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July 9, 2009
How Much Fish For Health? We’ll Tell You.
This week we launched HowMuchFish.com, the only online seafood calculator that quantifies both the health risks and benefits of a diet rich in seafood. Fed up with fishy activists like Greenpeace (a group more concerned with “saving” the fish than with your health) and Jeremy Piven (who, let’s face it, is just trying to save his own hide), we analyzed USDA nutritional information and worked with registered dieticians to explore both sides of the fish equation. And guess what? Seafood scored high marks across the board.
HowMuchFish.com puts conflicting information about seafood and health into a useful context (finally!) by displaying the nutritional content of the top ten most popular seafood species—the positive impact of fish consumption as well as the hypothetical risks from trace amounts of mercury.
Here’s an example: A 130-pound woman who enjoys canned light tuna would need to eat 123 ounces (7.7 pounds) of it every week in order to risk any negative health impact from mercury. But in just one 6-ounce serving, she gets all of the protein and selenium she needs for the day, as well as high levels of omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin B12, potassium, and iron. All of those health benefits clearly outweigh the miniscule amount of mercury detectable in that can of tuna (as well as activists’ scaremongering).
As we’re telling reporters today:
“The Internet is full of doom-and-gloom seafood calculators that only tell half the story. We’re trying to bring some balance to the discussion. The entire medical literature contains zero cases of fetal mercury poisoning related to fish consumption in the United States. But it’s full of evidence that fish is a health food.”
This message is crucial given how successful anti-seafood activists have been in scaring people away from such a healthy and important dietary staple. In our recently updated “Tuna Meltdown” report, we found that more than a quarter-million underprivileged American children were born at risk of having abnormally low IQs between 2000 and 2006, just because their low-income mothers were afraid to eat fish during their pregnancies.
Ready to give the calculator a test drive? Visit HowMuchFish.com and help us spread the word. Seafood sanity is back. Come on in – the water’s fine.
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