It's funny, because I saw the clip on the Today Show, and the correspondent even admitted that the study was linked to funding from the fisheries, but I think I remember her brushing it off. That raised a lot of red flags for me, but I wonder how many people are going to go gorge on fish now that "they" told them it's okay? It seemed too good to be true, since I sure do love me some fish.

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this is a PERFECT example of how our "news" is really more just a regurgitation of public relations propaganda.

The study is flawed and biased from the start and no REAL journalist could miss that. Of course our news media eats it up cuz there are no REAL journalists anymore.

I worked in local media for years. The PR firms simply took over and started providing so much "free" video to stations that real news got pushed to the side.

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Fish is good for the brain.

Mercury is bad for the brain.

What's the balance ???

This was the article I read on it;
http://www.cbc.ca/cp/HealthScout/071005/6100502AU.html

Well, since the concentration of mercury goes up further up the foodchain, small fishes?

Damnit, we really need to get those mercury out of the ocean. ...and the plastic...and the oil...and all the other crap. Captain Nemo is spinning very fast in his grave right now.

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Fish, like all other animals, are sentient beings, capable of experiencing pain. Eating lower on the food chain causes far less ecological damage.

Half the water consumed in the U. S., for example, goes to irrigate land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water are also used to wash away their excrement. In fact, U. S. livestock produce twenty times as much excrement as does the entire human population, creating sewage which is ten to several hundred times more concentrated than raw domestic sewage.

Animal wastes cause ten times more water pollution than does the U. S. human population; the meat industry causes three times as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined.

Meat producers are the number one industrial polluters in our nation, contributing to half the water pollution in the United States. The water that goes into a thousand-pound steer could float a destroyer.

It takes twenty-five gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, but twenty-five hundred gallons to produce a pound of meat. If these costs weren't subsidized by the American taxpayers, hamburger meat would be $35 per pound!

The burden of subsidizing the California meat industry costs taxpayers $24 billion annually. Livestock producers are California's biggest consumers of water. Every tax dollar the state doles out to livestock producers costs taxpayers over seven dollars in lost wages, higher living costs and reduced business income. Seventeen western states have enough water supplies to support economies and populations twice as large as the present.

Overgrazing of cattle leads to topsoil erosion, turning once-arable land into desert. We lose four million acres of topsoil each year and eighty-five percent of this loss is directly caused by raising livestock. To replace the soil we've lost, we're destroying our forests. Since 1967, the rate of deforestation in the U. S. has been one acre every five seconds. For each acre cleared in urbanization, seven are cleared for grazing or growing livestock feed.

One-third of all raw materials in the U. S. are consumed by the livestock industry and it takes thrice as much fossil fuel energy to produce meat than it does to produce plant foods. A report on the energy crisis in Scientific American warned: "The trends in meat consumption and energy consumption are on a collision course."

Nor can fish provide any help here. There are signs that the fishing industry (which is quite energy-intensive) has already overfished the oceans in several areas. And fish could never play a major role in the worlds diet anyway: the entire global fish catch of the world, if divided among all the world's inhabitants would amount to only a few ounces of fish per person per week.

Obviously, then, the idea of providing the entire world with a Western-style diet is quite absurd. But what about satisfying today's demand for meat--which provides only a fraction of the population with a Western-style diet?

If the world population triples in the next 100 years, then meat production would have to triple as well. Instead of 3.7 billion acres of cropland and 7.5 billion acres of grazing land, we would require 11.1 billion acres of cropland and 22.5 billion acres of grazing land.

But this is slightly larger than the total land area of the six inhabited continents! We are desperately short of forests, water and energy already. Even if we resort to extreme methods of population control: abortion, infanticide, genocide, etc...modest increases in the world population would make it impossible to maintain current levels of meat consumption. On a vegetarian or vegan diet, however, the world could easily support a population several times its present size.

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Significant environmental damage results from livestock agriculture, the fishing industry, etc. often driving many other species into extinction.

The extinction of the passenger pigeon was caused by the American westward expansion in the second half of the 19th century. As passenger pigeons became a popular food item, the numbers of this species rapidly diminished. Millions were slaughtered each year and shipped by railway cars to be sold in city markets. Another bird to become extinct because of its use as food was the heath hen, which became extinct about 1932.

The pacific sardine lives along the coasts of North America from Alaska to southern California. Sardines, once a major part of the California fishing industry, are now considered to be "commercially extinct."

Another species classified as "commercially extinct" is the New England haddock. Ecologists have also been concerned about the significant reduction in finfish, the Atlantic bluefin tuna, Lake Erie cisco, and blackfins that inhabit Lakes Huron and Michigan.

More than 200,000 porpoises are killed every year by fishermen seeking tuna in the Pacific. Sea turtles are similarly killed in Caribbean shrimp operations.

Some animals are killed because, as natural carnivores, they compete with the human predator for the right to kill other animals for food, including wild game and domesticated species raised by livestock ranchers. Alaskan hunters are eager to reduce the wolf population in their state because this animal is a predator of moose.

Cougars, coyotes and wolves are considered a menace to the cattle and sheep industries, and livestock ranchers have engaged in a large-scale campaign to exterminate them. Two species of wolves are now endangered, and very few wolves can be found in the United States except in Alaska and northeastern Minnesota.

The relatively small number of eagles in the U.S. is largely due to the destruction of this species by livestock ranchers, particularly those in the sheep business.

Herbivorous animals that inhabit rangeland areas are also killed by the livestock industry because they compete with cattle arid sheep for food. Large numbers of kangaroos are being exterminated in Australia, while in the United States livestock ranchers seek to destroy wild horses, wild burros, deer, elk, antelope and prairie dogs.

An ever-increasing amount of beef eaten in the United States is imported from Central and South America. To provide pasture for cattle, these countries have been clearing their priceless tropical rainforests.

In 1960, when the U. S. first began to import beef, Central America was blessed with 130,000 square miles of rainforest. But now, less than 80,000 square miles remain. At this rate, the entire tropical rainforests of Central America will be gone in another forty years.

These tropical rainforests are among the world's most precious natural resources. Amounting to only 30 percent of the world's forests, the rainforests contain 80 percent of the earth's land vegetation, and account for a substantial percentage of the earth's oxygen supplies.

These forests are the oldest ecosystems on earth and have developed extreme ecological richness. Half of all species on earth live in the moist tropical rainforests. But these jewels of nature are being rapidly destroyed to provide land on which cattle can be grazed for the American fast-food market.

The current rate of species extinction is 1,000 species a year, and most of that is due to the destruction of rainforests and related habitats in the tropics.

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of just how degenerate corporate America has become, and how urgently it needs to be replaced, that is IF people really want to save themselves from death by ecocide.

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You actually should get your facts straight before you publish material like this. Most fish we eat are high in selenium which has been shown to disable any negative impacts of mercury contained in most fish we eat, including all the tunas. Also, albacore tuna -- so called white meat tuna -- comes from at least two different sources. About 20-25% is U.S. troll caught albacore which has been tested for the last several years and has never been found to exceed even the strictest mercury advisories -- This is younger, smaller fish than the other 70% or so, most of which comes from foreign caught long line albacore which while still safe to eat has been shown to carry higher mercury levels and less omega-3 fatty acids (which are good for everything from brain development, to heart disease, to depression). Long lines, as a gear type often have some interaction with sea turtles. It is for this reason that NRDC, Turtle Island Restoration Network, and other marine mammal concerned organizations are scaring the American public into thinking they will be harmed by mercury in tuna. There has never been a recorded case in the history of the U.S. of a person getting mercury poisoning from fish caught on the high seas as all the tuna are caught.

Going after funding sources is a cheap and shabby way of discrediting otherwise robust science. No 'fishy money'
backed any of the research. National Fisheries Institute merely paid to help publicize this information, which can scarcely taint the value of the research itself. Indeed, given its public education mandate, NFI would be remiss were it not to make every effort to publicize this information. I hope we can all look forward to the recently announced University of Washington studies which will ask many of the same questions about nutrition and child development.

Put another way, should we not believe anything on NPR because it accepts huge grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts?

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Remember a month or so ago when 192 fisheries were quarantined because of the China pet food/ live stock feed scandal?
A week after that I read in major media news that 2 (two) fisheries were found free of contamination. Period.
I always wondered about the safety of eating fish from the 190 others.
Haven’t eaten fish since.

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Chicago Tribune on "Mercury Menace."

This link is also good and informative.

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Women can boost their intake of omega-3 fatty acids without risking the health of their babies or themselves by eating flaxseed oil, nuts, and leafy green vegetables or by taking vegetarian supplements.

These nutritious food sources are not only good for people, they don't support the cruel, environmentally-devastating fishing industry.

www.FishingHurts.com has some fascinating information.

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Seafood is the number one cause of food poisoning in the United States, due to our polluted waterways. Our water, like it or not, is full of human and animal feces, and this waste carries dangerous bacteria like E. coli. So when we eat fish, we are risking contraction of an illness that can make us really sick, or even kill us.

If this wasn't enough of a reason to stop eating seafood, fish flesh stores contaminants, such as PCBs, which cause liver damage, nervous system disorders, and fetal damage; dioxins, also linked to cancer; radioactive substances like strontium 90; and other dangerous contaminants like cadmium, mercury, lead, chromium, and arsenic, which can cause health problems imcluding impared mental development.

The fact is that anyone can get all our necessary vitamins and supplements that others get from fish by taking multi-vitamins not derived from fish.

My solution? Go vegetarian.

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The health risks of eating fish are enough to give anyone second thoughts. Many studies have shown how predator fish like salmon and tuna accumulate toxins such as mercury, lead, arsenic, and PCBs. Rather than trying to determine the minimum safe level for these toxins in my body, I find it easier to not eat fish, and to get my omega-3s from non-toxic sources like flax seeds.

The environmental reasons for not eating fish are equally compelling. Commercial fishing has devastated the biodiversity of ocean habitats. Populations of large fish have been reduced to a mere 10 percent of what they were in the 1950s, and a recent report in the journal Science projects that commercial fisheries will collapse by the year 2050. The commercial fishing practice of sweeping the ocean with massive nets destroys entire ecosystems, wiping out non-food fish species and coral reefs. Sadly, because this environmental disaster happens under the ocean surface, it doesn’t get the media attention that more camera-accessible crises do.

Whether you do it for your health or you do it to help the planet, consider eliminating fish from your diet.

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And not just for your life, but for the lives of all those living beings, who are unfortunate enough to be raised for food. The media is filled with the meat and dairy industry propoganda, and now the fishing industry is getting into the act. It's time for everyone to adopt a healthy vegan diet, free of all animal products. It's good for your health, it's good for the environment, and it's certainly good for the animals.

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