Analysis of 40 Studies Shows Seafood is Often Mislabelled
The guardian recently analyzed data from 44 recent studies of more than 9,000 seafood samples from supermarkets, restaurants, and fishmongers. The data collected comes from more than 30 countries and shows that 36% of seafood was mislabeled.
In some cases, fish were labeled as different species in the same family. In many cases, seafood is a cheaper, unpopular species of fish compared to what is supposed to be sold.
Because seafood is one of the most popular foods traded internationally, there is more room for mislabeling due to complex supply chains. The mislabeling of seafood is not a new problem and is significantly worse in restaurants than in stores.
Substituted fish can pose health risks. One frequent substitute for some varieties of tuna is escolar, a hard-to-digest oilfish. Others have unique parasites that may threaten health. Still others are less nutritious: when tilapia is a stand-in for red snapper, people are eating a fish with lower levels of nutrients, including lower omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids.
Between the mislabeling of seafood and the abundance of microplastics and other toxins often present in seafood, I generally try to avoid it altogether. When I do eat meat I stick to local grass fed organic meat, usually beef or pork.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjZsae-gSto
New Study Finds Microplastics in Seafood
A new study published in Environmental Science and Technology found microplastics in 100% of the seafood tested. Researchers acquired 10 oysters, 10 farmed tiger prawns, 10 wild squids, 10 sardines, and five wild blue crabs. All of the samples tested positive for at least trace levels of plastics, with varying amounts of plastic in each type of seafood. Sardines had the highest levels of plastic.
The study found that in an average serving of seafood, a person could consume approximately 0.7mg of plastic when eating oysters or squid, and up to 30mg of plastic in an average serving of sardines. A grain of rice weighs 30mg, on average.
“From the edible marine species tested, sardines had the highest plastic content, which was a surprising result,” Riberio told the University of Queensland. “Another interesting aspect was the diversity of microplastic types found among species, with polyethylene predominant in fish and polyvinyl chloride the only plastic detected in oysters.”
Polyethylene, the most popular plastic in the world, was the most common plastic found in the samples. Plastics commonly end up in the ocean where they breakdown into tiny pieces called microplastics. Microplastics are absorbed by plankton and eaten by other marine life and are carried through the food chain. Microplastics are in everything, from the food we eat to the rainwater.
Microplastics are In Your Poop
According to a recent study presented at the 26th United European Gastroenterology (UEG) Week, the plastics surrounding the food we eat has now made it into our gut. Researchers from the Medical University of Vienna and the Environment Agency Austria tested eight volunteers from a variety of countries, including Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the U.K., and Austria. These volunteers were asked to keep a food diary for a week leading up to having a stool sample taken. Of the 8 volunteers, none of them were vegetarian, and six reported eating sea fish. After analyzing the samples they collected, researchers confirmed that every single volunteer had microplastics in their stool. Scientists identified nine different kinds of plastics, including polypropylene (PP), polyethylene-terephthalate (PET), and others. Dr. Philipp Schwabl is the lead researcher who presented the findings at the 26th UEG Week.
This is the first study of its kind and confirms what we have long suspected, that plastics ultimately reach the human gut. Of particular concern is what this means to us, and especially patients with gastrointestinal diseases. While the highest plastic concentrations in animal studies have been found in the gut, the smallest microplastic particles are capable of entering the blood stream, lymphatic system and may even reach the liver. Now that we have first evidence for microplastics inside humans, we need further research to understand what this means for human health.”
The researchers of this study chose to focus on food packaging. Plastic food packaging is everywhere. In 2013, the plastic industry produced 78 million metric tons of packaging and only 28 percent of that was recycled. The amount of non-bottle plastic packaging containers (dairy tubs, deli containers, lids, etc.) recycled in the U.S. reached nearly 1.3 billion pounds in 2015. If that number is 28 percent of all of the non-bottle plastic in the U.S., the total amount of plastics directly touching deli meats, dips, spreads, sandwiches, and other popular foodstuffs is roughly 4.6 billion pounds. How do you avoid that?
It’s possible to limit your exposure to plastics through the food you eat. Shopping at the farmer’s market, bringing your own packaging to stores, and choosing items packaged in paper or glass are all potential options. That’s not the only way a person is exposed to microplastics, though. Water is another avenue of exposure. An analysis of popular bottled water brands found that 90 percent of them contained microplastics. The actual water bottle could be the source of those pieces, but a study of the water in major metropolitan areas found that 83 percent of samples contained plastic microfibers.
Microplastics enter our environment through a myriad of ways, like cosmetics, manufacturing processes, fishing gear, and packaging. Once microplastics are in the water, they are impossible for fish and other marine life (including coral) to avoid and can sometimes even get stuck in gills. These plastics are more than an irritant. They also contain BPA and other similar substances and can disrupt the endocrine system and cause serious health concerns.
We’ve known about plastics pollution in the oceans since the 1960s and 70s. Our use of it has increased dramatically since then. Four years ago, it was estimated there were between 15 and 50 trillion pieces of plastics in the oceans, and scientists have been discovering significant amounts of plastic in whales, birds, and fish. This study is confirmation that we are no different.
Roughly half of all of our seafood is from farmed sources. That isn’t inherently a bad thing. Farmed fish seems like a logically, responsible consumer choice. The problem is that modern agriculture’s ability to slowly strip away as many nutrients from our food as possible while making our food toxic, and causing irreversible environmental damage, is not exclusive to land.
Wild-caught seafood is also problematic. Hopefully, we all know how bad the condition is in our oceans. In addition to overfishing certain species to the point of potential food chain collapse, wild caught seafood frequently comes with mercury or PCBs (an industrial chemical). For those who like to eat fish or appreciate an omega-3, DHA brain boost, is does our current seafood model offer anything left to enjoy or worth preserving?
Here’s Where You Are
Much like land-based agriculture, the best way to ensure the quality of your seafood is to do it yourself or get it from a trusted individual or company (although the latter is less likely). Unlike agriculture, opportunities to exercise personal seafood quality control are few and far between. Many don’t live near water, and those that do should be cautious of eating local fish due to PCBs, mercury, DDT, and other chemical runoff. You could farm your own tilapia…but this isn’t feasible for almost everyone. With those eliminated, the question is: farmed or wild caught?
The Elephant Under the Sea
Much time has been spent discussing the differences between farmed and wild caught fish, and everyone agrees that farm raised fish is fattier than wild caught. From a health standpoint, fatty acids are the best reason to eat fish. But this doesn’t mean that farm raised fish are better for you, as the fatty acids in tilapia are primarily omega-6s and an excess of those are more likely to increase cardiovascular risk than boost brainpower. Farmed fish are also fed a completely unnatural diet from grain to chicken meal to other fish meal to other animal waste products. This often results in fattier, less nutritious seafood with more chemical residues than wild caught fish (though wild caught fish does have high levels of mercury). Neither option is a slam dunk, but farmed fish are more likely to cause long-term health issues.
Seafood Safety List
There’s really no way to eat guarantee that your seafood dinner will be healthy and sustainable, though most seafood falls into one of three categories – safe and sustainable, unsafe, or unsustainable. Safe and sustainable seafood is the best possible type of seafood to consume, as it is less likely to have high levels of mercury, PCBs, and harvested in a way that doesn’t damage the ecosystem.
Safe and sustainable seafood is the best possible type of seafood to consume, as it is less likely to have high levels of mercury, PCBs, and is harvested in a way that doesn’t damage the ecosystem. Location matters quite a bit when looking for sustainable fish populations, but some of the more common examples of this category include:
oysters (farmed or not)
Pacific sardines (wild caught)
Atlantic mackerel (wild caught)
clams (farmed or not)
Alaskan salmon
Unsafe fish are fish that are likely to have high amounts of mercury and PCBs and should be avoided. These fish are generally bigger in size, as their longer lifespan allows for a greater build-up of contaminants. They are not necessarily sustainable, but some of these fish include:
shrimp
swordfish
tilapia (farmed)
Atlantic cod
shark
big-eye tuna
ahi tuna
Atlantic salmon (farmed)
Unsustainable fish are the fish that are overfished, in danger of disappearing or cause environmental devastation through the way it is harvested. It’s debatable whether any seafood is truly sustainable at this point. Regardless, some of the worst offenders when it comes to sustainability are:
Chilean sea bass
all tuna
orange roughy
red snapper
Greenland halibut
swordfish
Atlantic sea scallops
The most popular fish at your average fish counter are usually shrimp, tuna, salmon, and tilapia. None of those are an ideal choice. The ideal choice is likely something smaller, wild caught, and from fisheries in the Pacific. But that can be difficult to find at the local fish counter. Finding sustainable and healthy seafood is already a difficult and time-consuming prospect. Is it likely to get better or worse?
What Sustainability Looks Like
Here the biggest seafood issue today: sustainability. Sustainability is choosing seafood that brought to market while considering the long-term health of that particular species and the overall health of the ocean. There are several organizations, like Seawatch or the Marine Conservation Society, dedicated to determining which seafood will have the least impact on ocean health. But right now that doesn’t really make a difference. For our fish consumption to be at a level the ocean can sustain, at least one out of every two people needs to stop eating seafood completely. Until that happens, there really isn’t a guilt-free way to enjoy seafood.
The Weird Sustainable Foods We Could All Be Eating Soon
Sustainable is big buzzword with the brightest minds of today looking for ways to feed an ever growing population in the face of an increasingly unstable and degrading Earth. People ignoring the environmental factor of the sustainable equation claim that GMOs are the answer to feeding the world’s people, but if you believe where people live is as important as what they live on, there has to be another answer.
Those bright minds have to be good for something; they are presenting some unusual, innovative, thought-provoking solutions. There’s evidence that conventionally icky stuff like bugs, pond scum, and strange fish offer a new notion of edible while also opening up a potentially bountiful source of needed nutrients.
Edible Creepy Crawlers
The idea of eating bugs is not unusual. Bugs are popular street snacks in Asia, and bugs like crickets have long been an important protein source for farmers in Africa. In North America and Europe, the idea of eating bugs remains squirm-inducing. But can we see past the ick factor to the nutritional and sustainable possibilities?
Grasshoppers and crickets are a commonly eaten in many parts of the world thanks to their ability to live everywhere, their ease of capture, and their neutral taste. Mealworms are also very popular, and in some countries eating ants and cockroaches isn’t uncommoin. As the gateway bugs of choice in the U.S., crickets are showing up as protein powders, supplemental flours, and at an adventurous fast food chain that is introducing milkshakes with cricket powder. Crickets and grasshoppers are a great source of protein (including essential amino acids lysine and tryptophan that are hard to find in conventional protein sources) and are recognized by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization as a good source of heart-healthy unsaturated fats. While chicken, pork, and beef might have more protein, they also require more space to grow and are responsible for egregious environmental degradation through increased methane gases, deforestation, and massive amounts of toxic animal waste.
In contrast, growing edible insects are far more efficient. To raise one kilogram of beef, you need eight kilograms of food, and you usually only eat about 40% of the cow. Crickets are 80% edible and only need 1.7 kilograms of feed to arrive at one kilogram of food. If you consider that someone somewhere is going to come up with the idea feeding bugs the 40% of food we waste in the U.S., it’s a sustainable slam dunk.
Strange Seafood
Our oceans are in crisis mode as more and more species die off. Soon the yellowfin tuna and the king crab we’re accustomed to seeing on our plate at seafood restaurants will be gone due to overfishing, fluctuating water temperatures, and increasing pollution. We’ll have to learn to adapt… and eat the food that already have adapted.
While the fish populations we’ve become accustomed to eating are dwindling, other invasive yet edible creatures are thriving in spite of the environment changes. Asian shore crabs, Asian carp, blue catfish, and lionfish are all experiencing growth as they displace native species.
In an effort to focus on managing an unbalanced fish population, some restaurants are adding these invasive fish to their menu. Even grocery giant Whole Foods is getting in on the action, announcing plans to make lionfish available to their customers over the next six months. With its venomous spines, lionfish doesn’t look too appealing, though it is popular in other regions of the world like the Caribbean. But with female lionfish laying 30,000 eggs every four days and a population so voracious it’s eating itself, this fish is a prime example of a new, sustainable seafood.
Starting at the Bottom of the Food Chain
Algae is a huge group of organisms that, odds are, are already available at your nearest grocery store. Sheets of dried seaweed abound in the ethnic aisles of the grocery store and at sushi restaurants, kelp is aking off amongst the health enthusiasts, and nearly every green nutritional powder has spirulina and/or chlorella in it. The health benefits of those two particular algae are impressive. Not only do they detox heavy metals and toxins from the body, and they contain omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids,antioxidants, and all of the essential amino acids which makes them complete proteins.
Seaweed is also a fantastically sustainable food. It can grow at a rate of almost six inches a day, and it doesn’t require any other resources other than the ones readily available to it. It also leaves the environment cleaner than it was before the it grew. People who understand the benefits of crop rotation will also appreciate the idea of farming seaweed opposite of shellfish season, which pairs two of the only farmed products that leave their environment cleaner than they found it. With its rapid growth, abundant nutrients, and cleaning habits, seaweed is a uniquely sustainable food.
It Will Become The Norm
Bugs are gross. Most people would sooner smash them under their foot than put them in a skillet. The green sludge found in ponds or the weird spiny fish that looks like a zebra pincushion don’t seem any better. But in the next fifteen years, we’ll have an estimated 8.5 billion people living on a planet that virtually everyone agrees we’re in the process of destroying. The “weird” and the “gross” are just foods we’re not used to yet, and these foods can provide for so many while slowing our negative impact on the environment. It’s time to get creative and do what we can to present sustainable options for everyone that might be little out of the ordinary. Here’s a good start, check out Total Nutrition – Make your own Homemade Multivitamin and Mineral Formulaand How To Grow Spirulina at Home.
Maryland is facing controversy over mislabeled blue crab cakes. Because of its crucial role in the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem, the blue crab is considered a keystone species. Without it, the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem would suffer serious disruption. The blue crab is also a staple of the local economy in Maryland, with 50% of the blue crab harvested each year in the United States coming from the Chesapeake Bay. The high demand and economic value of blue crab has led to overharvesting and resulting regulations.
Places in Maryland that sell crab cakes have started using other types of crab while falsely marketing their product as blue crab. A recent study by Oceana has shown that as much as 38% of crab cakes sold in Maryland as blue crab are, in fact, other types of crab. In addition to the deception, the crab used in these crab cakes is imported from areas around the world where the crab is harvested using unsustainable methods.
Researchers found eight other species besides blue crab with 48% of the crab cakes using crab species originating from the Pacific coast of Mexico and the Indo-Pacific region. In addition, almost 50% of the species used are ones that seafood guides warn people to avoid.
The only way that the problems of mislabeled seafood are going to be solved is through strengthening the tracking process for seafood from the place it’s caught to the place it’s served. Oceana is a leader in the movement to shore up food safety by improving the monitoring process of seafood production and cracking down harder on seafood fraud. They have urged the government to have the Task Force on Combatting Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing and Seafood Fraud implement traceability requirements on all seafood sold in America so that consumers can be confident that they get what they pay for and not something else.
Wild Caught? Maybe Not – Salmon Sold to You May Have Been Farm-Raised
The wild caught salmon sold to you in restaurants and grocery stores may have been farm-raised. Unfortunately, the results of a new study suggest that unless you catch it yourself, you can’t be sure it wasn’t farm raised.
Using DNA testing techniques, the non-profit ocean conservation group Oceana examined numerous samples of fish being sold as wild caught salmon both from restaurant menus and grocery stores. Of the restaurant samples, 2/3 of the “wild-caught” salmon was farm raised. Retail salmon fared better, with one out of five incorrectly labeled. The study also revealed instances of chum salmon being sold as king salmon and rainbow trout sold as wild salmon.
A startling 43% of the salmon tested, collected in New York, Washington, Chicago and Virginia from upscale and takeout restaurants and from various neighborhood and chain groceries, was mislabeled. The most common deception was Atlantic salmon being sold as wild salmon.
These Scientists Say We Need to do Something About It
The researchers authoring the study recommend that new policies be implemented to protect both the public and fishermen from mislabeling.
“Our results are consistent and wide enough to know that this is a problem that can occur anyplace, anytime, with any type of seafood,” said Kimberly Warner, a senior scientist at Oceana.
Oceana definitely knows what they are talking about. From 2010 to 2012 they conducted an extensive seafood fraud investigation, collecting more than 1,200 seafood samples from 674 retail outlets in 21 states. The objective was to determine if the seafood was honestly labeled. DNA testing found that a full one 1/3 of the 1,215 samples analyzed were mislabeled.
In that earlier investigation, seafood sold as snapper and tuna had the highest chance of being mislabeled. The majority of the samples identified by DNA analysis were not consistent with the labeling. In fact, only seven of the 120 samples of red snapper purchased nationwide were actually red snapper. The other 113 samples were another fish.
Accuracy in Labeling Also Depends on the Time of Year
The current study revealed that the time of year was a big factor in whether or not a restaurant would sell mislabeled salmon. During the winter months, fresh wild salmon is less available, creating a motive to substitute readily available, farmed salmon. The researchers found that large chain groceries were less likely than small grocers to offer mislabeled salmon to the public.
The authors of the study have a few suggestions for consumers looking to protect themselves from purchasing the wrong types of salmon. They suggest consumers ask their sellers about their seafood’s exact point of origin, its species, and whether or not the merchandise was fresh or previously frozen.
Salmon can travel halfway across the world and back before we get a chance to eat it. For instance in 2013, U.S. fisheries exported roughly 85,000 metric tons of salmon to China while importing 37,000 metric tons of salmon from China. Much of this import was the same fish that was shipped to China for processing.
To cut down on salmon mislabeling, the report’s authors are calling for comprehensive tracking of all seafood sold in this country from catch to point of sale.
What’s Wrong With Farm Raised Fish?
The first and obvious difference between farm raised and wild caught salmon is the cost. You are being overcharged if you are paying the price for wild caught salmon and not getting what you paid for. But there are other issues at stake. First there is taste, and secondly there are health concerns associated with farm raised fish and shrimp. Pathogens, contamination, and GMO feed are serious quality issues with fish and shrimp being raised in an unnatural and crowded environment. The virulent diseases spread through the salmon farms are suspected to have spread to the wild, severely impacting the wild salmon population. Factory farming raises unhealthy animals, and fish farms are nothing more than factory farms for fish. Stick to wild caught fish – if you can find a trusted source.
