We Should Be Eating More Canned Fish?
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Commercial fishing is not good. Do some research to find the many reasons.
Plastic is not something you want to eat, and fish have increasing amounts of plastic in them.
Same goes for Mercury. Sardines (and probably anchovies) don't have much, but other larger fish do.
Were it not for these problems, then I too would advocate good canned sardines for health. They have higher calcium per weight than any other food or drink. They have a good amount of protein, and of course they have the omega oils.
But the current state of things is such that it would be wise to reduce consumption, not increase it.
Interesting tidbit from the article.
That's the important part. I was eating tuna it pretty much every day for about a year until I found out that it was dangerous. They don't even have warnings on the can. Tony Robbins fried his brain doing that[0]. Still just hoping that I didn't do any damage to myself.
The fishing industry lobbies have sued the FDA and other health organisations around the world to prevent then from requiring warnings on the label, and to get them to change the maximum PPM levels:
> However, the fishing industry sued FDA, arguing that the economic impacts of the standard were likely to be too severe. A court agreed, and FDA had to revise the Action Level, raising it to 1.0 ppm, the current level.[1]
> Scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimate that as many as 600,000 babies are born each year at risk of neurological and developmental problems because their mothers have high blood mercury levels from fish consumption.[2]
[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/are-there-toxic-heavy-metals-...
[1] http://mercuryfactsandfish.org/mercury-facts/the-fda-action-...
[2] https://e360.yale.edu/features/a_call_for_tougher_standards_...
You also might want to watch The Fish on My Plate, a Michael Pollan-like documentary, because the evidence points to taking fish oil pills in sufficient quantities to have a clinically-significant effect would risk cardiovascular dysfunction and metabolic issues long beforehand, and how, anecdotally, eating small, wild-caught, heavy-metals-free fish on a near-daily basis seems like the best approach without more data. They also go into detail about the horrors of fish farming, pros/cons of wild-caught.
Every one of these has significant downsides to them (for you vegetarians out there, the phosphorous that leeches into the runoff is huge, affecting the ecosystem in ways we still don’t understand).
I get every point you make, but honestly, what is the real alternative?
If you eat a lot of meat, then you have all the vegetarian concerns you can come up with plus all the concerns directly tied to meat plus the rest of the indirect concerns.
For example grazing livestock using hilly land that only grows small grasses.
Can you please expand on this? Animal agriculture is the primary cause of ocean dead-zones (due to fertilizer + manure run-off).[0] Because you're still eating plants - it's just that you're filtering them through another animal, and thus removing the vast majority of the calories, protein, and other nutrients that you would have got if you'd directly consumed the plants.
I don't think there's any debate on the relative environmental impact of a plant-based diet versus one that includes meat and dairy. It wins in terms of pollution, land usage, water usage, and basically every other metric.[1][2][3]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/01/meat-ind...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
[2] https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...
There's a balance between doing what's optimal for individual health and what can be sustained. Unfortunately, I don't know of any better or equal omega-3 source because plant-based and fish oil capsules are demonstrably inferior. Canned, sustainable-quotaed, wild-caught, extremely fresh sardines and anchovies caught around South America are precisely what were recommended by the documentary The Fish on My Plate. The amount of bioavailable omega-3 content in them is significantly higher than fish oil pills, and was confirmed with blood tests. The thing is, in order to have a clinical impact requires consuming several servings per week or everyday would be a minimum amount.
I think it's pointless diet-shaming and nibbling around the edges to demand everyone become strictly vegan when better alternatives and mixes exist that can improve health.
0. Monterery Sardine Story Richard H. Parrish (2000)
Take oil sardines with the starry eyes. Am I supposed to eat the sardine whole, with head, eyes and tailfin? Am I supposed to bite the head off and spit it out? Cut it off?
It's so basic and I feel like an idiot, but I really have no idea.
These things have to be learnt just like anything else.
https://books.google.com/books?id=ukkVAwAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...
Eating fish takes a lot of skill and practice but the basic procedure is to remove the skin from the grilled fish with ultra care using a fork and knife. This will be very hard at first. It’s a skill.
Then remove whatever is left of the lungs.
You are left with the head, the white meat around the fish bone and the fin.
You will now just pick on the meat and eat it.
In the end you are left with a head, a fish bone and a fin. These 3 should still be connected and intact.
Sardines are the hardest because you will have to do it for 6 to 10 sardines (6 is the minimum acceptable portion).
Start with a big fish like a sea bass or something similar.
Good luck
Many other species of Tuna are threatened.
So it’s hard to talk about “Tuna” as being threatened or not threatened as it varies wildly.
The statement “the vast majority of tuna stocks are healthy” I guess could mean anything. Are they healthy because the vast majority that are left now that we fished out a few species are Skipjack?
It’s indeed a statement to be skeptical about. You can bend it to be trueish while at the same time saying “the vast majority of tuna species are threatened”. Glass half empty or half full.
The article does mention that smaller fish often found canned are lower in the food chain and thus have less mercury, but I would think that you'd have to look carefully at each species, and the sourcing, and the packaging before you could really say the health benefits are worth it.
The author goes into lot of detail.
TLDR 1. Eat small fish like Sardines, Mackerel, Anchovies etc
2. Get your omega 3 index
3. Make sure your omega 3 to omega 6 is good
There's a lot of options -- salmon (I personally have salmon sushi at least twice a week), omega-3 supplements, a dozen other healthy foods.
(For any readers who haven’t tried a great sardine, look for Matiz, La Gondola, any Portuguese brand, or in France, Rödel.)
Seafood is very healthy, the populations that eat a lot of seafood are very healthy, the stories about heavy metals or plastics are blown out of proportion and the toxicity claims is not supported by evidence.
I'm actually far more concerned about the preservation of wild life, with wild fish populations (such as tuna) going down due to over-consumption. I actually seek farmed fish — the omega 3 content might be lower, but the benefits of omega 3 are probably overblown too.
So there might actually be some benefits to the fearmongering, even if irrational ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I could see this being a possibility for many Asian countries, but I'm skeptical that this would be true for the US and Europe. Do you have any sources?
Regardless of the effects of CO2, that's quite possibly the most inaccurate and unscientific argument I've ever heard on this subject. Humans breathing has never caused an excessive amount of CO2, so drawing any relation of our byproducts to the effects of CO2 generated from manufacturing, energy and transportation industries is absurd.
"human excrements have a net null effect on global warming, as they are offset by carbon fixation in photosynthesis. As a result, they do not contribute to increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101102131108.h...
To humor you, I'll also show why your attempt at a second argument to be incorrect, regarding what constitutes pollution
>Pollution: “the introduction of harmful substances or products into the environment.”
I'll just assume you have a misunderstanding what pollution is rather than you purposely omitting details. Pollution can be literally anything introduced that changes the environment: "Pollution can take the form of chemical substances or energy, such as noise, heat or light"[1]. Were you aware of light pollution[2] and noise pollution[3]? We've already established that there is an imbalance of CO2 voume created by many large industries. If noise and light can have polluting affects, why can't CO2?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution
Also mostly per serving, not per gram. You can buy fish and meat without packaging that weighs as much as a sardine can.