I think this kind of article is downright irresponsible - when you weigh the small amounts of extra toxins you consume, the effects are always going to be lesser than the enormous benefits of consuming fish.
> Drs. Mozaffarian and Rimm put this in perspective in their analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association. (1) First, reviewing data from the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere, they calculated that if 100,000 people ate farmed salmon twice a week for 70 years, the extra PCB intake could potentially cause 24 extra deaths from cancer—but would prevent at least 7,000 deaths from heart disease. (source: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/fish/)
I'm certain a similar argument can be applied to the dangers of mislabeled fish or micro-plastics. To put it in perspective: if the sort of argument this article presents convinced even 7% of people to not eat fish, it would counteract the 7000 potential heart disease deaths in the above example.
That’s just from PCB from farmed salmon. What do we really know about ingesting those microplastics? I’m not really worried about “toxins,” in general, but plastics aren’t exactly made to be safe to ingest.
I thought the article made (implicitly) a case for fish farmed in controlled environment. Those should be safe, right? That is if you can find them correctly labelled, which the author notes is also an issue.
> but plastics aren’t exactly made to be safe to ingest
Plastics are usually simple polymers, long chain of hydrocarbons. Not saying it's safe to ingest, but comparatively with many other substances found in the environment, there is less likely to be any interaction with your organism. The contamination of drinking water with lots of drugs in traces is, I think, far more dangerous.
Does the consumption of fish matter? It seems like the linked article encourages consumption of more Omega-3.
Also, I'm generally confused by Omega-3 studies anyway (I'm not a scientist). In the early 2000's lots of research came out linking Omega-3 to health. But, then more recently, I thought that Meta analysis studies showed no relationship.
The article you linked is about supplementing Omega 3. Many times in science we isolate out the one thing we think that is causing the health benefit and supplement more of it. Usually we don't find the result we are looking for. Food is a very complex item and it could be many factors and they all need to be present together to get the effect. Lycopene supplementation doesn't seem to have the health benefits seen with eating tomatoes, etc., etc.
That's not really an indictment of the scientific method though. So isolated lycopene isn't as good as eating a tomato. Surely there are scientists that are iterating on that, trying to find the combination of compounds that does give the desired outcome, right?
That wasn't a critique on science, just noting that the simplest approach (trying to pin down health benefits to a single substance) doesn't work well in this case. It's a good idea to start with the simplest hypothesis; if that is rejected you move to more complex ones. In that case multiple substances are probably acting non-independently in our physiology, thus your experiments need to accommodate that.
Since eggs and many other meats are richer in omega-6 fatty acids, for most people eating more fish or supplementing with fish oil helps balance omega-3 and omega-6.
The most concentrated sources of omega 6 fatty acids are actually plants and especially manufactured plant oils, eg sunflower oil, corn oil, soybean oil, etc. Meat and eggs have some but they also have considerable omega 3s to balance things out.
It's best to avoid plant oils except for olive oil and coconut oil. Stick with butter, tallow and so forth, all great sources of balanced fatty acids.
I think the argument the original poster is trying to make is: statistics say people that eat fish are more healthy, but this is because of certain components of fish (like Omega 3s) and not something only providable by fish. These other sources (like flax seeds for omega3s) aren't shown to have large amounts of toxins. However, because it takes a variety of alternative foods to get all the healthy components in fish - even though an individual will be better off doing that - it would be hard and complex to find enough individuals eating all the healthy things combined to statistically show it's healthier then fish.
What argument, who's arguing? I'm saying that making decisions for your own particular situation based on what would happen to population statistics is fairly tricky.
Especially because of the epidemiological nature of these studies, lack of interventional studies for this particular subject and a bunch of other completely logical reasons.
Funny, I've been waiting for something like this to surface. About two years ago I was listening to a Swedish podcast. One of the hosts talked about his super model friend who, along with a bunch other super models, had been invited to a dinner with the world's leading cancer scientists. She was seated at the table right next to one of these men and during their chat she eventually pleaded guilty and told him that she was a periodic smoker. His answer was:
— As long as you don't eat fish, you're probably fine, and explained to her that these cancer findings would the next big pile of shit to hit the cancer fan.
The two hosts joked about the irony that supermodels were the first to hear about these findings.
> Drs. Mozaffarian and Rimm put this in perspective in their analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association. (1) First, reviewing data from the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere, they calculated that if 100,000 people ate farmed salmon twice a week for 70 years, the extra PCB intake could potentially cause 24 extra deaths from cancer—but would prevent at least 7,000 deaths from heart disease. (source: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/fish/)
I'm certain a similar argument can be applied to the dangers of mislabeled fish or micro-plastics. To put it in perspective: if the sort of argument this article presents convinced even 7% of people to not eat fish, it would counteract the 7000 potential heart disease deaths in the above example.