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>> My name is Aimee Lambert.
[Background music] Okay, Anna, we're going to make brownies, okay?
>> Yeah.
>> I have 2 daughters.
Anna who's 2 and a half and Beatrice is 6 months.
We try to have most everything homemade in our home
and not have processed things coming into our home.
Can you take the shell out and put it in the sink?
My husband is Jeremy Lew.
>> We're trying to get my 2-year-old to like fish.
>> Okay, we can talk about fish.
[Background music] I associate mercury dangerous with fish.
>> There seem to be more harmful compounds in the things we eat
and drink everyday and that suddenly a concern.
>> Happy careful dad.
>> I am being careful.
>> Fish contain mercury and mercury is a toxin.
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>> It's hard to know whether it's harmful or not in the levels that are around.
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[Background music] The internet is a blessing and a curse when it comes to finding
out information about things which you suspect you don't know.
>> Eating fish is a really important part of a healthy diet.
>> Women of child-bearing age and young children should limit their consumption
of high mercury fish.
>> I guess my question is what to feed the babies at this point.
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>> We get most of our fish from the sea and that's
where mercury builds up in our food supply.
Fishes are very healthy food source and we've contaminated it with mercury.
>> [Background music] Are you using those pipettes right there?
>> Yup.
>> Celia Chen is an amazing researcher.
She has the vision to focus our attention on an area surprisingly,
that has so little research done, the marine environment.
Her work is focused on how mercury builds up in food chains.
>> We started out studying mostly lakes and then we sort
of turned our research more towards marine ecosystems.
Because most of the fish people certainly in the US consume are mostly marine fish.
People actually don't even know where mercury in the environment is coming from.
>> I don't know where the mercury comes from that comes into our environment.
>> I assume environmental mercury in fish comes from pollution in the sea, runoff and trash
and things being dumped in the ocean.
>> Mercury is coming from lots of different sources.
>> There's mercury used in gold and precious metal mining.
>> In the [inaudible] industry and in industrial boilers and in consumer products.
>> Human activity has put a large amount of mercury into the atmosphere.
>> Coal-fired power plants are the number one source of mercury air emmisions in the world.
Mercury is preserved in the coals.
So when we burn it, that mercury is then released and gets up into the atmosphere
and then it accumulates both in waterways and on the land.
>> The kind of research that we've been doing at Dartmouth has mostly been about the amount
of mercury that gets into organisms and how that goes from one organism
to the organism that, you know, consumes it.
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>> [Background music] The mercury emissions gets deposited in the open ocean.
>> So how does it end up getting to the fish that we eat?
At the very bottom of the food web, it's taken up by phytoplankton and zooplankton
that then are eaten by really small fish.
Beyond that, bigger fish that eat the smaller and so on and so forth.
So, a lot of it is fish eating fish and so the fish that we eat, those are the ones that are
at the top, so, it's biomagnified, you know, many,
many times over as it goes up that food chain.
>> The problem is that we have doubled the amount of mercury in our environment
from pre-industrial times and two thirds of that comes from what humans have emitted.
>> Some of the mercury coming out of the stacks travels
around the world before it gets deposited.
>> When we did a study of all these lakes in the northeast, the most pristine lakes those ones
like gorgeous New Hampshire and Northern Maine that had the highest mercury in fish.
>> Of all the pollutants, that's one that, you know,
being remote from the source doesn't really help.
>> [Background noise] The reason that it's important for people to know that most
of this contaminate in the atmospheres from coal-fired plant is
because that's very connected to human decisions.
>> As a society, we can make choices
to help control these emissions and help reduce exposures.
>> So there are choices that we can make [background music] like using different kinds
of bulbs that are lower energy to reduce energy consumption.
>> The careful scientific research that we've done tells us it's important
to control the sources now and it will have an effect on how much mercury gets into our fish.
>> Hello little mouse.
>> Mercury is toxic to many tissues of the body but the nervous system is especially sensitive
to the harmful effects of mercury.
Pregnancy and the first few years after birth are especially sensitive periods
for long-term health effects.
>> The big hungry bear can smell a red ripe strawberry a mile away.
>> There's very clear evidence that mercury causes neurodevelopmental delay in children.
We're talking about subtle delays in development of verbal language,
attention and other aspects of child development.
>> Can you eat that strawberry?
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>> We know that the fetus is growing and developing in an incredibly rapid rate and,
you know, half of your cells that you're going to produce or produce during fetal life
and so providing specific advice about what can be eaten would be helpful.
>> With each pregnancy, [noise] you sit down with the doctor and they give you the checklist
of things that you need to be aware of.
>> The fish that are especially high in mercury that pregnant women should stay away from,
things like shark, and swordfish, king mackerel, and tilefish.
Those are the big 4.
Other fish that are bigger and higher in mercury include tuna,
especially the bigger tuna that's included in tuna steak or tuna sushi.
>> The concentrations in albacore tuna are 3 times higher
than the concentrations in the light canned tuna.
>> There are certain types of fish that we know that tend to be very low in mercury
and those includes smaller fish, anything that you can sort
of see the whole thing, the head, tail and the body.
So, sardines, little fish like that.
And also things that don't eat a lot of little fish like catfish, flounder, a tilapia,
the kind of white meat fish and then also things like trout and salmon.
>> So, my OB-GYN at the beginning of the pregnancy sat
down with a laundry list of dos and don'ts for eating.
So that's my association with mercury and what harm it might cause.
>> People respond and pay attention to messages
about risks much more than messages about benefits.
So you can tell the same person that eating fish is going to be good
for your baby's brain [noise] but eating fish with mercury is going to be risky [noise]
and they forget the first message.
>> It's very common that people just use a risk avoidance approache and say,
"Well, I think there's a risk there.
It's too confusing and will take too much time for me to really figure out the subtleties
and so I'm going to minimize my consumption of fish."
>> Ironically, many, many studies have shown clearly that women who don't eat fish at all,
they're children also have those neurodevelopmental delay.
So not eating fish is not a good option.
>> [Background music] Women who are eating about 2 or more servings a week of fish seem
to have kids that do better developmentally.
These are lower mercury fish.
>> Thank you.
>> There's one omega 3 fatty acid in fish called DHA, which is the building block
of the nerve tissue in the brain and the eyes.
And most of the uptake happens in fetal life in the first couple of years of life after birth.
[Laughter] It's a food that's a good source of protein.
It doesn't have a lot of harmful nutrients like saturated fats, trans fats,
and it has a lot of helpful nutrients including vitamin D, selenium and omega 3 fatty acid.
So don't avoid fish just because of concerns about mercury.
There are lots of fish to be eating.
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>> Once in a while, there's a case report of somebody who, you know, consumes the same kind
of very high level sushi [background music] with high level mercury everyday
or several times a day for prolonged exposure develop acute mercury toxicity fro very
high levels.
>> An adult can experience neurologic symptoms related to frequent consumption
of fish that's higher in mercury.
And we don't know exactly where that threshold is.
Part of the reason is that probably different people have different sensitivities.
>> And again, it's pretty rare in the United States.
It's reversible.
It's-- really happens in just a few people.
>> The EPA and FDA published joint guidelines recommending that women should try
to eat 2 servings a week of fish.
>> But if you were a woman of child-bearing age,
you want to limit your consumption of high mercury fish.
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[Background music] There's things that we can do as a society to control mercury missions
and we really want to protect fish for future generations.
Tell your congress people that you don't want to have to worry
about how much mercury is in your fish.
You want to be able to eat a healthy food source.
You want your children, you want you're grandchildren to be able to do that as well.
Your voice matters to tell the people that have power to affect change.
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>> People often ask me, "Do you eat fish," and I'd say, "Yes of course."
>> I love fish, yeah.
I eat a lot of seafood.
>> I eat a lot of it sometimes.
[Laughter].
>> We eat fish frequently.
>> So we have a daughter who's almost 3 and a daughter who's about 1 and a half and so,
both of them love fish and we give them lots of salmon.
>> They eat salmon, they eat tilapia, they eat trout, so they actually like it.
>> I would tell another mother that it's important for them to buy and consume fish
because we know that there's a lot of nutritional value.
>> Do you want some fish for dinner?
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