Hi, I’m Sofia and today I’m going to talk about fish
Recently, I was at a yoga studio, and when I was changing in the locker room,
all of a sudden I smelled a strong stench of fish.
It smelled really strong like tuna fish.
So I looked around to see where the smell was coming from and saw that the yoga teacher
who had just taught the class was opening up and eating a little can of tuna- just with
a fork straight out of the can.
She told me that she tries to always eat a little can of tuna fish
right after she teaches yoga.
She believes that’s pretty much the best thing she can do for her body.
And like her most people equate eating fish with doing something good for their health.
But is it really?
There are some very important considerations I think we need to keep in mind.
And these have to do both with some intrinsic characteristics of the fish themselves as
well as with some environmental issues of what the fish are exposed to.
Fish are frequently contaminated with things like mercury, PCB’s, dioxins, as well as
pesticides like DDT.
A recent study that sampled fish from around the world actually found that
84% of them had unsafe levels of mercury.
84% of them!
And what’s the problem with mercury?
Well, it’s a heavy metal that’s very difficult to eliminate from the body once it’s ingested.
It can cause problems depending on where it accumulates.
For example, it can accumulate in our nervous system
and cause a wide variety of neurologic problems.
Or, it can accumulate in the heart, in the actual heart muscle, and alter the
normal cardiac physiology and conduction.
And another highly concerning issue is that mercury can also cross the placenta barrier
in pregnant women and accumulate in the body of a developing fetus.
So it can cause nervous system damage or
other problems in the body of an unborn baby before it’s even born.
Fish today are also contaminated with a lot of plastic.
This wasn’t a problem 50 or 100 years ago, but now it is.
We have turned the oceans into nothing short of a plastic dump in the last few decades.
And now over 8 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year.
That’s the equivalent of more than 1,000 garbage trucks filled with plastic going into
the ocean every single day.
And all this plastic doesn’t go away either.
It just breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, which the fish eat, and
then people end up eating that plastic too when they eat fish
even though we don’t taste it, or see it, or smell it.
According to a recent study from the University of Belgium, seafood loving Europeans are estimated
to be eating about 11,000 tiny pieces of plastic per person per year.
The scary thing is we don’t really know how eating all this plastic
will affect human health.
We’re just now starting to study it.
In some fish however, we’ve seen plastic can cross cell membranes and accumulate in
the fish’s livers, brains and testicles, and cause problems with
their behavior, immune system, and reproduction.
And if it’s affecting fish, I don’t know how we can be so
comfortable that it’s not also going to affect us.
But moving on from environmental issues.
Let’s pretend I had a time machine and could go back in time 200 years or so and
could get a perfectly clean fish.
Would it be a heath food then?
Well it’s important to remind ourselves that even if we could hypothetically get
a perfectly uncontaminated fish, they are still animals.
And just like flesh of any other animal, fish contains animal protein.
But so what if it contains animal protein, right?
Well, animal protein contains a higher proportion of essential amino acids.
And when we eat animal protein - including that from fish - with that higher proportion
of essential amino acids, it causes our bodies to produce increased levels
of the hormone IGF-1, or insulin like growth factor one.
And IGF-1 stimulates cell division and growth and is associated with
increased cancer proliferation and malignancy.
The role of IGF-1 in cancer promotion is well understood and animal protein, including from
fish, is associated with increased circulating levels of this hormone and therefore is associated
with increased risk of cancer development.
While fish are frequently touted for containing long chain omega-3 fatty acids, it is
important to note that fish don’t produce omega-3 fatty acids.
They don’t make them themselves.
They get them from the plants they eat.
And we can easily get our omega-3s directly from plants
like nuts, seeds, and many vegetables.
And while some fish contain omega-3 fatty acids from the plants they eat, most of the
remaining fats in fish are saturated fats and cholesterol,
which are associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
For example, 3 ounces of sea bass has about 74 milligrams of cholesterol,
about the same as the 75 milligrams of cholesterol found in the same amount of beef.
And if that wasn’t enough, eating animal foods in general, including fish, increases
our levels of TMAO, which is a vasculotoxic substance that injures the lining of our blood
vessels and makes them more prone to develop atherosclerosis or to build up cholesterol
plaques in the blood vessels.
Not one single fish anywhere in the world contains even one gram of fiber, which in itself
makes it a poor choice as a health promoting food.
Fiber deficiencies are pretty ubiquitous in this country because most people don’t get
near enough fiber in their diet.
So when we eat fish, it displaces other more beneficial foods that we could be eating like
legumes or fruits or vegetables, that do have fiber along with
many other phytonutrients and antioxidants.
In some respects, fish has appeared to be less disadvantageous to health
than other animal foods like red meat.
But just because one food is less bad than another food that’s even worse,
it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a health food.
And in the case of fish, it’s not a health food for being less bad than red meat.
In conclusion, consumption of fish should not be encouraged from a health perspective
given not only it’s unacceptable levels of environmental contaminants like mercury,
dioxins, PCB’s and plastic fibers, but also because of the cholesterol and saturated fat
content, and the inherent increased cancer and cardiovascular risk associated with animal
protein in general due to IGF-1 and TMAO.
The ideal or "gold standard" diet from a health standpoint remains a whole food plant-based
diet, which means eating unprocessed, or minimally processed vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts,
fruits and seeds, while excluding animal foods like fish.
And this is a fortuitous fact too, because we are currently overfishing our oceans, and
in a big way.
The United Nations FAO publishes a report on the health of the world’s fisheries every
two years called the SOFIA Report.
And of course I remember this report very well, because my name is Sofia as well, but
the report actually stands for State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture,
and the last one had some very alarming figures --
reporting that a whopping 89.5% of fish stocks
are already "Fully Fished" or "Overfished".
This is totally unsustainable, no matter how you spin it.
Especially with our growing human population which is increasing by 1.5 million
people every single week.
So every week, we have 1.5 million new food eaters and plastic users, which make
all these matters even more challenging.
For those of us with access to food options, if we just stopped eating fish we could
end this unsustainable fishing assault on the ocean life.
And, of course, last but not least, the animals themselves would benefit.
Fish like any animal can and do feel pain.
Fishes may look different, with their adaptations for living in water.
They may not scream like a human, dog, or cow when they are hurt.
And we may not find them cuddly or as relatable, due to characteristics like not having eyelids,
which are not needed in water.
But fishes do have all the hallmarks of pain both physiologically and behaviorally.
For all these reasons, please leave fish or other animals off your plate.
For your own health, for the environment, and for the animals.