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Good for your health and the environment: Why we should be eating oily fish

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Tuesday, April 23, 2024

A range of economic, nutritional, religious and ideological factors influence our diets. The key, however, lies in finding a balance that cares for both our health and that of the planet. The traditional Mediterranean and Atlantic diets are two options that meet these requirements. Fish plays an important role in both, providing flavor as well as nutritional value. Globally, annual per capita fish consumption has almost doubled over the last 50 years, from 10.75kg in 1970 to 20.03kg in 2021. It has grown exponentially in China, where the average person ate 4.58kg in 1970, and 39.87kg in 2021, and has also grown significantly in the EU, where annual consumption has increased by 40%, from 16.58kg to 23.44kg in the same period. Oily fish is defined as fish with a proportion of fat higher than 5-6% of their muscle mass: sardines, longfin tuna, mackerel and horse mackerel are some the most well known examples. Oily fish has been part of many countries' cultural heritage throughout history. In Spain, for example, sardines are integral to the San Juan festivities in June, while the coastal fishing season for longfin tuna is also traditionally followed due to the seasonal migration of fish in search of nutrient-rich waters and suitable temperatures for breeding and feeding.   Oily fish as part of a healthy diet On a nutritional level, oily fish stands out thanks to three important components: Polyunsaturated omega-3 fatty acids, which can help to protect against cardiovascular disease and other illnesses. Peptides – protein molecules made up of two or more amino acids – which have various health benefits such as preventing or treating conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity. High vitamin content (notably vitamins A, D and E) and other micronutrients such as magnesium, selenium and iodine. The benefits of this combination of nutrients have been demonstrated by the GALIAT (Galician Atlantic Diet) project, led by the Santiago de Compostela University Hospital. The project consists of a series of clinical trials to determine the effects of the traditional Atlantic diet on the general population. The results show a reduction in metabolic syndrome – a group of conditions that increase the risk of heart disease and diabetes.   Sustainable fishing practices The fishing season for sardines, mackerel and horse mackerel runs, with varying intensity, from May to October. Plankton – which these fish eat – is more plentiful at this time of year, giving the fish a higher fat content and a better flavour. The most common method used to catch oily fish is known as "seine" fishing, one of the most environmentally friendly fishing techniques in use today: It produces little to no bycatch (the unwanted part of the catch that is not kept and is thrown back into the sea). Because this technique involves surrounding a shoal of fish with a net in order to catch them, it carefully targets the desired catch, meaning it does not trap or harm other species, thus helping to protect biodiversity. Taking every stage of production into account, its overall carbon footprint is one of the lowest among all sources of dietary protein. Horse mackerel fishing, for example, produces an average footprint equivalent to 550g of CO2 per 100g of protein, while sardines produce 646g of CO2 per 100g protein. This puts oily fish on a par with dairy products, vegetables and legumes, and lower than most fruits and meat.   Oily fish and traditional cooking Fish consumption is part and parcel of the evolution of Homo sapiens. For hundreds of thousands of years our species has incorporated it as a staple food, and its preparation has been perfected throughout history. Oily fish lends itself to a multitude of uses in the kitchen, from simple grilling or griddling to more elaborate dishes like tataki or papillote. One advantage of oily fish is that it is easy to clean and bone, meaning it can be included in children's diets. Given such a wide range of uses, along with its nutritional benefits and low environmental impact, this type of fish should be making regular appearances on our plates. Gumersindo Feijoo Costa, Catedrático de Ingeniería Química. Centro Singular CRETUS, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

"Fish plays an important role in [multiples diets], providing flavor as well as nutritional value"

A range of economic, nutritional, religious and ideological factors influence our diets. The key, however, lies in finding a balance that cares for both our health and that of the planet.

The traditional Mediterranean and Atlantic diets are two options that meet these requirements. Fish plays an important role in both, providing flavor as well as nutritional value.

Globally, annual per capita fish consumption has almost doubled over the last 50 years, from 10.75kg in 1970 to 20.03kg in 2021. It has grown exponentially in China, where the average person ate 4.58kg in 1970, and 39.87kg in 2021, and has also grown significantly in the EU, where annual consumption has increased by 40%, from 16.58kg to 23.44kg in the same period.

Oily fish is defined as fish with a proportion of fat higher than 5-6% of their muscle mass: sardines, longfin tuna, mackerel and horse mackerel are some the most well known examples.

Oily fish has been part of many countries' cultural heritage throughout history. In Spain, for example, sardines are integral to the San Juan festivities in June, while the coastal fishing season for longfin tuna is also traditionally followed due to the seasonal migration of fish in search of nutrient-rich waters and suitable temperatures for breeding and feeding.

 

Oily fish as part of a healthy diet

On a nutritional level, oily fish stands out thanks to three important components:

  • Polyunsaturated omega-3 fatty acids, which can help to protect against cardiovascular disease and other illnesses.

  • Peptides – protein molecules made up of two or more amino acids – which have various health benefits such as preventing or treating conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity.

  • High vitamin content (notably vitamins A, D and E) and other micronutrients such as magnesium, selenium and iodine.

The benefits of this combination of nutrients have been demonstrated by the GALIAT (Galician Atlantic Diet) project, led by the Santiago de Compostela University Hospital. The project consists of a series of clinical trials to determine the effects of the traditional Atlantic diet on the general population. The results show a reduction in metabolic syndrome – a group of conditions that increase the risk of heart disease and diabetes.

 

Sustainable fishing practices

The fishing season for sardines, mackerel and horse mackerel runs, with varying intensity, from May to October. Plankton – which these fish eat – is more plentiful at this time of year, giving the fish a higher fat content and a better flavour.

The most common method used to catch oily fish is known as "seine" fishing, one of the most environmentally friendly fishing techniques in use today:

  • It produces little to no bycatch (the unwanted part of the catch that is not kept and is thrown back into the sea). Because this technique involves surrounding a shoal of fish with a net in order to catch them, it carefully targets the desired catch, meaning it does not trap or harm other species, thus helping to protect biodiversity.

  • Taking every stage of production into account, its overall carbon footprint is one of the lowest among all sources of dietary protein. Horse mackerel fishing, for example, produces an average footprint equivalent to 550g of CO2 per 100g of protein, while sardines produce 646g of CO2 per 100g protein. This puts oily fish on a par with dairy products, vegetables and legumes, and lower than most fruits and meat.

 

Oily fish and traditional cooking

Fish consumption is part and parcel of the evolution of Homo sapiens. For hundreds of thousands of years our species has incorporated it as a staple food, and its preparation has been perfected throughout history.

Oily fish lends itself to a multitude of uses in the kitchen, from simple grilling or griddling to more elaborate dishes like tataki or papillote. One advantage of oily fish is that it is easy to clean and bone, meaning it can be included in children's diets.

Given such a wide range of uses, along with its nutritional benefits and low environmental impact, this type of fish should be making regular appearances on our plates.

Gumersindo Feijoo Costa, Catedrático de Ingeniería Química. Centro Singular CRETUS, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read the full story here.
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Forty Years After the Bhopal Disaster, the Danger Still Remains

In many ways, we all live in Bhopal now. We must continue to fight for a future in which we all have the right to live in healthy environments.

Forty years ago this month, a Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India, sprung a toxic gas leak, exposing half a million people to toxic fumes. Thousands of people lost their lives in the immediate aftermath, with the death toll climbing to more than 20,000 over the next two decades. Countless others, including children of survivors, continue to endure chronic health issues. In the United States, the events in Bhopal ignited a grassroots movement to expose and address the toxic chemicals in our water, air, and neighborhoods. In 1986, just two years after the disaster, this growing awareness led Congress to pass the first National Right to Know Act, which requires companies to publicly disclose their use of many toxic chemicals. In India, Bhopal victims have had a long struggle for justice. In 1989, survivors flew to a Union Carbide shareholders meeting in Houston to protest the inadequate compensation for the trauma they’d suffered. The settlement awarded each Bhopal victim was a mere $500—which a spokesperson for Dow Chemical, Union Carbide’s parent company, called “plenty good for an Indian.”  Union Carbide had the survivors arrested before they could enter the meeting. Meanwhile, their abandoned chemical factory was still leaking toxic chemicals into the surrounding neighborhoods and drinking water.  Nevertheless, Bhopal survivors never stopped fighting. They opened a free clinic to treat the intergenerational health effects caused by the disaster. They marched 500 miles between Bhopal and New Delhi. They staged hunger strikes. They created memorials to the disaster and established a museum to ensure that the horrors of their collective past are not forgotten.    The survivors even obtained an extradition order for Union Carbide’s former CEO, Warren Anderson, but the U.S. government never acted on that request. Forty years later, the factory in Bhopal has never been properly cleaned and is still leaking poison.  Unfortunately, the kinds of chemicals that flow through the veins of Bhopal survivors also flow through ours. The petrochemical industry has brought us together in a perverse solidarity, having chemically trespassed into places all over the world. According to one figure, Americans are exposed to dangerous chemical fires, leaks, and explosions about once every two days. In one dramatic example in early 2023, a rail tanker filled with vinyl chloride derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, forcing the evacuation of 2,000 residents.  Nearly all Americans now carry toxic substances known as PFAS in our bodies. These have been linked to cancer, liver and kidney disease, and immune dysfunction. And the continued burning of fossil fuels is killing millions of people each year around the world through air pollution.  Petrochemical and fossil fuel companies know they can only survive if they avoid liability for the damage they are doing to our health and the planet’s ecosystems. That’s why they are heavily invested in lobbying to prevent any such accountability. Polluting industries are certain to have strong allies in the coming Trump Administration, which plans to open even more land to fossil fuel production and, under the blueprint for conservative governance known as Project 2025, to slash environmental and public health regulations. But we can take inspiration from the people of Bhopal, whose fierce commitment to health and justice sparked a global movement. Earlier this month, on the fortieth anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, congressional allies of this movement including U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, and U.S. Representatives Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, and Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, introduced a resolution designating December 3 as National Chemical Disaster Awareness Day. “Chemical disasters are often the result of corporations cutting corners and prioritizing profits over safety,” said Merkley, who chairs the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee. “These catastrophes cloud communities with toxic fumes, upending lives and threatening the health and property of those living and working close by.” He called for “stronger laws to prevent chemical disasters and keep our communities and workers safe.” This growing global alliance, which has been called the largest movement for environmental health and justice in history, is fighting for a future in which everyone has the right to live in a healthy environment. It’s a movement that unites us all. Because in many ways, we all live in Bhopal now. This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service. Gary Cohen is the president of Health Care Without Harm and a long time member of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal. Read more by Gary Cohen December 18, 2024 3:25 PM

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Study Miscalculation Has Everyone Talking about Black Plastic Spatulas Again. Experts Are Still Concerned

The scientists behind a popular study on the health effects of flame retardants in black plastic cooking utensils and toys made a calculation error but still say their revised findings are alarming

Should you throw out your black plastic spatula? A recent study that reported alarming levels of several flame retardants in common black-colored plastic items (including cooking utensils, toys and hair products) had many people suddenly taking stock of their inky array of plastic kitchenware and considering wood or metal alternatives. And the reasons for the concern were understandable: the study’s findings, published in Chemosphere, highlighted potential health effects from exposure to the flame retardants, particularly decabromodiphenyl ether (decaBDE)—a chemical the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned in 2021 for its apparent links to cancer and reproductive, developmental and immunologic toxicity effects.But this week the study’s authors issued a correction that suggests exposure to decaBDE from the tested products isn’t as close to the EPA’s safety reference level as they initially thought. The decaBDE exposure they estimated from the screened products is still correct, but it’s one tenth of the reference dose. The study had miscalculated the comparison by an order of magnitude.The amount of flame retardants in such products is “not as harmful, with respect to the EPA guidance, as [the researchers] originally stated, although, with these chemicals, they may be harmful when you’re exposed to small amounts over a long period of time,” says Andrew Turner, a biogeochemist at the University of Plymouth in England, who wasn’t involved in the research and studies the disposal and recycling of plastic consumer goods. “It’s difficult to put numbers on these chemicals.”On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The study authors issued an apology for the mistake in which they maintained that the “calculation error does not affect the overall conclusion of the paper.”“Our results still show that when toxic additives are used in plastic, they can significantly contaminate products made with recycled content that do not require flame retardancy,” says Megan Liu, a co-author of the recent study and science and policy manager at Toxic-Free Future, an environmental health research and advocacy group. “The products found in this study to contain hazardous flame retardants included items with high exposure potential, such as things that touch our food, as well as toys, which come in contact with kids.”Why might some black plastics contain flame retardants? Flame retardants are required in certain products (often including computers, TVs and other common electronic items) to meet fire safety regulations. To reduce the amount of e-waste and fossil fuels needed to make new plastics, some of these items are recycled into black plastics. But the problem is that “you could also recycle the flame retardants and other chemicals that are associated with that plastic,” says Stuart Harrad, an environmental chemist at the University of Birmingham in England, who wasn’t involved in the paper. “Now that’s fine to some degree, I suppose, if you’re only recycling the plastic into uses like TV sets, where you need to meet fire safety regulations. But the point is here is that that isn’t happening.”The new study’s main goal was to identify any flame retardant chemicals in various common products. The researchers screened 203 items, ranging from plastic sushi take-out trays to toy necklaces—and found 17 of them were contaminated with high levels of flame retardants. Fourteen of those products contained high levels of decaBDE.The U.S. has largely banned decaBDE and other polybrominated-diphenyl-ether-based flame retardants. New electronic goods use safer flame retardants, but older electronics that contain decaBDE could still be in many households or might have been only recently tossed out for recycling, Turner says. “When you talk about some electronic devices, they last quite a long time,” he adds. These older devices might only be reaching recycling plants now.The new study’s findings generally line up with past evidence that recycled plastics—and flame retardants—can end up in toys and cooking utensils, Harrad says. But it’s been unclear whether the mere presence of flame retardants in a cooking utensil pose any health threat to humans; there are many contributing factors, including the source, the dose, the duration of exposure and any other chemicals that may be present. In a 2018 study Harrad and his colleagues tested potential exposure from black plastic cooking utensils and found that uptake through the skin from simply holding them was negligible. But when they tested them in prolonged cooking experiments with hot oil, about 20 percent of the flame retardants in a utensil transferred into the oil on average. “That’s really because the oil, particularly hot oil, is going to be a pretty good way of extracting these chemicals,” Harrad says.How did the miscalculation occur?The authors of the new study estimated humans’ potential exposure to decaBDE from the plastic products by using the calculation in Harrad’s 2018 study. They applied this calculation to the median levels of decaBDE detected in the products they tested. This wound up being an estimated 34,700 nanograms per day of decaBDE. They then compared that figure with the EPA’s reference dose of 7,000 nanograms per kilogram of body weight per day. (Some researchers note that this measurement was derived from lab tests and animal models, not direct human testing). To better assess human risk, the scientists calculated a reference dose based on a 60-kg (132-pound) person and initially found 42,000 ng per day, a value alarmingly close to the 34,700 ng per day of exposure they estimated from the new data. But 7,000 multiplied by 60 is actually 420,000. This may have been a simple math error, but the correction massively reduces how close the amount of exposure is to the maximum acceptable limit.The figure with the miscalculation was “contextualizing the levels that we saw in our study, thinking that it could be helpful for people,” Liu says. “This was really just one part of our study that isn’t even part of our key findings.”She and her co-authors have emphasized that the error shouldn’t detract from one of the study’s main conclusions: that none of these flame-retardant chemicals, especially those that have been banned, should be found, in any amount, in these products in the first place.“They're probably banging their head in frustration when they found out they made that calculation error,” Harrad says, adding that the rest of their findings “were perfectly plausible.”“The study does highlight the fact that we’ve not sorted this out yet—that we’re still finding these chemicals coming through into new goods that contain recycled plastics,” Harrad says. “We do need to step up our efforts to isolate these chemicals from waste and make sure that they don't get recycled.”So should you really ditch your black plastic spatula? 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By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterWEDNESDAY, Dec. 18, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Microscopic plastic particles in the air could be contributing to...

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