I hate to be one of those people demanding sources, but I'm wondering where I can find someone who's carefully weighed the evidence.
The article does mention that smaller fish often found canned are lower in the food chain and thus have less mercury, but I would think that you'd have to look carefully at each species, and the sourcing, and the packaging before you could really say the health benefits are worth it.
My understanding is, that while fish consumption is correlated with better health, the supposed effects of omega-3 fats in observational studies are not proven in controlled studies with omega 3 supplements (https://www.cochrane.org/news/new-cochrane-health-evidence-c...)
Omega-3 doesn't refer to just one thing. Most plant sources of omega-3 are ALA which your body needs to convert to EPA and DHA. Your body isn't very good at making DHA so it is useful to get it directly from your diet. Fish are a good source of DHA.
People get concerned about the toxicity of fish, yet the air they breathe in the polluted city they live it does far more harm than a food can ever do. Not to mention smokers, but the rates of smokers with health concerns about food has been going down, anecdotally speaking.
Seafood is very healthy, the populations that eat a lot of seafood are very healthy, the stories about heavy metals or plastics are blown out of proportion and the toxicity claims is not supported by evidence.
I'm actually far more concerned about the preservation of wild life, with wild fish populations (such as tuna) going down due to over-consumption. I actually seek farmed fish — the omega 3 content might be lower, but the benefits of omega 3 are probably overblown too.
So there might actually be some benefits to the fearmongering, even if irrational ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>People get concerned about the toxicity of fish, yet the air they breathe in the polluted city they live it does far more harm than a food can ever do.
I could see this being a possibility for many Asian countries, but I'm skeptical that this would be true for the US and Europe. Do you have any sources?
Maybe I wasn't clear, but I was asking for a source regarding the claim that air pollution affects humans more than the food they consume (specifically based on location). That website is just some data of current air pollution.
>CO2 is what we breathe out and it’s what plants breathe in.
Regardless of the effects of CO2, that's quite possibly the most inaccurate and unscientific argument I've ever heard on this subject. Humans breathing has never caused an excessive amount of CO2, so drawing any relation of our byproducts to the effects of CO2 generated from manufacturing, energy and transportation industries is absurd.
"human excrements have a net null effect on global warming, as they are offset by carbon fixation in photosynthesis. As a result, they do not contribute to increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere."
The word pollution was mentioned. You may say concentration of CO2 contributes to warming, but it’s not pollution. Pollution: “the introduction of harmful substances or products into the environment.”
No, you're attempting change the subject to argue semantics instead of addressing my response to your claim that "CO2 is what we breathe out and it’s what plants breathe in" has any significance in the overall CO2 volume produced. Do you acknowledge that humans exhaling produces a fraction of the CO2 generated by manufacturing, energy and travel industries? If not, why? Here's the link to the study from my previous comment. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101102131108.h...
To humor you, I'll also show why your attempt at a second argument to be incorrect, regarding what constitutes pollution
>Pollution: “the introduction of harmful substances or products into the environment.”
I'll just assume you have a misunderstanding what pollution is rather than you purposely omitting details. Pollution can be literally anything introduced that changes the environment: "Pollution can take the form of chemical substances or energy, such as noise, heat or light"[1]. Were you aware of light pollution[2] and noise pollution[3]? We've already established that there is an imbalance of CO2 voume created by many large industries. If noise and light can have polluting affects, why can't CO2?
While I completely agree. I think the author could have made a much stronger argument. And whenever I try canned fish from Europe, it's far better than the American brand.
I recently discovered this and cannot get enough of it. I'm trying to find a good place to purchase it (at a reasonable price) in the USA though. Damn tasty!
Canned tuna is usually Skipjack, which is still considered sustainable in most places vs the rate of fishing.
Many other species of Tuna are threatened.
So it’s hard to talk about “Tuna” as being threatened or not threatened as it varies wildly.
The statement “the vast majority of tuna stocks are healthy” I guess could mean anything. Are they healthy because the vast majority that are left now that we fished out a few species are Skipjack?
It’s indeed a statement to be skeptical about. You can bend it to be trueish while at the same time saying “the vast majority of tuna species are threatened”. Glass half empty or half full.
Fish always freaks me out, because I don't know how to handle it.
Take oil sardines with the starry eyes. Am I supposed to eat the sardine whole, with head, eyes and tailfin? Am I supposed to bite the head off and spit it out? Cut it off?
It's so basic and I feel like an idiot, but I really have no idea.
There are books and YouTube videos that explain how to prepare food. A couple of personal favourites are Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child et al, and the Roux Brothers BBC series (on YouTube).
These things have to be learnt just like anything else.
Search seems to indicate that Julia Child, like everyone else, takes it as a given that you already know which parts of the sardine can be eaten. Your condescension is noted but not very helpful.
A few years back I wrote this: https://yozy.net/2012/11/smelly-spread/ and still do the same thing all the time. Just mix the sardines with butter and onions, and smash it all together with a fork. Oil, fins, heads...
Ok. You should trust me on this matter because I'm Portuguese. The first thing you need to know is to that in Portugal there is special fish cutlery. There is a special knife. You don’t need it but it helps.
Eating fish takes a lot of skill and practice but the basic procedure is to remove the skin from the grilled fish with ultra care using a fork and knife. This will be very hard at first. It’s a skill.
Then remove whatever is left of the lungs.
You are left with the head, the white meat around the fish bone and the fin.
You will now just pick on the meat and eat it.
In the end you are left with a head, a fish bone and a fin. These 3 should still be connected and intact.
Sardines are the hardest because you will have to do it for 6 to 10 sardines (6 is the minimum acceptable portion).
Start with a big fish like a sea bass or something similar.
Commercial fishing is not good. Do some research to find the many reasons.
Plastic is not something you want to eat, and fish have increasing amounts of plastic in them.
Same goes for Mercury. Sardines (and probably anchovies) don't have much, but other larger fish do.
Were it not for these problems, then I too would advocate good canned sardines for health. They have higher calcium per weight than any other food or drink. They have a good amount of protein, and of course they have the omega oils.
But the current state of things is such that it would be wise to reduce consumption, not increase it.
> they calculated that if 100,000 people ate farmed salmon twice a week for 70 years, the extra PCB intake could potentially cause 24 extra deaths from cancer—but would prevent at least 7,000 deaths from heart disease
That's the important part. I was eating tuna it pretty much every day for about a year until I found out that it was dangerous. They don't even have warnings on the can. Tony Robbins fried his brain doing that[0]. Still just hoping that I didn't do any damage to myself.
The fishing industry lobbies have sued the FDA and other health organisations around the world to prevent then from requiring warnings on the label, and to get them to change the maximum PPM levels:
> However, the fishing industry sued FDA, arguing that the economic impacts of the standard were likely to be too severe. A court agreed, and FDA had to revise the Action Level, raising it to 1.0 ppm, the current level.[1]
> Scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimate that as many as 600,000 babies are born each year at risk of neurological and developmental problems because their mothers have high blood mercury levels from fish consumption.[2]
If people are going to eat meat (a couple of times a week), then fish is probably the way to go. Small fish, that is. But microalgal omega-3 EPA/DHA has all the benefits and none of the mercury/microplastics/environmental/ethical concerns. Less than a dollar a day[0], and the price continues to fall.
But has it been double-blinded clinically verified to be as bioavailable as the omega-3 compounds from consuming very fresh canned sardine/anchovies? And, supplements aren't regulated in the US, you really have no idea what's in them and no idea about proper dosage. Supplements in the US are generally a popular, expensive scam with little or zero evidence to back them up.
You also might want to watch The Fish on My Plate, a Michael Pollan-like documentary, because the evidence points to taking fish oil pills in sufficient quantities to have a clinically-significant effect would risk cardiovascular dysfunction and metabolic issues long beforehand, and how, anecdotally, eating small, wild-caught, heavy-metals-free fish on a near-daily basis seems like the best approach without more data. They also go into detail about the horrors of fish farming, pros/cons of wild-caught.
So what’s the alternative? Beef? Chicken? Pork? Vegetarian?
Every one of these has significant downsides to them (for you vegetarians out there, the phosphorous that leeches into the runoff is huge, affecting the ecosystem in ways we still don’t understand).
I get every point you make, but honestly, what is the real alternative?
Most vegetables are grown for lifestock food, so I don't think that's valid concern about vegetarianism.
If you eat a lot of meat, then you have all the vegetarian concerns you can come up with plus all the concerns directly tied to meat plus the rest of the indirect concerns.
If you remove all the meat from the world’s food supply, you’re going to have to make up for a lot of bulk as well as protein. So you will still be growing lots of plants. And those plants will be fertilized.
> the phosphorous that leeches into the runoff is huge
Can you please expand on this? Animal agriculture is the primary cause of ocean dead-zones (due to fertilizer + manure run-off).[0] Because you're still eating plants - it's just that you're filtering them through another animal, and thus removing the vast majority of the calories, protein, and other nutrients that you would have got if you'd directly consumed the plants.
I don't think there's any debate on the relative environmental impact of a plant-based diet versus one that includes meat and dairy. It wins in terms of pollution, land usage, water usage, and basically every other metric.[1][2][3]
We all (should) know what happens when overfishing occurs. [0]
There's a balance between doing what's optimal for individual health and what can be sustained. Unfortunately, I don't know of any better or equal omega-3 source because plant-based and fish oil capsules are demonstrably inferior. Canned, sustainable-quotaed, wild-caught, extremely fresh sardines and anchovies caught around South America are precisely what were recommended by the documentary The Fish on My Plate. The amount of bioavailable omega-3 content in them is significantly higher than fish oil pills, and was confirmed with blood tests. The thing is, in order to have a clinical impact requires consuming several servings per week or everyday would be a minimum amount.
I think it's pointless diet-shaming and nibbling around the edges to demand everyone become strictly vegan when better alternatives and mixes exist that can improve health.
0. Monterery Sardine Story Richard H. Parrish (2000)
Sardines seem consistently not to fall into your objections. Because they are low on the food chain, they don't have the same mercury and plastic issues as larger fish. I also have not seen strong evidence that they're in any danger from current fishing practices or that it is significantly impacting its predators. Sardines are pretty great
As a kid my Dad introduced us to sardines while hiking. Friends always thought my brother and I were crazy when cracking open a can at the summit of whatever peak we just climbed, until they try one and realize that nothing else they have packed for their own lunch will now satisfy their newfound craving for oily fish. I don't know why, but it works.
Did I miss something or was his only argument why we should eat it is that he likes it? He says its not that bad for you, but it's not really good for you, it's not that expensive, although it's far from cheap. it's not that gross eating bones and eyeballs and shit after you get used to it, but it is until then. None of these at all imply we should eat it.
62 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadThe article does mention that smaller fish often found canned are lower in the food chain and thus have less mercury, but I would think that you'd have to look carefully at each species, and the sourcing, and the packaging before you could really say the health benefits are worth it.
The author goes into lot of detail.
TLDR 1. Eat small fish like Sardines, Mackerel, Anchovies etc
2. Get your omega 3 index
https://omegaquant.com/
3. Make sure your omega 3 to omega 6 is good
There's a lot of options -- salmon (I personally have salmon sushi at least twice a week), omega-3 supplements, a dozen other healthy foods.
(For any readers who haven’t tried a great sardine, look for Matiz, La Gondola, any Portuguese brand, or in France, Rödel.)
Seafood is very healthy, the populations that eat a lot of seafood are very healthy, the stories about heavy metals or plastics are blown out of proportion and the toxicity claims is not supported by evidence.
I'm actually far more concerned about the preservation of wild life, with wild fish populations (such as tuna) going down due to over-consumption. I actually seek farmed fish — the omega 3 content might be lower, but the benefits of omega 3 are probably overblown too.
So there might actually be some benefits to the fearmongering, even if irrational ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I could see this being a possibility for many Asian countries, but I'm skeptical that this would be true for the US and Europe. Do you have any sources?
Regardless of the effects of CO2, that's quite possibly the most inaccurate and unscientific argument I've ever heard on this subject. Humans breathing has never caused an excessive amount of CO2, so drawing any relation of our byproducts to the effects of CO2 generated from manufacturing, energy and transportation industries is absurd.
"human excrements have a net null effect on global warming, as they are offset by carbon fixation in photosynthesis. As a result, they do not contribute to increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101102131108.h...
To humor you, I'll also show why your attempt at a second argument to be incorrect, regarding what constitutes pollution
>Pollution: “the introduction of harmful substances or products into the environment.”
I'll just assume you have a misunderstanding what pollution is rather than you purposely omitting details. Pollution can be literally anything introduced that changes the environment: "Pollution can take the form of chemical substances or energy, such as noise, heat or light"[1]. Were you aware of light pollution[2] and noise pollution[3]? We've already established that there is an imbalance of CO2 voume created by many large industries. If noise and light can have polluting affects, why can't CO2?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pollution
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_pollution
[1] https://www.kingoscar.com/where-to-buy/
Many other species of Tuna are threatened.
So it’s hard to talk about “Tuna” as being threatened or not threatened as it varies wildly.
The statement “the vast majority of tuna stocks are healthy” I guess could mean anything. Are they healthy because the vast majority that are left now that we fished out a few species are Skipjack?
It’s indeed a statement to be skeptical about. You can bend it to be trueish while at the same time saying “the vast majority of tuna species are threatened”. Glass half empty or half full.
Take oil sardines with the starry eyes. Am I supposed to eat the sardine whole, with head, eyes and tailfin? Am I supposed to bite the head off and spit it out? Cut it off?
It's so basic and I feel like an idiot, but I really have no idea.
These things have to be learnt just like anything else.
https://books.google.com/books?id=ukkVAwAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...
Eating fish takes a lot of skill and practice but the basic procedure is to remove the skin from the grilled fish with ultra care using a fork and knife. This will be very hard at first. It’s a skill.
Then remove whatever is left of the lungs.
You are left with the head, the white meat around the fish bone and the fin.
You will now just pick on the meat and eat it.
In the end you are left with a head, a fish bone and a fin. These 3 should still be connected and intact.
Sardines are the hardest because you will have to do it for 6 to 10 sardines (6 is the minimum acceptable portion).
Start with a big fish like a sea bass or something similar.
Good luck
Commercial fishing is not good. Do some research to find the many reasons.
Plastic is not something you want to eat, and fish have increasing amounts of plastic in them.
Same goes for Mercury. Sardines (and probably anchovies) don't have much, but other larger fish do.
Were it not for these problems, then I too would advocate good canned sardines for health. They have higher calcium per weight than any other food or drink. They have a good amount of protein, and of course they have the omega oils.
But the current state of things is such that it would be wise to reduce consumption, not increase it.
Interesting tidbit from the article.
That's the important part. I was eating tuna it pretty much every day for about a year until I found out that it was dangerous. They don't even have warnings on the can. Tony Robbins fried his brain doing that[0]. Still just hoping that I didn't do any damage to myself.
The fishing industry lobbies have sued the FDA and other health organisations around the world to prevent then from requiring warnings on the label, and to get them to change the maximum PPM levels:
> However, the fishing industry sued FDA, arguing that the economic impacts of the standard were likely to be too severe. A court agreed, and FDA had to revise the Action Level, raising it to 1.0 ppm, the current level.[1]
> Scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimate that as many as 600,000 babies are born each year at risk of neurological and developmental problems because their mothers have high blood mercury levels from fish consumption.[2]
[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/are-there-toxic-heavy-metals-...
[1] http://mercuryfactsandfish.org/mercury-facts/the-fda-action-...
[2] https://e360.yale.edu/features/a_call_for_tougher_standards_...
[0] https://www.vegetology.com/shop/opti3-omega-3-epa-dha
You also might want to watch The Fish on My Plate, a Michael Pollan-like documentary, because the evidence points to taking fish oil pills in sufficient quantities to have a clinically-significant effect would risk cardiovascular dysfunction and metabolic issues long beforehand, and how, anecdotally, eating small, wild-caught, heavy-metals-free fish on a near-daily basis seems like the best approach without more data. They also go into detail about the horrors of fish farming, pros/cons of wild-caught.
Every one of these has significant downsides to them (for you vegetarians out there, the phosphorous that leeches into the runoff is huge, affecting the ecosystem in ways we still don’t understand).
I get every point you make, but honestly, what is the real alternative?
If you eat a lot of meat, then you have all the vegetarian concerns you can come up with plus all the concerns directly tied to meat plus the rest of the indirect concerns.
For example grazing livestock using hilly land that only grows small grasses.
Can you please expand on this? Animal agriculture is the primary cause of ocean dead-zones (due to fertilizer + manure run-off).[0] Because you're still eating plants - it's just that you're filtering them through another animal, and thus removing the vast majority of the calories, protein, and other nutrients that you would have got if you'd directly consumed the plants.
I don't think there's any debate on the relative environmental impact of a plant-based diet versus one that includes meat and dairy. It wins in terms of pollution, land usage, water usage, and basically every other metric.[1][2][3]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/01/meat-ind...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
[2] https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49238749
There's a balance between doing what's optimal for individual health and what can be sustained. Unfortunately, I don't know of any better or equal omega-3 source because plant-based and fish oil capsules are demonstrably inferior. Canned, sustainable-quotaed, wild-caught, extremely fresh sardines and anchovies caught around South America are precisely what were recommended by the documentary The Fish on My Plate. The amount of bioavailable omega-3 content in them is significantly higher than fish oil pills, and was confirmed with blood tests. The thing is, in order to have a clinical impact requires consuming several servings per week or everyday would be a minimum amount.
I think it's pointless diet-shaming and nibbling around the edges to demand everyone become strictly vegan when better alternatives and mixes exist that can improve health.
0. Monterery Sardine Story Richard H. Parrish (2000)
https://swfsc.noaa.gov/publications/CR/2000/2000ParrR2.pdf
Also mostly per serving, not per gram. You can buy fish and meat without packaging that weighs as much as a sardine can.