Over the past few years, American consumers (especially women) have been literally bombarded with warnings about the dangers of eating fish. While many of these warnings have come from the usual suspect sources -- self-styled "environmental" groups and activists crusading against the deadly "Big Fish" industry -- some confusion is directly attributable to our governmental watchdogs.
In 2004, the FDA and the EPA co-produced a health warning, advising women who are or might become pregnant to limit their intake of certain fatty fish, to avoid contaminating unborn children with mercury or PCBs. Many women did as they were advised; unfortunately, due to their inability to tell one fish from another, or to accurately weigh out fish portions, some women likely avoided eating fish altogether.
In the new issue of the medical journal The Lancet, the latest in a series of studies demonstrating the positive health effects of eating fish once again shows that, rather than limiting fish intake for women who are pregnant, we should promote a diet with more fish. Such diets have been repeatedly shown to maximize fetal brain development and produce healthier infants, with higher IQs and improved coordination and communication skills.
Researchers from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the University of Illinois at Chicago teamed up with scientists from the University of Bristol in the UK and studied over 11,000 pregnant women, utilizing food frequency questionnaires. They assessed the status of their children at ages six months through eight years by testing their developmental, behavioral, and cognitive outcomes, as compared with the mothers' recorded fish intake during their pregnancies.
The study findings were that women whose diets contained the lowest quantity of fish had children whose IQs, social behavior, and fine motor coordination were also in the lowest quartile. For each measure, the lower the intake of fish or seafood during pregnancy, the higher the risk of sub-optimum development. This evidence stands in stark contrast to the alarms emanating from the camps of such anti-fish advocates as the Environmental Working Group and their adherents, who counsel women to limit fish intake while pregnant and even discourage mothers from preparing fish for their toddlers and preschoolers based upon nothing other than superstition and activist tripe.
There is of course some amount of contaminants in fish of all types, including mercury, PCBs, and other chemicals. But the amount of these substances is simply not sufficient to cause harm to infants, children, or fetuses. Even the "reference dose" used by the ultra-cautious EPA includes a tenfold "safety factor" as part of its calculated allowed dose, so exceeding that amount would still be highly unlikely to cause adverse effects. The new report, added to the spate of prior similar studies, confirms that the presence of traces of contaminants is of little or no consequence for health: the net effect of eating fish is, in any case, clearly a positive one, probably due to the beneficial effects of the omega-3 fatty acids in the fish.
These essential fatty acids, besides being an absolute requirement for adequate brain and nervous system development in utero, are also largely responsible for the other beneficial effects of a diet high in fish: reduced sudden death from heart disease, reduced irregular heartbeats, lower stroke incidence, and lower death rates from all causes among those who eat more fish.
The sad truth is that, over the course of the past few years, many infants have been born with lower brain function than they might have had, due to the unscientific warnings issued by activists groups and our own government agencies. Hopefully, as study after study shows how misguided these advisories are, officials at the FDA or even the EPA will come to their senses and tell women the truth: eat more fish for your baby's health.
Gilbert Ross, M.D., is Executive and Medical Director of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org, HealthFactsAndFears.com).
On a related subject, see ACSH's report on Regulating Mercury Emissions from Power Plants.
