weight—leaving parents to guess at this critical variable for calculating safe levels of mercury consumption.9 For example, the advisory currently states that children can eat up to six ounces of albacore tuna per week—the same recommendation as for adult women. However, based on the EPA's guidelines for state fish advisories,10 which are scaled to body weight, a child weighing 67 pounds and following that recommendation would consume more than twice the federal limit of mercury.11
Last year, the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academies, issued what was expected to be the definitive verdict on the risks and benefits of eating seafood. However, its report, which was written by a panel of doctors and scientists, raised even more questions. It noted that much of the evidence of seafood's health benefits and risks is still preliminary or insufficient, and that solid information about mercury and PCBs is lacking.12 The report recommended that federal agencies ramp up their monitoring of contaminants in seafood. At present the FDA tests only a few hundred fish out of the billions of pounds of seafood sold each year in the US. For example, the FDA calls haddock a "lower mercury" seafood based on the testing of just four individual haddock in the early 1990s.13 The FDA currently does not test for PCBs or other contaminants (flame retardants, dioxins, etc.) affecting fish, thus adding to the fragmented nature of the available information.
Are there enough fish in the sea?
Not so long ago, cod swimming off the coast of New England were so plentiful that local fishermen had trouble sailing their boats through them. Nowadays, this beloved species, which gave Cape Cod its name and is best known as the main ingredient in fish and chips, is nearly gone. Many other popular seafoods are also being overfished (i.e., caught faster than they can reproduce): Chilean sea bass, bluefin tuna, rockfish, red snapper, and many more.
Equally troubling is the problem with "bycatch"—sea turtles, sharks, wahoo (a type of mackerel), mahi-mahi, young tunas, and other fish that are not being fished for but become entangled in fishing nets. Researchers estimate that nearly a quarter of the fish caught are killed and discarded as unusable or undesirable.14 Last November, an international team of ecologists and economists published a groundbreaking paper in Science with a cautionary finding: Based on an intensive four-year analysis, the team predicts that, if current trends in the depletion of species continue unabated, wild fisheries could be virtually gone by 2048.15
Are farmed fish part of the solution or part of the problem? For the moment, they're both. Environmental and health standards vary widely from country to country and from fish farm to fish farm. Many farms are damaging coastal environments, generating water pollution, and harming natural fish populations. Some require antibiotics to fight the spread of diseases in crowded fish ponds. Most troubling is the capture of wild fish to serve as feed. On some farms, for example, raising 1 kilogram of farmed shrimp requires up to 2 kilos of wild fish.
Win-win-win choices for kids
Serving seafood to your children needn't be a risk/benefit calculation, or a tradeoff between your child's health and that of the ocean. Armed with some information and a willingness to read labels and ask questions at the grocery store or fish market, parents can make good seafood choices.
One resource that can help is KidSafe Seafood. A program of SeaWeb, a nonprofit ocean-conservation organization, KidSafe Seafood pulled together a unique team of pediatricians, chefs, and scientists from Environmental Defense and the Monterey Bay Aquarium to identify seafood options that are nutritious, low in contaminants, and ocean-friendly.
Wild salmon tops this list: It is sustainably caught in Alaska under a strict fisheries-management plan. Wild salmon is also well tested for contaminants, and has been found to contain such low levels that even children as young as three can eat it weekly.
There are good farmed fish, too. In particular, many shellfish—such as bay scallops, clams, and the blue mussels favored by ten-year-old Hannah—can be farmed in ways that don't damage the ocean or coastlines. Several cutting-edge farms are now raising shrimp miles from the ocean in high-tech "closed containment" systems, in which all wastes are recycled and no chemical additives are used.
KidSafe Seafood maintains a website, www.kidsafeseafood.org, with detailed information on fish that can be safely eaten weekly, bimonthly, and monthly by both young and older children. All recommendations are based on the EPA's health guidelines—which are considered more precise and protective than the more general FDA advisory—and the most comprehensive scientific data currently available.
There is much that parents, and all of us who care about our health and the oceans, can do:
- Be educated consumers who eat a variety ?of seafoods that are sustainably caught ?and raised.
- Support safer, cleaner renewable energy that won't require the burning of coal.
- Be aware of the chemicals used by farms and manufacturing facilities in our communities.
- Join environmental organizations.
- Take the children in our lives to visit aquariums to learn more about protecting the oceans.
Kids like ten-year-old Hannah can help lead the way. "I like seafood a lot," says Hannah, who carries a wallet seafood guide when she shops with her mom, "but I want to keep the environment healthy."
NOTES
1. American Heart Association, "Dietary Guidelines for Children," www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4575.
2. Malden C. Nesheim and Ann L. Yaktine, eds., Institute of Medicine, Seafood Choices: Balancing Benefits and Risks (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2007), 1?3.
3. L. Goldman, M. Shannon, Committee on Environmental Health, "Technical Report: Mercury in the Environment: Implications for Pediatricians," Pediatrics 108, no. 1 (July 2001).
4. Ibid.
5. See Note 2, 106.
6. US Department of Health and Human Services, US Environmental Protection Agency, "Mercury Levels in Commercial Fish and Shellfish" (February 2006): www.cfsan.fda.gov/~frf/sea-mehg.html.
7. Sam Roe and Michael Hawthorne, "How Safe Is Tuna?" Chicago Tribune (18 December 2005).
8. "Mercury in Tuna: New Safety Concerns," ConsumerReports.org (July 2006).
9. US Department of Health and Human Services, US Environmental Protection Agency, "What You Need to Know About Mercury in Fish and Shellfish: 2004 EPA and FDA Advice for Women Who Might Become Pregnant, Women Who Are Pregnant, Nursing Mothers, Young Children," EPA-823-R-04-005 (March 2004): www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/admehg3.html.
10. US Environmental Protection Agency, Guidance for Assessing Chemical Contaminant Data for Use on Fish Advisories—Volume 2: Risk Assessment and Fish Consumption Limits, Third Edition (Washington, DC: November 2000), 1?24.
11. "Consumption Advisories: Fish to Avoid," www.oceansalive.org/eat.cfm?subnav=healthalerts.
12. See Note 2: 1-8.
13. See Note 6.
14. "Bycatch: Fish and Animals Caught and Wasted," www.mbayaq.org/cr/cr_seafoodwatch/sfw_bycatch.asp.
15. Boris Worm et al., "Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services," Science 314, no. 5800 (November 2006): 787-790.
For More Information
KidSafe Seafood, www.kidsafeseafood.org
For a seafood wallet guide:
Blue Ocean Institute, http://blueocean.org
Environmental Defense, www.oceansalive.org
Monterey Bay Aquarium, www.montereybayaquarium.org
For information about protecting children from toxic chemicals:
Environmental Working Group, www.ewg.org
Healthy Child Healthy World, http://healthychild.org
Physicians for Social Responsibility, http://www.psr.org
Beth Trask developed the KidSafe Seafood project on behalf of the nonprofit ocean conservation organization SeaWeb. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she works on a variety of environmental projects and enjoys cooking with local foods that are healthy for people and the planet.
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