News Coverage
Family Physicians Group Under Fire for Tuna Fish Ad
Published May 18, 2004
The largest organization of family physicians in the United States is coming under fire for running an advertisement in one of its publications urging pregnant women to eat tuna fish.
The ad, sponsored by Bumble Bee, Chicken of the Sea and StarKist, pictures a pregnant woman happily biting into a large tuna fish sandwich.
Some kinds of tuna fish contain high levels of mercury and public health experts urge pregnant women to limit their intake of it.
The ad was run in a publication of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) and sent to each of the Academy's 50,000 member doctors.
"Family Doctor: Your Essential Guide to Health and Wellbeing" is a 243-page magazine-style publication chock full of ads, some paid for by fast food or junk food companies, including a lead two-page ad from McDonald's.
The tuna ad runs on page 152, across from a chapter on "Pregnancy and Newborn."
The ad is titled "For Pregnant & Nursing Women: The Benefits of Eating Canned Tuna Are No Fish Tale."
When told about the ad, Jane Houlihan, director of research at the Environmental Working Group, said that it "borders on unethical to recommend that pregnant women eat canned tuna, a food that contains enough mercury that it poses potential harm to a baby's brain."
"The ad mentions all of the benefits of eating fish without mentioning the fairly high levels of mercury in canned tuna," she said. "I agree with everything in the ad about the benefits of the nutrients in fish. But I disagree with the kind of fish that they are recommending that pregnant women eat. Compared to other kinds of seafood - flounder, haddock - canned tuna is not a fish that pregnant women should be eating regularly."
Houlihan said that an association representing family doctors "shouldn't be part of recommending that pregnant women eat lots of canned tuna - that could be detrimental to the health of their patients."
But Dr. Michael Fleming, the president AAFP, defended the publication and its ads.
"The fact that these ads are there doesn't imply any endorsement," Dr. Fleming told Corporate Crime Reporter.
How much did McDonald's pay for the two-page ad up front?
"We don't know," Dr. Fleming said. "We paid a custom publisher to publish the magazine. We don't know how much was paid for the ads."
Dr. Fleming estimates that the AAFP made over $100,000 from the magazine's ad revenues.
He said that all ads were reviewed for scientific accuracy and taste and that a few ads were rejected.
He said he would have rejected a McDonald's ad showing a customer biting into a cheeseburger.
But what about the McDonald's ad featuring chocolate milk and chocolate pudding as a healthy alternative?
"Chocolate milk is a healthy food," Dr. Fleming says. "Children like chocolate milk."
What about the sugar?
"If I a had a choice between a Coca-cola and chocolate milk, I would go with chocolate milk every time," he says.
When asked about the tuna ad, Dr. Fleming says - "first of all, the pregnant woman in the ad is not eating a big hunk of tuna, she's eating a tuna fish sandwich."
"We don't have data that says women shouldn't be eating tuna," Dr. Fleming says. "There is no official recommendation anywhere that pregnant women shouldn't eat tuna fish."
Environmental Working Group's Houlihan disagrees.
Earlier this year, her group obtained FDA documents showing that canned albacore, known as white tuna, had mercury levels twice as high as past FDA estimates for canned tuna, and three time the levels in light tuna. (See www.ewg.org).
Houlihan says that the FDA buckled under pressure from the tuna industry and refused to warn women about the dangers of eating tuna, and merely recommended that pregnant women limit all fish consumption to 12 ounces a week.
Houlihan's group has sued the FDA over the recommendation, arguing that if followed, the FDA's advice would actually increase the number of women of childbearing age with unsafe levels of mercury in their blood.
Houlihan says that back in 2001, her group conducted an investigation which showed that FDA officials had quashed findings of public opinion research on how to tell women about mercury contamination of seafood. The suppressing of the findings came after meetings with tuna industry lobbyists.
Dr. Fleming admits that some of his members have complained directly to him about the corporate ads that dominate the "Family Doctor" publication, although he won't say how many. He says that for future publications of "Family Doctor," AAFP might "tighten the criteria" for the ads "a little bit."