The Case Against Eating Fish
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
> Drs. Mozaffarian and Rimm put this in perspective in their analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association. (1) First, reviewing data from the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere, they calculated that if 100,000 people ate farmed salmon twice a week for 70 years, the extra PCB intake could potentially cause 24 extra deaths from cancer—but would prevent at least 7,000 deaths from heart disease. (source: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/fish/)
I'm certain a similar argument can be applied to the dangers of mislabeled fish or micro-plastics. To put it in perspective: if the sort of argument this article presents convinced even 7% of people to not eat fish, it would counteract the 7000 potential heart disease deaths in the above example.
There's a bunch of stuff that other than fish that would have the same if not better effect and it has no side-effects.
Especially because of the epidemiological nature of these studies, lack of interventional studies for this particular subject and a bunch of other completely logical reasons.
I thought the article made (implicitly) a case for fish farmed in controlled environment. Those should be safe, right? That is if you can find them correctly labelled, which the author notes is also an issue.
Plastics are usually simple polymers, long chain of hydrocarbons. Not saying it's safe to ingest, but comparatively with many other substances found in the environment, there is less likely to be any interaction with your organism. The contamination of drinking water with lots of drugs in traces is, I think, far more dangerous.
— As long as you don't eat fish, you're probably fine, and explained to her that these cancer findings would the next big pile of shit to hit the cancer fan.
The two hosts joked about the irony that supermodels were the first to hear about these findings.
I suspect something has been lost in translation there.
Also, I'm generally confused by Omega-3 studies anyway (I'm not a scientist). In the early 2000's lots of research came out linking Omega-3 to health. But, then more recently, I thought that Meta analysis studies showed no relationship.
(Could someone explain like I'm five?)
[0] http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/135726...
Since eggs and many other meats are richer in omega-6 fatty acids, for most people eating more fish or supplementing with fish oil helps balance omega-3 and omega-6.
It's best to avoid plant oils except for olive oil and coconut oil. Stick with butter, tallow and so forth, all great sources of balanced fatty acids.
However, large fish, near the top of the food chain can contain a lot of toxins. Examples: tuna, grouper, even large salmon.
A lot of restaurants also sell ox or bison instead of beef.
Fresh fish is loaded with omegawhatever and is completely delicious.
Instead of cutting out one thing instead just maintain a balance like a grown up. Eat fruit, nuts, fish, cattle, paper clips, the fear of junior developers etc etc. If you only eat loads of cheap mislabelled fish then the problems warned in this story might come true but who really does that?
I buy whole breams once a month or so and with some greens on the side I consider it a completely healthy (and delicious) meal.
I grew up eating crabs and lobsters weekly and it didn't kill me.
What's the case here?
You don't know yet what is gonna kill you. You might get a stroke tomorrow caused in some part by doing those things. That is essentially why living healthy is a thing, and why the number one cause of human death in the world is bad eating habits and not old-age.
Should I avoid nice things to get an extra 10 years when I'm 70? Not this cat, but I don't judge anyone for feeling different.
Said another way: if food is your measure of happiness in life, you should branch out and try something other than eating, and even then, food is not good because there is meat in it. A good dish is a good dish in any case, and there are thousands of good dishes containing no animal products what so ever.
It sounds dark, but I would genuinely rather die suddenly while enjoying my life to its fullest instead of clinging on and trying to extend it at the detriment of my fun (puffs cigarette and swigs from a bottle)
;) ;)
5 years back, I loved BBQ rips, steak, cows milk and cows cheese, and thought I couldn't live without it. Today I still love the taste of those things, but I have stopped consuming them and have found alternatives that I like just as much or better with the added benefit that they don't kill me, which adds to me liking them even better.
You shouldn't ignore the fact that the number one cause of humans deaths (cardiovascular disease, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and some types of cancer) is directly tied to eating meat, fish, eggs, dairy and oil. Especially dairy. Dairy is arguably the worst of the culprits, but the others are not healthy either, not by any measure. Less bad does not make good. Not in any big or small amount. And yes, you might not get sick from eating them if you eat less of them, but that doesn't make them healthy, and since they also are the single biggest cause of climate change (because of the way they are produced), and that consuming those things when we don't need to at all is ethically corrupt, there is really no good reason to do so.
So i believe the number one killers are all mostly lifestyle related and can't be attributed to some specific type of food so easily.
Again, you can be healthier than others eating those things, but if you were in that case, not eating it would make you much healthier than your previous self. And not forgetting that as little as the amount of dairy in three glasses of milk a day increases you chance notably of getting prostate cancer, colon cancer, cardiovascular disease and heart disease. A big portion of yoghurt often have more than that. Exercising doesn't decrease those chances by much if at all.
You make it sound like eating dairy is always unhealthy, similar to smoking. But I doubt that's the case and I don't know of any evidence supporting that.
And yes, antibiotics and other drugs is also a problem for meat products. I'm also against producing and consuming those, if you were wondering.
As you said yourself: Not all alternatives are better. Some of them are even worse. You'll have to take a closer look to what's inside, that's why I don't like the generalization "Dairy is bad!".
All the claims that dairy (milk) is healthy that I'm aware of and that is still well regarded (peer reviewed and hasn't later been debunked), is research that says stuff like "you need this much protein, you need this much calcium, you need this much that and that", and then they conclude with stuff like "and if consume this much dairy, you get all those things", but that is focusing on the good stuff in a vacuum and completely neglecting all the bad stuff that is in dairy, and that you already get all the good stuff if you simply eat any proper diet, but some diets, like a plant-based one, avoids the bad stuff.
Saturated fat, which is the reason people gets type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and heart disease. I don't believe I need to link you any sources for that, since it's common knowledge and agreed about. In dairy, the amount of saturated fat is really high. It's why oil (when taken out of it's natural package like olive oil is taken out of it's natural package: the olive) is also bad for you. It's 100% saturated fat instead of in the natural package where for every gram of oil you were also getting some fibers, some carbs and so on.
Cholesterol. Same with saturated fat, although it's less bad. But the thing is that humans need to consume no cholesterol what so ever, so for every mg of cholesterol you consume, you simply add to your overall amount of ldl (also called bad) cholesterol, which has the same effect as saturated fat. All the cholesterol we need (hdl cholesterol) is something we produce our self.
As little as the amount of dairy in three glasses of milk a day (which many get by drinking one glass, putting some on their cereal and then eating a lot of cheese too) is also found to increase ones chances of prostate and colon cancer.
And the thing about dairy is that it is a complete scam. We learn as children that we should consume milk to build strong bones and get protein, but it's just not true. If you eat enough (varied) food (as in a completely normal proper diet), you will never be deficient in neither calcium nor protein. And studies show that you can't just consume more calcium to get stronger bones, it doesn't work like that, so drinking more milk to get even stronger bones is also completely fallacy. The dairy industry want us to believe milk is the raw power of nature, but in fact the only milk humans should consume is the milk our mothers produce, and when we are done we that, we don't need to consume milk anymore, especially not bovine milk. Cows milk is liquid growth food for a calf, that's it. There is nothing good in milk that you can't get from a better source, but there is a whole lot of bad stuff.
If you are interested, I suggest these two[1] sources[2]. Those sites are obviously biased towards plant-based diets, but with good reason and they cite all their facts to scientific sources that you can check out with a simple google search using the number of the research paper, so you can check what they are saying out for yourself. I've never found it to be wrong.
If you are even more interested and like to watch documentaries, you should check out Cowspiracy[3] and What The Health[4]. They are great, and all facts used are available on their respective websites with links to the sources and explanations and so on.
[1]: https://nutritionfacts.org/?fwp_search=dairy&fwp_content_typ...
[2]: http://www.pcrm.org/health/diets/vegdiets/health-concerns-ab...
People die from eating fatty food fried in poor quality oil every day of their lives, yes. That doesn't mean that oil is bad for you, it doesn't mean that fat is bad for you, it doesn't mean that you're at risk of heart attack if you have something that's fried every now and again.
Of course we have to eat things in moderation, but the idea that because overconsuming something is bad for you then any amount of it must be a little bit bad for you? That's bunk. That's just not true. Dairy is not bad for you, oil is not bad for you, sugar is not bad for you.
And there is, emphatically, absolutely nothing wrong with drinking cows milk.
I'm not going to give up eating meta, fish, eggs, dairy and oil just because you think that the effect of food on your health is linearly proportional to how much of it you consume.
Consuming saturated fat, hormones and cholesterol is literally bad for you. It affects your body in a negative way without any benefit in contrast to alternatives aka bad for you.
> The number one cause of humans' deaths is directly tied to drinking water as well. Just because people eat meat, fish, eggs, dairy and oil and then die does not make those things bad.
You could say that, and just because I worded something poorly doesn't change the facts that those particular things in meat, dairy and so on is never good for you.
> People die from eating fatty food fried in poor quality oil every day of their lives, yes. That doesn't mean that oil is bad for you, it doesn't mean that fat is bad for you, it doesn't mean that you're at risk of heart attack if you have something that's fried every now and again.
There is no health-benefit to consuming refined oil instead of getting oil in their natural package, but there are lots of health concerns, so yeah it's bad.
Fat is not bad for you, but saturated fat is bad for you when it's put into a package where it has too much of it compared to what else is in the package, which is the case for dairy, meat and so on.
By your logic, smoking is not bad for you either as long as you only smoke a little.
> Of course we have to eat things in moderation, but the idea that because overconsuming something is bad for you then any amount of it must be a little bit bad for you? That's bunk. That's just not true. Dairy is not bad for you, oil is not bad for you, sugar is not bad for you.
It is bad for you because you can get the same good stuff there is in it from other sources that doesn't have the bad stuff. What you are proposing is, that if you eat a little bit of something that is bad for you, it's not bad. But that is a complete fallacy. It's always bad for you. Will it have a negative effect on you in the long run? Not if you don't overdo it, but that doesn't change the fact that it is bad for you.
The only time that dairy, meat and so on is good for you is in the absence of alternative food so you would starve if you didn't consume it.
> oil is not bad for you, sugar is not bad for you.
Refined oil and refined sugar is always bad for you. It has no positives, only negatives. It's bad.
> And there is, emphatically, absolutely nothing wrong with drinking cows milk.
There sure is. For a cow to give milk, it has to be pregnant and it then has to give birth to a calf. But for you to drink the milk instead of the calf, the calf has to be taken away and be put on some other nutrition that is not it's natural nutrition (cows milk - yeah, that is what it is, growth food for a baby cow, not human food), or it has to be killed. The process is very traumatic for both the cow and the calf, and they will often be stressed and moan for weeks, except in the case of the calf that is often killed not many days old. For the cow to constantly give milk instead of only when it becomes pregnant naturally, it has to be raped by a human on a schedule so it never stops giving milk, and when the cow reaches 4-6 old, the cow is in so bad state it can't keep on producing the required amount of milk, so it is sent to a slaughterhouse and horribly killed and slaughtered. A cow will live to 20-26 years old in nature. There is nothing empathic about people thinking that cows milk is their right, even if it is killed in the most pain-free and lives with the least amount of suffering possible for it to be a dairy cow, which unfortunately is not true for more 1/10.000.000 dairy cows.
> I'm not going to give up eating meta, fish, eggs, dairy and oil just because you think that the effect of food on your health is linearly proportional to how much of it you consume.
I'm not thinking these things. Science is. The only reason it's still part of a normal diet in the way it is, is because of powerful lobbying done by the dairy, meat, egg and fishing industry, and because just like you (and me 5 years back) I couldn't contain the thought of not consuming these things, so I'd gladly ignore the problems with them. So do a lot of doctors and scientists and so on.
You just did not answer the OP's question at all. Sure, animal cruelty is an important issue but its NOT the one you were debating with the OP.
Firstly, even though milesrout wrote `emphatically`, I believe he meant `ethically` since that is what I wrote which he answered to.
Secondly, and I'm not a native English speaker so I might be wrong, empathically, my comment is still valid. What we do to dairy cows can only be described as a product of a complete lack of empathy for the cows, nothing less.
In that case, that slew of words simply demonstrates why there is also something, emphatically, wrong with drinking milk ethically and not only personal health wise, which is what we have been discussing.
It demonstrates that milk is bad in not only one aspect but two, and if we then account for how it is contributing to climate change as well, it is now bad in three aspects and, well, the dairy industry is looking very much like the devil, and people that consume dairy looks like stupid sheep and not modern, intelligent humans.
Take it or leave it.
* The claim that cows have to be 'raped' to give milk is absurd. Milking cows is not rape. If you don't milk them they just about burst - have you seen their udders when they aren't milked?
* The claim that 'in nature' cows do something is also wrong: cows do not exist without humans and have never existed without humans. Cows are domesticated animals. They are biologically and physiologically distinct from any 'natural' animal, if such a thing really exists (everything everywhere has been affected by human activity). That's how artificial selection works.
Beef and dairy contribute to climate change, yes, but that wouldn't be a problem if they were priced correctly. If dairy and cattle farmers were required to pay off their externalities - i.e. to clean up after themselves and pay carbon taxes for all the methane - then beef and dairy would be priced such that it was consumed less, but still consumed, which is both healthier and better for the environment.
But the discussion is about human health, and the fact of the matter is that there's nothing wrong with it, for humans, in moderation.
Cows only create milk to feed their young. Cows only have young if they are inseminated. Thus dairy cows are kept in a perpetual cycle of breeding to produce young (which are taken from them early) so they produce milk.
Half the young are male and thus useless; they are killed. Half the young are female and kept to replenish the dairy herds.
As DanBC said, it isn't the milking that is rape. It's the forced impregnation. The milking is exploitation.
It's like saying if you go ahead and fuck a dog or another animal, that's not rape either. It might not be in your country, but in my country, Denmark, it sure is. By law, the animals are treated - in this case - like children since they can't consent to the action. Except in the livestock industry, where the practice is allowed because "we need our milk and meat". Now, even in Denmark, the word rape isn't used about such thing, but it's the same thing really.
It's rather short minded logic on your behalf too. There is nothing wrong, per se, with a cow raping another cow. That's part of nature. Things change though when it's a human that does it to a cow. Since the action is done by the human, who understands the action and the concept of rape, I think it's fair to classify it as rape, again, since the cow can't consent to it.
> If you don't milk them they just about burst - have you seen their udders when they aren't milked?
Yes, it's gross how we have bred these animals to become milk and meat machines. But actually, if you take a dairy cow out of the industry, it doesn't take long before it starts to only produce milk in natural amounts again, that is, only enough to feed it's calf, maybe a little more, but that's it. The reason they constantly produce so much as they do is because of breeding and continued use of different kinds of drugs and steroids to get that reaction. In other words, we are artificially creating the problems they have when not milked, so talking about the milking as something like "humans helping the cows so their udders don't get infected and shit" is a complete fallacy. We are exploiting them, torturing them and killing them, that's what we're doing to them.
> * The claim that 'in nature' cows do something is also wrong: cows do not exist without humans and have never existed without humans. Cows are domesticated animals. They are biologically and physiologically distinct from any 'natural' animal, if such a thing really exists (everything everywhere has been affected by human activity). That's how artificial selection works.
Firstly, there do live cattle freely in nature some places to this day, but yes, dairy cows for one is grossly overbred to produce the best meat and milk with no regard for their health. But a dairy cow do in fact have the capability to live until 20-26 years of age, if not kept as livestock where it's body is destroyed after 4-6 years old.
> Beef and dairy contribute to climate change, yes, but that wouldn't be a problem if they were priced correctly. If dairy and cattle farmers were required to pay off their externalities - i.e. to clean up after themselves and pay carbon taxes for all the methane - then beef and dairy would be priced such that it was consumed less, but still consumed, which is both healthier and better for the environment.
Indeed, if it were priced differently - not subsidised, for one - and the amount of dairy and beef produced were around say 1% of one is produced today, that would mean a lot of the climate, yes, and to peoples health.
> But the discussion is about human health, and the fact of the matter is that there's nothing wrong with it, for humans, in moderation.
Again, that is like saying that smoking is not unhealthy in moderation. That's a complete fallacy. Will it kill you if you only smoke one cigarette a week? Probably not. Is it healthy? Nope, still not healthy and never will be.
You're going to have to argue with the multitude of people who have had success beyond "losing weight" on low carb diets.
The days of calling low carb a "fad" are waning.
Their success is feeling great, not preventing sickness. They are gonna get them too, at some point, probably, but they might feel great until then. You can feel great on almost any diet, but only few helps preventing these diet-related sicknesses.
> The days of calling low carb a "fad" are waning.
Low carb is gonna come around and bite people in the ass. High carb is so important for a good balanced health (science agrees about that), and has no negatives except if you also want to eat 2000cals of eggs, meat and cheese a day, in which case you are gonna get fat, and then cutting out the boring carbs is the choice people are choosing, instead of cutting out the eggs, meat and cheese, a choice which is gonna give them diabetes type 2, cardiovascular disease, heart disease and cancer in the long while.
But what if your past bad eating habits affect your quality of life at 40 or 50?
I'm guessing you must be pretty young if you see your 70s in those terms. There's a good chance you'll still be healthy enough to have a pretty good quality of life in your 70s.
From all the blogs about various pesticides, pollution, feed issues, animal cruelty, we might as well just go back to sustenance farming and grow/raise our own... oh wait we can't do that because fracking and industrial soil pollution! You can't trust your back yard! /rolls eyes
So much of online "health advice" is a series of micro-optimizations at best.
Somehow we have got to the point where the'recommended daily quota' of fruit and veg is something insane like 10 a day (I can't find gov.uk stats but a lot of newspaper articles etc).
Is it so hard to understand "put shit in and you become shit"? Why does anyone need to be told?
Is it so hard to understand that you should eat good quality and varied foods? That you don't need to swear off kebabs forever but don't do them every day? That putting more in than you use makes you bigger and putting less in smaller?
And all you got from that is "Is it so hard to understand"?
Yes, yes it is.
You remember all the talk about BPA plastic being bad for you and an endocrine disruptor? Do you really think people should just "know" that fact before science verifies?
And being skinny does not mean being healthy. That's just one metric.
Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article.
Sounds convenient but IMHO somewhat beside "the point" of all these pontifications: your rule of thumb we as a species had already figured out for 100s of millenia+. That's why we don't eat grass and are told to be cautious around unknown wild berries or mushrooms. All these ponderations like OP OTOH are about "insidious, long-term-unnoticable-until-too-late health scares". An ongoing search for insights comparable in spirit to past "long-term damage" findings about lead or how some trichinosis parasites have an incubation period of ~30 years.
It is until it isn't; most of the time when I deal with "normal people", they seem to expect getting sick from "bad" food almost immediately, and are confused why I haven't died of cancer already because I'm using artificial sweeteners with my tea. My rule of thumb applies primarily to that kind of situations.
Not denying the importance of long-term considerations, but given the amount of nonsense media publish (c.f. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you-...), I just ignore the topic altogether until some entity like WHO or FDA starts making noises.
Colorectal cancers in young people have increased 40% in just 16 years. Melanoma rates in young people have increased 250% in four decades.
Colorectal cancers would increase because detection has increased. It became fairly popular to get a probe done at a certain age. I seriously can't give these sorts of numbers credit, just like having a percieved increase in autism after including more folks in it and having better screening and awareness.
Why do some people insist on rationalizing these trends away?
However, I stand by my general stance. Many cancers simply wouldn't show up in a population with a much shorter life expectancy. I'm not about to say it isn't partially environment or lifestyle (other things do cause cancer), just that we notice because of our life span and ability to detect these. I get this from articles like the one listed at the end, which states: The main reason cancer risk overall is rising is because of our increasing lifespan. And the researchers behind these new statistics reckon that about two-thirds of the increase is due to longevity. Colon cancer seems to be an outlier, and there are a couple of these. Cervical cancer is caused by a very common virus and often affects younger women, just to give another example.
http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2015/02/04/why-are-c...
The problem is that if the background noise is loud enough, you can't identify causes. Do you get cancers because of one of the things you're exposed to? A combination? All of them? Is one the real culprit while the others are not? We live in a soup of thousands of poorly studied compounds, and as a result it's very hard or impossible to even study the problem in a human population.
So, maybe it is shaving years off our lives, or causing something we are aware of, but we're not aware of a causal link.
Especially considering that the effects might take a really long time to be actually measurable.
Sure, older generations might get pretty old right now, but these generations also grew up in a vastly different world compared to generations being born right now. At this rate, I can easily fathom a future where people have never seen a somewhat clean beach, like in The Expanse.
With this kind of stuff tetraethyllead always comes to my mind. Even at its introduction, there had been warnings about the dangers, lead poisoning was something that was already established as something bad. That still didn't stop us from using TEL in all kinds of gasoline for decades. It took us, again, decades to phase this stuff out but the damage is already done and large swaths of land will remain heavily lead-polluted for decades to come.
Finally... people only seem to find science believable when it comes to them in CSI form, unless they're actually scientists, in which case it's precisely the opposite. I've tried to explain to people that good science takes time, especially with something as varied as human beings and mortality. Most people can't be bothered, are ideologically opposed, or can't really understand. Plenty of the people who would agree with you and I about this would be nodding and saying, "Yep, that's why I don't vaccinate my kids!" smh There is this tiny sliver aware of the potential risks, between two vast gulfs of ignorance. Worse, plenty within that tiny slice have ideologies which don't allow for giving a rat's ass about this issue, or have some personal gain in mind.
It's hard not to conclude that should future historians be in a position to study us, they'll be chuckling and shaking their heads in the same we do studying the Victorians.
https://www.davidwolfe.com/fukushima-radiation-tumors-fish-s...
https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-fukushima-causing-bloody-t...
EDIT: Apparently some people were triggered by my original comment.
http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/surprise-youre-eating-fuk...
However it links to a CBS article (that is available) this one mentions 10 times higher than usual radiation in Tuna caught off the West Coast (but its still supposed to be edible).
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/radioactive-bluefin-tuna-crossed...
I am not convinced. Reminds me of how the Chernobyl accident was being downplayed in an IAEA report.
The source link was the to one of the original blog posts David Wolfe paraphrased the content and lifted the imagery from. The source link was crap and the arguments were lies that are easily debunked.
>However it links to a CBS article (that is available) this one mentions 10 times higher than usual radiation in Tuna caught off the West Coast (but its still supposed to be edible).
Yeah, detection in Tuna is concerning and needs to be considered. I wanted numbers so I found https://swfsc.noaa.gov/textblock.aspx?Division=FRD&id=20593 and a breakdown of how those numbers related to reality: http://abitofperspective.com/?cat=3 We are many orders of magnitude away from even a simple medical procedure. Even assuming you can afford to eat 75lbs or so of contaminated Bluefin tuna caught near Japan.
Mercury content (in any long lived fish) poses a more realistic concern. We already recommend tuna not be eaten frequently for these and sustainability reasons. But your source article was claiming that radiation was found in salmon and causing tumors there, which is a lie.
(Thankfully mercury levels have been declining as we move away from coal power generation: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tunas-declining-m... )
>I am not convinced. Reminds me of how the Chernobyl accident was being downplayed in an IAEA report.
Don't go throwing a red herring in here. What happened there was wrong but you can't make that argument without data. It's just as wrong as misinforming the public and causing a panic.
If you feel offended by me calling your source liar, come prepared to defend them or learn to accept new data and change your position. I responded so future readers of this thread won't be mislead into believing something that isn't true.
This article made it very clear that it was just what she does based on what she has encountered, not health advice. Also, a large part of her concern had nothing to do with pollution. It was that different types of seafood require different cooking methods to be healthy to eat. This is well known, and with so much seafood being mislabeled isn't a vague issue.
She also has language like this: "If, like my friends and family, you choose to continue to eat seafood, I would urge you to at least start asking questions."
So "asking questions" is the "least" you can do, she may have a veneer of politeness but her opinion on what people should do is clear.
Further evidence is the flow of her arguments. She starts off talking about the mislabeling of fish, but then says "Let’s say you buy your seafood from a store that correctly labels its fish, or from a fisherman you trust. Maybe you even catch it yourself. But no matter how careful you are..." and then dives into the microplastics.
So even if you are able to bypass her argument about mislabeling, which is filled with a lot of maybes in and of itself, in her opinion you still shouldn't eat fish because plastic.
Yeah, this is the health advice equivalent of "no offense, but... insert offensive thing"
That's not really related to the article I guess, but I'm curious:
What's the difference between "ox" and "beef"?
I'm intrigued because in French, ox and beef are supposed to be the same thing (both bœuf), and I would probably have written "A lot of restaurants also sell cow or bison instead of beef" since bœuf is supposed to be castrated bull, while most often people actually get sold cow meat.
The thing is, the world is really diverse. In some countries like Japan they eat A LOT of fish, but I'd say it's mainly fish and not seashells. In Valencia (Spain) and nearby towns for example there's a lot of mussels and we also eat many small fried whole fish, which I can see how they probably have a larger chance of containing plastic than a piece of fish meat.
And that is Spain and Japan, developed countries. There are lots of places where people cannot choose what to eat. And she is not even saying NOT to eat fish, she just says she doesn't eat, the reasons ("with a substance we still don’t really understand") and a possible solution:
- There are steps we can take on the community level to make seafood safer. We can demand stricter and more specific labeling guidelines from federal food agencies and fish distributors.
- the only ways to mitigate the problem are to reduce our reliance on single-use items and avoid products wrapped in excessive packaging.
I'll eat it, I know where it comes from at least though.
The pink or red color you see in some wild-caught fish is from carotenoid pigments in the krill they consume (or that has been consumed by other creatures that are then consumed by the salmon).
The farm-raised fish are given the exact same pigments before they are sent to market.
There are reasons to avoid farmed fish, but the color isn't one of them.
> DSM has studied consumer preferences regarding the flesh color of salmon. Our research shows that dark-colored salmon flesh consistently commands a premium. Typically bought by more affluent groups, it can command an additional USD 0.50 to USD 1.00 per pound when offered side-by-side with light-colored salmon flesh.
> Light-colored salmon attracts a different consumer demographic, being more frequently purchased by minority groups than dark-colored salmon.
I fly fished wild salmon since I was in my early teens and they were always pink. We stole enough fish from the fishfarms to see a difference (either grey or insanely over coloured) ;)
I think maybe Pacific salmon are different to the kind we get in Scotland though? Ours only spawn once and they don't eat when they're back in freshwater (as a consequence the tail end of the fishing season is horrible; black skinny things that fall apart when you touch em)
Most salmon (Atlantic or Pacific) only spawn once and then die, but occasionally an Atlantic salmon will survive to make another trip.
There's really no hard and fast distinction between what's called a "salmon" and what's called a "trout", other than salmon typically spending time at sea. For example, Oncorhynchus mykiss is called a "rainbow trout" if it remains in freshwater its entire life. It naturally has pale flesh (though farmed rainbow is often given the same pigments as the farmed salmon). If it spends time at sea, the exact same fish is called a "steelhead" (occasionally, a "steelhead salmon") and has red or pink flesh.
A near-relative, Oncorhynchus nerka, is called the "red salmon" or "sockeye salmon"if it spends time at sea, but "kokanee", "kokanee trout" or "silver trout" if it remains landlocked.
And so on.
You hire the incorrect guy, and it takes only a bubble stone incorrectly placed creating a too strong current. Having plenty of food and almost no natural predators, a bigger percentage of this fishes will survive unless you cull it. Is as simple as that.
I can understand that some journalists would kill for a good history with elements of survival horror and the big bad army/pharma/nuclear companies creating monsters in secret laboratories; but the real life of a sea farmer is normally much more boring than a videogame.
The problem was widely studied in any case, there are books and monographies available (i.e: Abnormalities in finfish mariculture: an overview of the problem, causes and solutions. Divanach et al., 1996).
A group of articles orbit around genetic issues (triploidy in domestic Salmon has an effect for sure), and a second group around mechanic issues on the first days of life like impact against bubbles or walls. Acccidents involving chemicals released in water are rare events, all fishes will typically die (this is a bussiness unforgiving with the tiniest mistakes that you could commit) and there is not much more to say except the un-publishable "I'm stupid and killed 2000 fishes again by mistake".
Just for the record, we found a correlation between temperature and skeletal deformities in sea bass that was published in 'Aquaculture international' vol 12 (Abdel et al., 2004). Could be a good place to start searching.
Include the notion of not being loyal to brands or geographic origin.
Examples: Don't eat too much tuna, but when you buy tuna always buy a different brand/type. When you buy meat, don't always eat beef or pork, alternate, and choose from different brands suppliers. Same with vegetables, etc.
By all means avoid sugar added / too much processed foods, I think these 2 points are above reasonable doubt today.
It's a real luxury and privilege to have access to the variety of foods we enjoy today, we should exploit it more IMHO.
>> Even though current research shows we do not absorb most plastics, it’s possible that a small amount (about 1 percent) can still accumulate in our bodies over time. That number might change: research on microplastics in our food is still in its infancy, and while some studies have documented the detrimental effects of plastics on fish and other aquatic animals, we still don’t know much about their long-term effects on humans.
So, all current scientific evidence points to this not being a problem. But it _might_ _maybe_ _someday_!
edit - I've also never heard of any food safety guidelines that specify different storage temperatures for different species of fish. The whole thing is pretty suspect.
As far as I know, the "detrimental effects of plastics" that have been "documented" are stuff like getting caught in six-pack rings, getting intestinal clogs, etc., none of which are likely to be an issue with microplastics.
Do you mean our lack of current scientific evidence? The fact that we have no idea about long term effects of ingesting those plastics should be alarming enough.
I didn’t sign up to be a guinea pig for this experiment. Thanks to this article at least I know I’m part of one.
The food we eat is mass produced, we should assume very low quality and environmental sustainability.
Now, should I stop eating fish? Nothing was proven a health concern, what's the effect of the small plastic I'll ingest through fish?
Most studies I've seen on health correlate healthy individuals with eating fish. Now, those are probably a few years or decade old, is fish worse today? I think it's still inconclusive.
We live in happy ignorance of the horrible shit in most of our food but we have pretty reasonable controls that none of it is complete poison.
Eating fish would also correlate with a lot of other things in many parts of the developed world, like spending more on food, or following mainstream “healthy” advice, which correlates with other choices.
Is it? The food I eat predominantly isn't. Speak for yourself.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tamar-haspel/mislabeled-fish_b...
I can't find it, but there is an even better article that explains how the US fishing industry got Congress to make imported fish be called something else so they wouldn't be seem as competition. Can't find that though.
I won't eat fish in a restaurant or from a grocery store chain.
You can get it with head on and skin so you can tell what kind it is. Also if you ever do try it, try to get a whole one smoked with bone in. Something about leaving the bone in makes it have a slightly different texture and taste, to me at least.
One other thing is make sure its smoked well, meaning if it isnt smoked long enough it can be too moist. I wouldnt want anyone to try it and sort of get a soggy smoked fish lol. Nothing "wrong" with it but I think its better eating.
Edit..person who posted about smoked sardines just made me so hungry! never had em and its going on list, thanks for suggestion!
(This ruined smoked salmon for me, I guarantee they won't disappoint however be warned you can't uneat it and you can't go back...)
Give it a go.
Would you say that this applies to smoked eel as well? It's always quite moist when I buy it and while I love it, now I'm curious if it could be even better.
I think this thread prompted me to buy a smoker and start learning to do it myself.
Capers, or specifically caper brine, also make for a wonderful addition. You could also go for a combination of salt, dill, and Old Bay.
Same thing with shellfish (also forbidden by Kosher rules). Not only do they tend to collect nasty bugs from any human sewage in the water, but they have some truly scary toxins in their own right.
None of those are an issue with modern farming and aquaculture, though.
What probably happened was that a whole village got wiped out with (say) Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning, and the priest from the next village decided that God really, really didn't want people eating oysters any more.
Why don't you eat fish? I can't work it out :)
Fish is very different from something like mammal meat. They shouldn't be lumped together when talking about major nutritional tradeoffs.
Basically I don't see what you're getting at. Fish is food. It can be analyzed as such.
> Fish is food.
At a high enough level they are both foods. But I'm talking about a lower level, where you are choosing between types of food. When looking at the types of concerns the article has, there is no justification at all for lumping all meats and only meats together.
The empirical health benefits of vegetarianism vanish once you control for health-consciousness.
Trying to paint some bleak health picture on all meats is plain FUD.
https://sentientist.org/2013/05/20/the-ethical-case-for-eati...
And to clarity my earlier statement, there are plausible reasons to not eat meat: animal suffering, cost, environmental impact.
Avoiding absolutely all meat on the basis of health reasons (the original context of the discussion) is bogus.
If I had to summarise what I remember from when I studied something related, I'd say your best bet is to eat (a) small amounts of (b) mostly white meat.
(a) is pretty obvious: a bit of meat on occasion is enough to ward off any possible malnutrition. If you don't go fully vegan the risk isn't high, but neither is any negative effect the meat may have.
(b) is probably more controversial, but contrary to what a certain crowd has been hyping, it seems like the evidence against red meat is still ahead. More in regards to cancer, a little less for cardiovascular diseases. The mechanisms aren't clear: Harald zur Hausen (Nobel for HPV) thinks it's viruses from undercooked red meat and only eats it well-done. Cholesterol is more of a symptom than a cause...etc.
You can also ward off any possible malnutrition by eating completely plant-based. It's not hard. You gotta eat more varied than when you eat animal products, but that comes with a bunch of added benefits, so it's really a win-win, and even a small portion of white meat on occasion is a huge tax on the environment compared to plants, and it still comes with all the ethical drawbacks, if you are concerned about that at all.
> (b) is probably more controversial, but contrary to what a certain crowd has been hyping, it seems like the evidence against red meat is still ahead. More in regards to cancer, a little less for cardiovascular diseases. The mechanisms aren't clear: Harald zur Hausen (Nobel for HPV) thinks it's viruses from undercooked red meat and only eats it well-done. Cholesterol is more of a symptom than a cause...etc.
In any case, science is clear that it's a lot more unhealthy than eating a plant-based diet. It baffles me that people focus on the "it's possible it's not as bad as they say, even though science agrees it's bad, so lets eat it", instead of the "well, there is a lot of controversy about how quickly eating animal products is gonna kill me, so lets just eat the things that don't and that also doesn't unnecessarily destroy our planet and is ethically corrupt".
Nobody is saying 'a steak a day keeps the doctor away'. But red meat is good for you: it's full of all sorts of essential nutrients that you need. It's tasty, and if it were in any serious way harmful then we wouldn't be eating it.
The unhealthy aspect of red meat is 1) it contains a lot of stuff you don't want to consume, like cholesterol, hormones, too much saturated fat, recycled drugs and shit and 2) you can get all these good and important nutrients from other food sources that does not contain the bad stuff, and since there is no benefit to consuming these things via red meat compared to say plants, red meat turns out to be a negative to your health instead of a positive.
Some activities are worst than other; but all have some effect on the environment. Mussel farms release sediments to the sea floor below, modifying its granular structure. This changes the communities of organisms living in the area.
[1] https://vimeo.com/ondemand/whatthehealth/203617202
[2] Vegetarians less likely to develop cancer than meat eaters, says study https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/jul/01/vegetarians-...
[3] Vegans live longer than those who eat meat or eggs, research finds - Every three per cent increase in calories from plant protein was found to reduce risk of death by 10 per cent http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/...
[4] 16 Studies on Vegan Diets – Do They Really Work? https://authoritynutrition.com/vegan-diet-studies/
[5] How Not To Die: The Role of Diet in Preventing, Arresting, and Reversing Our Top 15 Killers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXXXygDRyBU
Also, OP made a specific claim about controlling for health-conscious behavior that is not countered here.
Relative risks (RRs) were estimated by Cox regression,
stratified by sex and recruitment protocol and adjusted
for age, smoking, alcohol, body mass index, physical
activity level and, for women only, parity and oral
contraceptive use.
(One possibly life-prolonging behaviour observed more in vegetarians: not considering the Guardian to be a 'sensationalist' newspaper)
It just wouldn't be a very enjoyable life.
I'm sorry if that sounds facetious, but do I really need to demonstrate that most people enjoy eating meat? Well, they do. They enjoy it a lot.
Less unhealthy does not mean something is healthy, and since meat is basically saturated fat, hormones, cholesterol, not to mention all the drugs fed to the animals that are recycled through it and shows up in the meat too. And about B12: that is recycled too. Livestock are fed B12 (and other stuff) which is why it's prevelant in meat as it is. If you worry about B12, it would seem to me that you worry about health, so getting B12 through meat where you also get all kinds of bad stuff sounds illogical instead of just taking a vitamin pill.
American Heart Association made some recommendations like this in the 90s that caused everybody binge on carbs and weigh 300lbs.
Recent studies (http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2010/01/13/ajcn.2009... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9635993 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19364995) failed to find ill effects from saturated fats. (Trans fats are another story.)
> hormones
It's been years, and we're still waiting for any actual evidence on this one. If it concerns you, there is hormone-free meat, just there there are pesticide-free veggies.
> cholesterol
Scientific consensus is that eating cholesterol has zero effect on cholesterol levels, since the body regulates production of it anyway.
> Livestock are fed B12 (and other stuff) which is why it's prevelant in meat as it is.
True, though cows, sheep, goats, deer, etc. naturally produce B12 themselves (or more accurately, their bacteria do).
> getting B12 through meat where you also get all kinds of bad stuff sounds illogical instead of just taking a vitamin pill.
It seems a little bit of red flag if a diet is deficient enough that you need pills to compensate, but I have no opposition to them per se. I take multi-vitamins now and then.
I didn't make a comprehensive list of meat's better-than-average nutrients (e.g. iron comes to mind). Can you get the same nutrients without meat? Yes, it's possible. On the other hand, there's a reason humans are omnivores, even if we like to pretend they're not.
An unhealthy diet is an unhealthy diet in any case. Saturated fat is not good for you. It's the reason you get type 2 diabetes, among other stuff. No one will tell you it's healthy.
> hormones
Still one reason less to eat meat when the alternative is free of that crap and healthier in every other way too. And there is also all the science that says it is a problem. Especially in dairy, but also in meat. We don't need it, and we (possibly) suffer from consuming it, so doing so is plain stupid when there are alternatives.
> Scientific consensus is that eating cholesterol has zero effect on cholesterol levels, since the body regulates production of it anyway.
That's not true at all. The scientific consensus seems to be that it (dietary cholesterol also called ldl cholesterol) contributes about 0.3-0.4 of what saturated fat does when it comes to raising your blood cholesterol. But the fact is that humans need to consume zero dietary cholesterol - nothing at all - and consuming it has unhealthy effects, so doing so is plain stupid health wise when their is an alternative with zero dietary cholesterol.
> True, though cows, sheep, goats, deer, etc. naturally produce B12 themselves (or more accurately, their bacteria do).
So do humans. Still not a good reason to consume humans nor livestock.
> It seems a little bit of red flag if a diet is deficient enough that you need pills to compensate, but I have no opposition to them per se. I take multi-vitamins now and then. I didn't make a comprehensive list of meat's better-than-average nutrients (e.g. iron comes to mind). Can you get the same nutrients without meat? Yes, it's possible. On the other hand, there's a reason humans are omnivores, even if we like to pretend they're not.
You don't get the B12 from meat because of some special properties of the animals as a food source. You get it from meat because 1) the animals consumes supplements (which you can do too instead of getting it through an animal that consumed a supplement) 2) they consume poop (by accident or by choice) 3) their food is bacterially contaminated 4) they themself eat animal products where the occurrence are the same yet again.
The reason why we need a pill in 2017 if we don't eat animal products or food that is fortified (like one could argue meat is, and that lots of plant-milks are for example) is because our water and our food is sanitary compared to what livestocks and our ancestors consumed. Health wise, getting B12 from meat is highly disadvantaged compared to a vitamin pill, which is a great thing for people to consume in any case.
For one, the WHO beg to differ
http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2015/pdfs/pr240_E.pdf
tldr Red meat is group 2a, probably carcinogenic to humans, processed meat is group 1, carcinogenic to humans.
Now you can't buy Nivea face wash for example, with these beads. Their R&D team came up with a replacement, done and dusted by the end of 2015.
Change happens rapidly when reputation and sales are on the line.
You should only eat animal products that came from your pets, i.e. you observe their lives, empathize with what's happening to them, and take responsibility* for their subjective experience.
Beyond that, on the cosmic scale, it doesn't matter what your practices are. We can disagree about what constitutes a subjectively good experience for a chicken or a fish. Future generations will disagree on those things too. They won't judge you for where your empathy steers you, but they will judge you for opting out of the responsibility.
If you want to pay someone to take care of "your" pets, that's fine too, but they're just your employee. You can leave your dog with the dogsitter, but you're still responsible for their care. The same is true of chicken you eat. You're still the CEO in that interaction, and still responsible for the life of the animal, so due diligence is necessary.
Ecological care, health, animal welfare, labor welfare, all of these things naturally shake out empathy and responsibility.
Vegans will be looked down on the same as meat eaters, because they are not taking responsibility for animal welfare either. They use "vegan" as a proxy for "humane" but it's not good enough. It's better than a meat eater who is absconding responsibility, but not as good as a meat eater who is taking responsibility. The vegan myth is that it's possible to produce food with no animal impacts.
"Don't eat fish" or "Eat local" or "Don't eat animal products" all suffer the same fate: they're rough heuristics in a process where we need actual responsibility. Before computers it was too hard to actually understand what was happening to your "pets" or where your "vegetables" were coming from but now that we have computers we can do it.
> Vegans will be looked down on the same as meat eaters, because they are not taking responsibility for animal welfare either.
Vegans aren't interested in animal welfare in the way we usually think of it, i.e. in terms of bigger cages, access to fresh air, etc. Vegans are interested in animal rights as in not using animals at all. It might not be possible to product food without hurting some animals, but there's a moral difference between accidentally and intentionally hurting someone.
How many fieldmice do you have to maim for it to be considered equivalent to a quick death for a deer, after a happy, wild life, in a region where that animal was effectively torturing other animals through overgrazing? How many rivers can you dam, destroying entire ecologies, before it's equivalent to someone taking care of a pig like it's their own child for a year and then bopping them on the head and slitting their throat before the pig knows what's happening?
Certain vegan products constitute outright animal torture. Palm oil from burning orangutan habitat is the classic example. How is torturing orangutans to get palm oil better than killing a deer who is torturing other deer?
Veganism is appealing to people who want to pretend that violence doesn't happen. But violence is an inevitable part of ecologies functioning. Consuming calories is violence, despite what it might feel like in the supermarket. The best we can do is deliberate respectful violence in place of unnecessary violence (torture).
can microplastics pass membranes or get stuck?
We have created an incredible dependency on fish:
- "Fishmeal", fish based product fed to animals.
- "Fish emulsion", fish oil used as fertilizer for our crops. Yes, your vegeterian meal might not be vegan.
- Fish fed to other animals including other fish
- Fish, fish that we eat
Don't take my work for it. The most cited number is 10%.
And farmed fish are wreaking havoc in the local marine environment wherever they are. Most countries have laws protecting water from "overnutrition" (which kills most marine life) yet the farmed fishing industry seems largely exempt from those laws. Outside my home town of 100.000 inhabitants they just opened a new salmon farm that lets out as much nitrogen into the water as would the whole town's sewer system if we just dumped it all at sea.
Fish might be sustainable from a co2(e) point of view, but most fisheries and fish farms are not.
When I grew up cod was a "love it or hate it" thing, because of it's strong taste. Nowadays, cod means some white flaky texture with no taste.
>thewalrus.ca
It's the little things.
But then again, I don't order fish from any restaurant, but go to a fishing village and the restaurants there show you the fresh fish for you to choose from. Good fresh fish is not cheap.
I cannot understand why the writer, a scientist, engages in scaremongering instead of presenting a holistic picture. A dinner of fresh fish paired with an excellent white wine makes for a healthy and very enjoyable evening.