Mercury in fish.

The New York Times ran a scare piece earlier this week about high mercury levels in bluefin tuna found in NYC restaurants, focusing on sushi joints. Mercury in seafood is a significant environmental issue, no doubt, but TIME has an interesting interview with Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, who argues that the health benefits of eating the fish noted for higher levels of mercury outweigh the risk (to adults) of mercury exposure. He also says that varying the fish in your diet limits your risk of negative effects from mercury, and points out that the studies on cardiovascular damage from mercury have not produced consistent results. The best news: Eat all the salmon you want, as it’s high in omega-3 fatty acids and low in mercury. That’s my favorite type of sushi, so I’ll place a double order the next time I’m out for raw fish.

Comments

  1. I’m more of a crab man myself…I tried CRAB TEMPURA last week and it was divine. Dammit, now you’re giving me the urge to go out to Benihana and drop 60 bucks on sushi. Thank god the friend I’d always go with is at the other end of the country now.

  2. I’m not an expert on this but isn’t there a significant difference between mercury levels in farmed fish and wild fish? I’ve always wondered why sushi restauarants don’t specify.

  3. w/r/t the NYT mercury piece I was initially really upset and concerned as I eat sushi 3-4 times a week. However I then realized they are really only discussing Blue Fin Tuna, as the problem is a product of large fish being higher on the food chain. Yellow fin tuna is much smaller in size.

    This means that the actual mercury risk from eating your average piece of tuna is quite low. Blue fin is VERY expensive and the menu/server almost always states what it is. Most of us arent eating blue fin, I only get it once or twice a month if I am lucky.

    It really was a scare piece.

    Naveed: When it comes to salmon it is a safe bet that unless they say it is wild (and charge accordingly) it is farmed. Of course the NYT also did a sampling a couple years ago of “wild” salmon from various purveyors and found that the majority was actually farmed.

    One way you can often tell is that wild salmon is often a much darker hue, and more pink then orange.

  4. This is the NYT article that samples wild salmon from various purveyors and finds that it is quite often actually farmed.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/dining/10salmon.html?scp=19&sq=wild+salmon&st=nyt

  5. I don’t think there is such a thing as farmed yellowfin or bluefin tuna. I could be wrong.

    Color isn’t always the best indicator on salmon. Salmon farmers add a colorant to the feed (much as chicken farmers use marigold) to darken the resulting flesh.

    I don’t know about you all, but when I have sushi, I order several different kinds, which, according to the TIME article, is a good way to limit mercury exposure. Plus the worst offenders for mercury are shark, sword, mackerel, and certain types of tuna. I’ve never seen the first two as sushi, and I don’t care for raw mackerel anyway.

  6. Very cool, Jason. I wonder if they’ll also offer lower mercury content; as I recall, some of the mercury in the water isn’t the result of human activity.

  7. Actually there is farmed bluefin although they are just starting to get the hang of doing it. Most operations don’t cultivate the fish from eggs. Instead they capture schools of smaller bluefin and take them to netted pens where they are fed controlled diets to maximize fat content. This is in many ways the Kobe of Tuna.

    There are operations begining to get the hang of cultivating the Tuna from fry to slaughter, but they are still in their infancy.

    Here is an article on it from 2005:

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6189975.stm

  8. This company in Australia is also looking at commercially farming tuna http://www.cleanseastuna.com.au/cs_company1.htm and has just received a big investment from John West.

  9. I know that many people are against farming fish for environmental and health reasons, but I for one think it is a great thing. I can’t not eat salmon or tuna and I also can’t accept a world where their wild populations collapse.

    Look at what happened to Atlantic Cod. The population has been decimated and it is not recovering.

  10. Keith ~ unrelated ~ with a pending trade between Seattle and Baltimore on the table, I got to talking with a friend of mine who thinks that Seattle would be giving up too much. I tend to agree with him (kind of), if only because it still doesn’t make the Mariners good enough. It’s probably a good trade in terms of value, but not for a team like the M’s who don’t have a 4th OF that they can plug out there every day.

    Anyway, we got to talking about Adam Jones’ service time. He’s played for 2 years, but I read that he still has 6 arbitration years left. What are the rules on that? How many games or at bats would he have needed for his clock to start? Or was I mis-informed and he really only has 4 arb years left?