Some vegetarians might claim that fish are friends not food, I am not one of them.
But what if our fishy friends are actually poisoning us?
Hey guys, Julia here for DNews
Thanks to recent trends like the mediterranean diet, fishy meals are having their heyday.
Fish seems to be the perfect healthy food, since they’re packed with omega-3s, which
could be good for the heart and some claim it’s great brain food too.
Buuuut there’s always a problem in paradise.
Eating too much fish, might cause a buildup of mercury.
Mercury builds up in the bodies of smaller fish, which gets eaten by bigger fish, so
the mercury builds up there, and then THAT fish is eaten by even bigger fish so they
get even more mercury… and so on up the food chain, this process is called bioaccumulation.
So mercury bioaccumulates in bigger fish like shark or swordfish, which wind up with pretty
big doses of the toxin.
But even more common fish like tuna and salmon can accumulate decent doses too.
For most people this isn’t a problem, the benefits from fish far outweigh any negatives.
But mercury exposure in pregnant women could harm the brain and nervous system of a developing
fetus.
Exposure might be linked to ADHD issues in their children, according to one study published
in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
and the FDA recommends that pregnant and breastfeeding women avoid eating shark, tilefish, swordfish
and king mackerel, fish with the highest levels of mercury.
They also recommended limiting consumption of albacore tuna to six ounces per week.
So where does all that mercury come from?
It is a natural element found throughout the environment.
Some scientists think that it could be coming from hydrothermal vents.
But it’s much more likely it’s thanks to human activity.
We produce a lot of heavy metal waste from power plants and manufacturing industries.
While some safeguards are in place, some facilities have serious leaks or disposal issues.
So heavy metals like mercury get released into the air and then find their way into
water systems and head out to sea.
There, the toxin builds up in fish, which turn the mercury into a toxic form, methylmercury.
According to the EPA “Nearly all fish and shellfish contain traces of methylmercury”.
Other animals are affected too, like coral.
Corals are really good at filtering out these heavy metals from the water, unfortunately,
this can also harm them.
Just small amounts can kill them.
But their deaths may not be in vain!
Corals have given inspiration to a group of Chinese scientists.
These researchers describe their new coral inspired material in the Journal of Colloid
and Interface Science.
They made aluminum oxide nanoplates, which have proved themselves to be pretty good removals
of pollutants in past research, but not ideal.
So the researchers created their nanoplates to mimic coral’s structure and the way that
they curl.
By making a structure that’s porus like coral it increases the surface area of the
coral, making it absorb all that nastiness so much better!
So that could be a cool biomimicry solution in the future - well, that along with green
energy and manufacturing solutions that keep the oceans from being polluted in the first
place.
But for now, the FDA recommends eating at least two meals a week which include fish,
just not any of the large species like swordfish.
But what about farmed fish - is that a good alternative or not?
Trace explores that question in this video