Mercury in Fish: Does Eating Seafood Help or Harm Your Health?
Monday July 2, 2007
The next time you start to order a tuna sandwich for lunch or a swordfish steak as your dinner entrée, give some thought to a research study by the Chicago Tribune and Rutgers University, which shows that commercial seafood contains much higher levels of mercury than most people suspect. The investigation found that government regulators and the seafood industry are doing little to protect public health and, in fact, have been placing consumers at risk for decades by “knowingly allowing millions of Americans to eat seafood with unsafe levels of mercury.”
Photo courtesy of Clarita
Comments
Curious question: I have a food allergy to many types of fish and poutry but not Swordfish or Mahi Mahi—I also can eat shrimp/lobster but not crab?? What’s the deal—any ideas of common denominator? Mercury have anything to do with it???
Thanks, John
Hi John — I’m no medical expert, and this is really a question for you to take up with an allergist or some other medical professional. But from my layman’s perspective, I’d say it is unlikely that your seafood allergies are related to mercury in fish. For one thing, you say you can eat swordfish with no problem, and mercury concetrations tend to be higher in larger fish (such as swordfish), because they are higher on the ocean food chain and eat other fish that have eaten other fish, etc., so that the mercury content builds up. Might be a good idea to check with your doctor about this. There could well be some common denominator, but mercury probably isn’t it.
Why all this concern about fish when dentists are putting mercury fillings in peoples mouths every day.
Jim: Take a look at this web site:
http://www.toxicteeth.org/
I use to eat a lot of fish. But now I have cut back. I just don’t want to take the risk. I have been thinking of getting my omega-3 by pill form.
Donna A.
Yes, and how about all the mercury you get in a lot of the vaccinations that you and your children get. No one wants to own up to the toxic effect on children from these REQUIRED shots. DUH!!! If the stuff in fish is harmful, why not that in vaccines?
You can learn more about some of the dangers of mercury-based vaccines by reading this article: http://environment.about.com/od/earthtalkcolumns/a/autism.htm
This article is a little misleading in that in blames the mercury content of rivers and lakes solely on industrial processes. The earth belches millions of tons of mercury into the air every year from volcanoes and other natural processes. It exists in nature. In fact, mercury actually helps fish with buoyancy and in other ways.
As for its effect on humans, I’ll leave that up to the “scientists” to decide.