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Fish - The good, bad and toxic!

Fish is being touted as a wonder food today. The Omega oils are widely proclaimed as a miracle cure for cholestrol, ageing and almost everything from skin rejuvenation to increased chances of conception!

Fish quickly deteriorates, so be fussy when buying fish. Fortunately there is an easy way to gauge its freshness. The eyes are the best indicator , they rapidly loses moisture and pressure. Fish with sunken eyes is stale - don't buy it.

It is difficult to assess the freshness of processed fish products like fish fingers, crumbed fillets and fish cakes. Even worse, it is difficult to see where the fish came from before the processors worked with it. The labelling laws only require them to say where the food was processed, not where it's ingredients came from. Often the processors get away with a phrase like "Made from local and imported product".

Not all countries have the same standards when it comes to food production and environmental testing. Food labelling laws allow manufacturers to avoid divulging where their constituents came from.

Fish are a good example to demonstrate the importance of product labelling and quality controls. We tend to believe the advertising hype when it comes to fish. We believe our salmon was snatched out of a pristine mountain stream in Canada by some fisherman who goes out daily, braving big brown bears as he selects only the right breed of fish for the canneries. In actual fact much of it comes from fish farms and has never seen a mountain stream. Fish used in products like fish patties, crumbed fillets, fish fingers and marinara topping for pizzas, can be sourced anywhere, most likely a fish farm.

Manufacturers strive to keep us totally ignorant where the fish content of their product came from or what type of fish they use. Do you honestly believe that a processing plant, mincing fish up into a paste, is using prime fish?
If not then what type of fish are they using?
Sub-prime?
Then how "Sub" is their sub-prime fish?

However, the fish patty factory used imported fish and only when there was a drop in market prices did it use any local fish. The imported fish came from Asia, they told me. They even gave the name of the agent who handled the importing for them. I discovered that the "agent" imported the fish for animal feed, meal and fertiliser processing as well, from Vietnam. The fish was graded in Vietnam, not here.

Now I was alarmed. In Vietnam many fish farms are on the Mekong River. So are many cities and the two are often very close neighbours. On one trip there I recall driving over the bridge to My Tho, a fairly large city, and to my surprise, seeing the pens of a group of fish farms below, opposite the city itself. I couldn't imagine obtaining a licence to place a fish farm in any river opposite a city, here in Australia, Canada, the UK or the USA. Even with strict environmental controls, the risk of accidental contamination is too high. Daily run off from busy roads contains high quantities of heavy metal pollutants. This runs into storm water drains and into waterways, not through sewage treatment plants like household and industrial waste.

The bridge into My Tho, with the fish farms under the bridge (right hand side) opposite the city.

Given the effects of the defoliant spraying during the Vietnam war, where over 12,000,000 gallons of defoliant much of it containing Dioxin, was sprayed over the country and the fact that this is still leaching into the rivers, I would have reservations about using these fish for anything except fertiliser and even then only in small quantities. Dioxin is the most toxic man made poison ever created (see our article on Food Labelling).

While fish is low in fats and the few it does contain are high in good cholestrol, it can also contain a high level of contaminants and this can vary, depending on it's origin.

As the world's fish stocks decrease and fisheries data worldwide indicates all stocks have dropped during the last century, we are turning to fish farming. As the world population increases, so does the level of pollution, especially in waterways - the most convenient sites for fish farms.

Unlike land farming, where we grow herbivores for meat, fish farming favours the predatory species and this creates another problem as it works through the food chain. For the purposes of this illustration, let's compare land produce to fish and assume that at each level of the food chain concentrates the toxins to double the previous concentration (actually it's usually much more):

On Land

The contimination on land appears in grasses , in low concentrations over a long period of time.
Grazing animals eat the grass and the small intakes of contimination are added together and concentrated in the meat by at least 100%. Because milk and eggs are 'short time' products, the contiminats are still concentrated in them but not repeatedly over a long time, as they are in the meat. Yearling lamb can contain 75% of the contaminants of hogget, the meat from older sheep.
Humans consume the produce and concentrate the contiminants, now at 1000% of what they were in the pasture. They are now in sufficient concentrations to be toxic.

Grazing Animals concentrate the contiminants in pasture

In the Ocean

Contaminants in the water are filtered out by algae and concentrated 100%. Each organism contains at least twice the level of the water's toxin.
These tiny creatures are eaten in their thousands by smaller fish. The toxins are now concentrated by 1000%.
The larger fish like tuna, trevally, salmon and many of the fish species we eat, feed on the smaller fish. This concentrates the toxins a further 100% to 100,000% or 10,000 times the concentration in the ocean.

The ocean food chain concentrates toxins.

Toxins are concentrated more in marine food chains than land food chains because there are more stages in the food chain. In the oceans, the inititial contaminations are more diluted. The same cannot be said for lakes, river systems and small bodies of water.

Shellfish
Shellfish are a valuable source of Zinc and the body needs approximately 100 mgs a day. 200 grams of shellfish (which includes crab nad lobster meat) yeilds 7mgs of Zinc and is one of the richest natural sources of Zinc.

Unfortunately shellfish has a very short shelf life. When not refrigerated, the shelf life can be measured hours. Bacteria rapidly reproduce, rendering the shellfish highly toxic. Shellfish should only be purchased chilled or frozen.

Because shellfish are filter feeders, it is vital to know that it was harvested in clean water. Contaminants like heavy metals are rapidly concentrated in shellfish so it is important to know where they came from.

In cases of shellfish poisoning, the poisonous ingredients are toxins made by algae-like organisms called dinoflagellates, which the shellfish have consumed. Poisoning can range from vomiting to paralysis and death, depending on the toxins in the shellfish. Shellfish poisoning (which covers several different types of poisons) only will occur if the shellfish comes from contaminated waters, is not kept chilled or is too old.

Unlike packaged foods at the supermarket, fish often does not come in a package. Regardless, it is very important to know where it comes from. "Imported" is not a geographical location. Imported cars may invoke images of luxury - the same cannot be said for fish.

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