I will rarely take the negative perspective on this blog where food is concerned.  However, this post is written in response to the advice that fish should be avoided entirely in order to circumvent the whole sticky issue of sustainable seafood.  Let me explain why this is not a good idea, and how sustainable seafood issues fit into a much larger conversation about the food we eat and where it comes from.

The eat-no-seafood approach implies that stopping the consumption of fish will lead to the restoration of ocean health, at least where fisheries are concerned.  This ignores the fact that fisheries are affected by more than just overfishing.  Habitat loss, climate change, ocean “acidification,” dead zones, pollutants, and eutrophication all contribute to the decline in marine diversity and ecosystem health.  The underlying cause of declining ocean health is not dietary consumption, but the dramatic increase in human population in conjunction with a per capita increase in use of natural resources.

Not only are there several billion more of us than in our grandparents’ heyday, but we all use much more water, energy, refined metals, and fossil fuels.  This is not just a problem – this is the problem.  To those who propose that we eat fewer fish, may I suggest instead that we all have fewer babies.*  And, of course, simplify our habits of material consumption.

For example, salmon runs in Northern California have been so drastically reduced that the 2009 salmon season will be 10 days of recreational fishing in early September, with no commercial fishing whatsoever.  Although the conservation efforts are couched in terms of saving the fishery for the fishing industry, even the Department of Fish and Game acknowledges that many factors affect the number of returning fish, including the watershed and ocean temperatures.  Cod and Atlantic salmon have not recovered from commercial extinction even with fishing moratoriums in place.  Neither have a number of other fisheries rebounded under strict management and controlled mortality.  Simply removing seafood like this from the menus won’t save declining numbers of fish unless we are protecting the habitat that allows them to reproduce.

Furthermore, reducing seafood consumption will have consequences for already poor dietary health of Americans.  The importance of omega-3 fatty acids has been seriously understated in American health and diet education.  How do we determine the importance of any one dietary item like omega-3 fatty acids?  There are at least three different types of evidence required to make a convincing connection:  1. epidemiological studies in humans that correlate effects with dietary habits, 2. biochemical explanations of the molecular pathways involved, and 3. studies in model organisms such as rats and mice that show the effects of a controlled diet in closely related mammals.  In the case of omega-3 fatty acids, all three types of research demonstrate that omega-3 fatty acids have an important role in mitigating physiological stress.

And if, as we contend, there is a lack of adequate omega-3 fatty acids in the Western diet, do we see a corresponding effect in the health of the population?  Yes.  As noted in the previous jump, omega-3 fatty acids have been shown to mitigate 6 out of the top 7 leading causes of death in the US: coronary heart disease, cancer, stroke, lower respiratory disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s.  (Number 5 of 7 is accidental death.)  Certainly, there are many other factors that contribute to poor diet and health in America.  But the danger in recommending the removal of seafood from the already-suffering American diet is that the diseases above that are well correlated with inadequate omega-3 intake will become even more prevalent.  It is not an exaggeration to say that  investment in the wise use of our fisheries is an investment in our own future and our health.

There are a number of papers that support these ideas (e.g., Simopoulos ratio, Essential fatty acids in aquatic ecosystems), tapping into the theory that our current dietary needs reflect the types of foods that were available as humans evolved.  Knowing this, a moderate amount of common sense can be applied to come up with a list of things that truly should not be eaten.  Cheetos and Twizzlers, for example.  I am hardly one of your crunchy activists who can claim to live off of tofu, but there are a number of ingredients that I would advise people to avoid:

Preservatives

Trans fats (partially hydrogenated vegetable oils)

Refined sugars and High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)

Artificial sweeteners

Genetically modified crops that have not been tested for safety (that would be all of them)

We could go into the scientific literature to explore each one of these, but for our purposes it should be sufficient to say that humans should eat what our bodies were designed to use.  Seafood included.  Our healthcare system will thank you.

If you blanched at the thought of giving up Cheetos and Diet Coke, you can thank the modern advertising industry for changing our ideas about what normal human food is.  That is lesson number two: people who are selling you something should not be the ones to tell you what to eat.  At the top of this post, you can see that the jar of peanut butter that says, “No Trans Fats” must qualify that statement to mean “per serving.”  Companies that use trans fats in their products now reduce the serving size on the label so that they can round down the advertised trans fat content to zero.  Your heart and waistline pay for this deliberate obfuscation.

That’s hardly the most insidious tactic out there.  If you haven’t seen The Future of Food, I highly recommend that you watch it.  I don’t care if you are the most conservative industrialist – if you aren’t absolutely shocked within the first five minutes, I will eat my hat (but still not Cheetos).

*Until the world is ready to have a conversation on human reproductive rights, there is a simple strategy to slow the progress of human population growth: encourage higher education for women worldwide.  To quote Slobodkin, “…in an animal like man, in which the litter size is normally one, the number of births per female lifetime is in general of less significance in determining the reproductive potential of the population than is the age at initial reproduction.” – Slobodkin, L. B.  Growth and Regulation of Animal Populations.  Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1961.