News Coverage
FDA flounders in not fessing up to mercury in tuna
Published December 21, 2003
Feeling a little resentful over the new warnings on tuna consumption by pregnant and nursing women, as well as youngsters? You're not alone.
We're all stewing, with good reason. As Britney would sing, "Whoops! They've done it again."
Suddenly a popular, quick-to-fix and assumedly healthy food a dieter's must and a dinnertime staple is a no-no. We're advised to limit our consumption to 12 ounces or less a week. Isn't that just dandy?
Don't know about you, but I'm just a little irritated, because the government has known about this for some years. They have known the facts. Hear me? They knew. The Food and Drug Administration delayed relating that information to us, until forced to do so.
The risks are real. While one can't believe everything one reads, the facts on tuna are well-documented by the National Academy of Sciences. For years, that august group has tried to get the FDA to open up publicly about the dangers. Tuna stores mercury. When we eat tuna, so do we permanently.
"Welcome to my body, Mr. Mercury. Meet your new neighbors, Miss Pesticide and Joe Preservative. They have dozens of relatives living in here. You'll just love the PCBs; they're a fun family!"
Mercury blasts into the air out of power plants our good buddies in the politically powerful-and-therefore-less-regulated category of industry. Mercury zaps into the air and rides it, eventually, into our waters, large and small. There, fish consume it in the form of toxic methylmercury. Guess who's next on the food chain?
When anyone eats tuna and several other large fish by the way they're eating mercury. The average person can tolerate some mercury buildup. At greater risk are fetuses, infants and pre-schoolers. Thus, if one is pregnant or nursing, or happens to be a very young child, mercury buildup over time will endanger a young or developing nervous system. It is suspected in connection with learning disabilities and other neurological problems, among them delayed motor and cognitive development, attention deficit disorder, coordination problems. In short, that whole spectrum of problems kids have increasingly displayed in our schools.
The National Center for Policy Research for Women and Families in Washington, D.C., has publicized NAS statistics indicating that 60,000 children a year are born at risk because of exposure to methylmercury before birth.
So the FDA, having knowingly squelched the seriousness of that threat in the face of energy industry and tuna industry pressures, has at last told the truth, a truth that the National Academy of Sciences [NAS] has been urging it to share with us for years.
In fact, the FDA only talked after being outed by the Environmental Working Group. Although the FDA's own testing confirmed that white tuna contains significantly high levels of mercury three times higher than the FDA had acknowledged it did not release the results until the EWG filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
For shame. People appear to be more expendable than industry to our government.
Americans have every right to be angry at the FDA for its lack of courage. To make matters worse, the Bush administration is sluggish [at best] in its proposals to contain mercury pollution from industrial polluters. It is, in fact, easing Clinton-era federal restrictions, according to EPA proposals announced Monday. That won't help.
What's a person to do?
As most hobby fishermen know and Americans increasingly assume, fish are far less safe a food source than we would have them be. In making the switch from red meat to fish, we've simply exchanged one health danger for another.
Most of us will, and can, continue to eat tuna. Regardless of what diet or eating plan one adopts, however, the main thing to do is eat a balance of foods, as organically raised as possible. More vegetables, more fruit, more water and, in general, less of everything that adds fat or pollutants [often stored in fat cells] to the body.
Unfortunately, eating is a Russian roulette for vulnerable consumers, offering a smorgasbord of evils. If spiders in red grapes worries Massachusetts residents, consider the unseen dangers from chemical pesticides and fertilizers, mercury [which never goes away] and polluted water.
There's no safe place to turn. So exercise restraint and balance in what you eat. Somehow the human race will survive, as it always has done.
And add tuna to the list, along with shark and swordfish, of fish no longer safe to consume. As smaller fish contain lesser concentrations of mercury, it's safer to eat salmon, shrimp, blue crab, flounder and haddock, farmed trout and catfish.
But, while searching for alternatives to white tuna for children and mothers-to-be, Americans should also demand better environmental policies than we have seen under this administration.
It is insane for this nation to tolerate environmental policies that threaten our food supply. Better to clean up the source of mercury or other toxic pollutants a step the administration has shown less and less inclination to do. Only the public's loud voice will force change.
If we simply learn to eat less of the harmful substances without cleaning up the environment in which fish swim and animals roam, we may one day end up with nothing safe to eat.