FISH-EATING, AND WHY AVOID ALMOST ALL FISH TODAY

by Dr. Lawrence Wilson

All information in this article is for educational purposes only. It is not for the diagnosis, treatment, prescription or cure of any disease or health condition.

The following article speaks for itself. Similar problems exist today with most fish and seafood today, even wild caught fish because you don’t know if they are really wild caught or just farmed in a different way that they are allowed to call ‘wild caught’.

Heavy metal contamination. Contaminated feed and packaging is only one problem. An even worse problem is large amounts of mercury in most fish. Another problem in seafood and shellfish is the presence of cadmium, arsenic, aluminum and nickel because shellfish are often caught in coastal waters that are horribly contaminated in many nations.

For this reason, in nutritional balancing science, we only allow adults to eat sardines, and only 3 to 4 cans per week. Sardines are generally wild caught, quickly cleaned and placed in cans and cooked. When fairly fresh, they are not a bad food, though they, too, can be eaten in excess. Children can have only one or two cans weekly for this reason, while adults can have up to 4 cans weekly in most cases. Please avoid all other fish, including tunafish and salmon, both of which are quite high in mercury.

Asian Seafood Raised on Pig Feces Approved for U.S. Consumers

By Nguyen Dieu Tu Uyen and William Bi - Oct 11, 2012

Bloomberg Markets Magazine

At Ngoc Sinh Seafoods Trading & Processing Export Enterprise, a seafood exporter on Vietnam’s southern coast, workers stand on a dirty floor sorting shrimp one hot September day. There’s trash on the floor, and flies crawl over baskets of processed shrimp stacked in an unchilled room in Ca Mau.

Elsewhere in Ca Mau, Nguyen Van Hoang packs shrimp headed for the U.S. in dirty plastic tubs. He covers them in ice made with tap water that the Vietnamese Health Ministry says should be boiled before drinking because of the risk of contamination with bacteria. Vietnam ships 100 million pounds of shrimp a year to the U.S. That’s almost 8 percent of the shrimp Americans eat.

Food Report: Food Sickens Millions as Company-Paid Checks Find It Safe

Using ice made from tap water in Vietnam is dangerous because it can spread bacteria to the shrimp, microbiologist Mansour Samadpour says, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue.

.Special Report: Food Poisoning and Safety

“Those conditions -- ice made from dirty water, animals near the farms, pigs -- are unacceptable,” says Samadpour, whose company, IEH Laboratories & Consulting Group, specializes in testing water for shellfish farming.

Ngoc Sinh has been certified as safe by Geneva-based food auditor SGS SA, says Nguyen Trung Thanh, the company’s general director.

No Record

“We are trying to meet international standards,” Thanh says.

SGS spokeswoman Jennifer Buckley says her company has no record of auditing Ngoc Sinh.

At Chen Qiang’s tilapia farm in Yangjiang city in China’s Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong, Chen feeds fish partly with feces from hundreds of pigs and geese. That practice is dangerous for American consumers, says Michael Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety.

“The manure the Chinese use to feed fish is frequently contaminated with microbes like salmonella,” says Doyle, who has studied foodborne diseases in China.

On a sweltering, overcast day in August, the smell of excrement is overpowering. After seeing dead fish on the surface, Chen, 45, wades barefoot into his murky pond to open a pipe that adds fresh water from a nearby canal. Exporters buy his fish to sell to U.S. companies.

Yang Shuiquan, chairman of a government-sponsored tilapia aquaculture association in Lianjiang, 200 kilometers from Yangjiang, says he discourages using feces as food because it contaminates water and makes fish more susceptible to diseases. He says a growing number of Guangdong farmers adopt that practice anyway because of fierce competition.

“Many farmers have switched to feces and have stopped using commercial feed,” he says.

Frequently Contaminated

About 27 percent of the seafood Americans eat comes from China -- and the shipments that the FDA checks are frequently contaminated, the FDA has found. The agency inspects only about 2.7 percent of imported food. Of that, FDA inspectors have rejected 1,380 loads of seafood from Vietnam since 2007 for filth and salmonella, including 81 from Ngoc Sinh, agency records show. The FDA has rejected 820 Chinese seafood shipments since 2007, including 187 that contained tilapia.

To contact the reporters for this story: Nguyen Dieu Tu Uyen in Hanoi at uyen1@bloomberg.net

William Bi in Beijing at wbi@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Neumann at jneumann2@bloomberg.net

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