MAGAZINES 
Fishing for the Facts
Tips on choosing safe, sustainable seafood
Fish is touted as among the most healthy food choices you can make, providing a lean source of protein and heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids. In fact, the American Heart Association recommends eating two 3.5-ounce servings of fatty fish each week. But there are a few things to consider when buying fish and other seafood to make sure you’re doing yourself—and the marine environment—more good than harm.
Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch estimates that 4 million boats are fishing globally, and their impact on fish populations and the environment is significant. In addition to overfishing, some fishing practices produce inordinate amounts of bycatch—7 million tons of mammals, birds, sea turtles, sharks, and other sea life that is caught in nets incidentally and then tossed back into the sea either dead or dying. This represents one-quarter of the U.S. catch. According to Seafood Watch, shrimp trawlers (nets up to the size of a football field) are the worst culprits, catching as much as 15 pounds of sea life for one pound of shrimp.
The environmental impact of trawling is also worth cringing over. Sweeping across the ocean floor, bottom trawlers and dredges destroy the habitats that provide shelter, food and breeding grounds for marine life. Bottom trawlers in Alaska, for instance, remove more than 1 million pounds of deepwater coral and sponges each year.
Seafood Watch rates fish and seafood based on its research of the fish population and fishing practices. The organization sorts seafood into three main categories to help consumers make more sustainable choices: The “Best Choices” (green) list includes seafood that is abundant and fished in responsible ways; the “Good Alternatives” (yellow) category includes options that still come with concerns about human impacts; the “Avoid” (red) list means just that. In many cases, a certain type of seafood will be listed in all three categories—where and how it’s caught make the difference. The ratings are available on the organization’s website and as both a printable pocket guide and an app.
In some cases, the recommendations may be surprising. While some farmed fish and seafood are recommended—oysters, mussels, clams, catfish and U.S. farm-raised tilapia are all good choices— farmed salmon, for one, is not. The impact on the environment and salmon population makes wild salmon a much better choice. Farmed Atlantic salmon is on the Seafood Watch “Avoid” list.
RATINGS BRING RESULTS
Some local restaurants pay close attention to watch lists. “Just as sports fans are checking the sports news every day, I’m checking the Monterey Bay Aquarium watch list,” says Adam Watts, chef de cuisine at Jax Fish House in Boulder. He explains, “There’s nothing worse than depleting a species. Nothing means more to me than my daughter having the fish that we’re lucky to have.” Watts changes the menu frequently, depending on the availability of sustainable seafood. Lately he’s been including a variety of fish farmed in Colorado, such as a hybrid striped bass, Colorado catfish and whole Colorado rainbow trout.
Whole Foods’ Luke Meinzer, a regional seafood coordinator based in Boulder, says that once the store began to display Seafood Watch ratings at the seafood counter, consumers started to buy less on the Avoid list. “That can push a fish out of the Avoid category, because it pressures fishermen to change their gear,” says Meinzer.
While Greenpeace lauds Whole Foods for its labeling and transparency as well as its seafood policies and initiatives, the fact that the grocer carries a number of Avoid-listed items pushed it down to No. 4 on Greenpeace’s annual Supermarket Seafood Sustainability Scorecard, detailed in its Carting Away the Oceans (CATO) report. Perhaps surprisingly, the national grocer ranked first for sustainability is Safeway, just ahead of No. 2 Target and No. 3 Wegmans. No grocer yet has scored higher than “Pass,” but Greenpeace expects that to change when Whole Foods fulfills its pledge to remove any seafood in the Avoid category by April 22, 2012—Earth Day. (If Boulder’s Alfalfa’s were to get a grade on the Greenpeace scorecard, it would likely rank high on the list. Alfalfa’s pledges a strong commitment to sustainability, and carries nothing in the Seafood Watch Avoid category.)
The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which rates fisheries for sustainable fishing practices, is another independent rating agency that restaurants and retailers use frequently. The blue MSC label, according to Meinzer, is the “gold standard,” though Greenpeace argues that the MSC environmental standards and socioeconomic criteria for workers’ rights are not stringent enough. The label is found on fish packaging and on the labels in the seafood case at some grocery stores.
The MSC also combats what is yet another concern for consumers: fish fraud. A recent Consumer Reports investigation found that 38 of 190 fish samples in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut restaurants and grocers were either mislabeled, incompletely identified or misidentified by employees. The MSC guarantees a chain of custody from fisheries to the market. Meinzer says that Whole Foods additionally uses Trace Register, which is “able to trace all our fish right back to the boat it was caught on, and any hands it went through on the way to the store.”
THE MERCURY’S RISING
Consumers can begin to depend on some local restaurants and markets to make good choices about seafood sustainability, but when it comes to health issues, “that’s a choice of the consumer,” says Watts.
The health concerns surrounding fish and seafood stem from various contaminants that they carry, the most prominent concern being mercury. High levels of mercury can cause damage to the brain and nervous system in a fetus or young child, and so the populations needing to be most careful are pregnant women (or women considering becoming pregnant) and children under the age of 6. Generally, the bigger the fish, the higher the mercury level.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends steering clear of shark, swordfish, king mackerel and tilefish because they are laden with mercury. Commonly eaten varieties with low levels of mercury include shrimp, canned light tuna, salmon, pollock and catfish. Albacore tuna contains higher levels of mercury than canned light, because albacore tuna is a much larger fish than skipjack, which is the source of most canned light tuna. Fortunately, the Seafood Watch recommendations now use asterisks to indicate species highly contaminated with mercury.
Polychlorinated biphenols (PCBs)—“probable human carcinogens,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency—build up in fish and animal fat. PCBs also have been linked to damage in children’s nervous systems. To reduce the amount of PCBs you ingest, the Environmental Defense Fund recommends removing the skin of fish, scraping away any fat that hasn’t drained off, and grilling or baking the fish rather than frying it.
Lest you decide to avoid the seafood counter the next time you buy groceries, the American Heart Association says that the health benefit of eating fish far outweighs the potential harm, though it urges checking local advisories for PCBs if you catch local fish to eat. In addition to reducing the risk of heart disease and stroke, health benefits of omega-3 fatty acids include reducing symptoms of hypertension, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), some skin conditions, joint pain and other rheumatoid issues.
Omega-3s have such broad benefits because they help control inflammation, and they balance the negative effects of omega-6 fatty acids. Omega-6s are essential too, but if not properly balanced they increase risks of heart attack and stroke. Through eggs, poultry, baked goods, cereals, margarine and vegetable oils, the American diet typically has a ratio of 20 parts omega-6s to 1 part omega-3s. A healthy ratio is roughly 4 parts omega-3s to 1 part omega-6s.
The bottom line is that fish is worth including in your diet, but it is also worth investigating the restaurants and grocers you frequent, to ensure that you’re not getting too many contaminants.
Wahoo’s Fish Taco, a popular chain in Colorado and California, claims on its website, “At this time, [wahoo and mahi mahi] do not appear on the watch list with tuna and swordfish.” Yet wahoo, the restaurant’s primary fish, does have high levels of mercury, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, which has issued a health advisory for the fish. Additionally, Seafood Watch notes that there is a lack of research on the resilience of the wahoo population.
Meanwhile, McDonald’s, which purchases 43.2 million pounds of pollock a year for its Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, won a Seafood Champion Award from the Seafood Choices Alliance in 2009 for shifting from less-sustainable sources of fish to more-sustainable ones.
That’s good news for the fish, and good news for the consumers who care about them.
Freelance writer Shannon Burgert regularly covers health, sports and science topics for Boulder Magazine. She teaches third grade at Louisville’s Fireside Elementary School, and is also an Ironman triathlete.
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