Fish-eating Horror Stories

While reading something else on the internet a couple of days ago, a photo caught my eye in an unrelated link - a fish, with the headline "10 Fish You Should Never Eat."
     Most of them were species we don't really eat much of in this country, like shark and Spanish mackerel. Then they proceeded to blacken the reputation of albacore tuna, swordfish, orange roughy and Chilean sea bass. Their reasoning wasn't all because of health risk to humans, but because of diminishing supplies of the species. I'll get to that later.
     On the same day that I saw this scare story about fish, I received an email from an on-line health publication with the following information:

A new medical study of over 77,000 subjects has shown the huge benefit of adding fish to a vegetarian diet - pesco-vegetarianism. The study indicates that those vegetarians who also eat fish might have a better health benefits than vegetarians who keep it strictly green.

     "We weren't expecting the pesco-vegetarians to show the lowest risk," explains Dr. Michael Orlich, assistant professor of medicine and public health with Loma Linda University. "But the finding for pesco-vegetarians, compared with non-vegetarians, was highly statistically significant, so this is very unlikely to be due to chance."

      "All vegetarians together had on average a 22 percent reduction in the risk of developing colorectal cancer, compared with non-vegetarians," he said. In terms of individual cancers, that equated to a 19 percent lower risk for colon cancer and a 29 percent lower risk for rectal cancer, the researchers found.

      Pesco-vegetarians enjoyed a 43 percent reduction in risk of colorectal cancers compared with non-vegetarians. For vegans and lacto-ovo vegetarians the risk fell 16 percent to 18 percent, while semi-vegetarians had an 8 percent lower risk, according to the study findings. 
   
      Cardiologists want us all to eat fish a couple times of week, and now this study shows that your gut can benefit greatly from a largely fish and vegetable diet as well.  The fact that some fish have trace amounts of mercury is a smoke screen - I strongly believe that fish stories like the one I saw are put there by meat industry PR people. Many scientific studies have shown that red meat contributes to heart disease and when charred is a known carcinogen - how many scare stories do you see about that? How many "10 Red Meats You Should Never Eat" articles?
     Every actual scientific study of the effects of eating a healthy diet that includes fish several times a week shows it to be beneficial, to heart health, your eye sight, your memory, your digestive tract - can't really think of a body part that it's not good for. As I've noted before, cultures which consume a diet rich in vegetables and seafood have the greatest longevity.
     Moral: listen to the science and ignore the scare stories that have no scientific basis.

As far as conserving species - we agree with limiting the catch on certain species, and we never sell anything that is truly endangered, like blue fin tuna or beluga caviar. While Chili bass is endangered in some fisheries, it is not in others. We only buy legally caught Chili bass. There are people who rely on selling their catch to support their families. However, there are fishing boats off the coast of South America catching these fish in areas where they aren't supposed to fish.  If you only buy from reliable fish sellers who know where their fish comes from, it's OK to eat. And it's delicious.