Healing with Food Article

Fish

Accompanying recipes: Cilantro Pesto and Pacific Halibut

Once upon a time, fish was a healthy food choice. Unfortunately, today that’s not always true. Whether you snag your fish in a market, lake or stream, it’s in your health’s best interest to make informed choices.

Here are two important criteria to consider: toxicity and sustainability. Also, there are preferred ways to prepare fish to minimize toxins. Let’s examine them.

Toxicity

As our oceans, lakes and rivers become increasingly contaminated, so do fish. Be they farmed or wild, nearly all fish contain trace amounts of the highly toxic methyl mercury. Some fish contain high levels and thus pose the greatest risk to people who eat them regularly.

The most mercury-contaminated are long-lived, large fish that feed on other fish. So favor smaller fish.

The FDA advises pregnant women, breast-feeding women, women considering becoming pregnant, infants, young children and the elderly to not eat shark, swordfish, king mackerel and tilefish.

Consider that the FDA stance tends to be conservative. Thus, it might be prudent for everyone—pregnant or otherwise—to consider minimizing consumption of large fish, including tuna.

Fortunately, there is a tasty kitchen remedy that counters mercury. Apparently cilantro helps mobilize mercury stored in the brain and spinal cord and excrete it via the stool or urine. See Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine, March 2001. Therefore, lavish your fish supper with cilantro (see accompanying recipes).

In addition to mercury, other toxins found in problematic levels in fish include the chlorinated compounds PCBs, dioxins, chlordane and two pesticides, dieldrin and DDT. Typically fish caught near industrial, urban and agriculture areas are higher in these contaminants.

Sustainability

In addition to making food choices that support your individual health, also consider our collective health. This makes sustainability our second guideline in selecting fish. The United Nations reports that over one-third of all fish species are vulnerable to, or in immediate danger of, extinction. It is therefore critical to purchase fish only from a reputable merchant who does not carry endangered species.

When considering sustainability, farmed fish might seem an obvious solution. However, producing “factory” fish is problematic.

Farmed fish are fed hormones, antibiotics and chemicals to enhance their growth and to keep them from dying in overcrowded conditions. Farmed fish, most commonly tilapia, may be fed hormones that reverse their sex as a way of yielding more succulent flesh. Shrimp farming, to name just one, also severely damages offshore habitat and destroys the local fishing economy.

To make feed for farmed fish, the ocean is mined for trash (non-marketable) fish varieties. This is an extraordinarily wasteful process.

In an effort toward sustainability, some farmed fish are fed grain and soy pellets. However, one can’t help but wonder—how healthy are farmed fish raised on grains and beans? To drastically alter the diet of any species makes it vulnerable to disease.

Before purchasing farmed fish, ask for the details of what the fish are fed plus a guarantee that the farm does not have a negative impact upon the environment. Farmed fish may include abalone, catfish, caviar, clams, mussels, oysters, salmon, striped bass, tilapia and trout.

Best Cooking Methods

Before cooking fish, clean and gut it, because some chemicals, including PCBs, tend to concentrate in the organs, particularly in the liver and fat. These toxins are associated with industry and agriculture; thus, fish caught in the San Francisco Bay or the Great Lakes Region are more contaminated than fish from Alaskan waters.

Therefore, trim the fat, remove the skin, and fillet the fish before cooking. Fat is located along the back and the belly, and in the dark meat along the lateral line running along the side of the fish. Skinning fish will remove the thin layer of fat under the skin.

Favor cooking methods that enable the juices to drain away such as steaming, poaching, baking or grilling. (Consider minimizing recipes that retain the juices such as fish soup and fried, breaded or batter-coated fish.) Discard fish cooking juices. According to government data, using these methods may eliminate about half or more of the PCBs in fish.

Making Choices

What fish to put on the dinner table? I favor small- to medium-sized wild fish not in danger of extinction and without high mercury levels. This currently includes halibut (Pacific), sablefish/black cod, salmon, sardines, sea bass (white) and squid. The shellfish not in danger of extinction include Dungeness crab, lobster (rock/spiny), and shrimp (trap- caught).

You may also wish to minimize shellfish consumption. These scavengers are most commonly implicated in food sensitivities and food poisoning.

Fish Low in Mercury
Shellfish
Salmon—wild
Sole
Flounder
Cod
Haddock
Ocean Perch

Fish Medium in Mercury
Light Canned Tuna
Mahi Mahi
Halibut

Fish High in Mercury
White canned tuna
Shark
Swordfish

For information about fish healthfulness and sustainability, see:
www.cfsan.fda.gov/~frf/sea-mehg.html
www.epa.gov/waterscience/fishadvice/advice.html
www.mbayaq.org/cr/seafoodwatch.asp

Food antidotes that help cleanse the body of mercury include seaweed and cilantro. To find all seaweed containing recipes, use the Search feature. For accompanying recipes see: Pacific Halibut and Cilantro Pesto.

May you be well nourished,

Rebecca Wood