A few weeks ago, we shared a preview of a Mother Jones article about Tuna and Mercury. Now, Mother Jones made the entire article available via the Web. Now that the piece is going to be distributed to a wider audience, it’s probably a good idea to look back at our original rejoinder to get up the speed on their arguments and our responses. In the meantime, it’s hard to stifle a laugh as other folks who have picked up on the story are noting that NFI, and me in particular, are coming down hard on reporters who write about tuna and mercury. Now, there was a time when journalism was something of a bullhorn and editors served as gatekeepers, deciding which facts the great unwashed masses were fit to receive. Thankfully, those days are long over. What we have here now is not a one-way broadcast, but rather a conversation. You ask us some questions, we answer and share those same answers with a wider audience. You print your story, we fact check it against what we know to be true, taking care to make note of the facts that you may have omitted. And when it comes to Mother Jones and a host of other journalists, most seem more than willing to ignore information that might not gibe with the story they’re trying to sell. I don’t know about anyone else, but I prefer the give and take that we enjoy now. And in that spirit of give and take, it’s probably a good idea for us to detail a number of other errors and distortions Mother Jones made in its most recent article:

(Tuna often exceeds even the weak US standard: In 2006, for instance, the group Defenders of Wildlife tested cans of tuna straight out of grocery stores and found that 1 in 20, particularly those imported from Latin America, had mercury above the fda action level and could, in theory, be pulled from the shelves.)

A review of this old study reveals a number of problems. For starters, there is no such thing as Latin American tuna. Tuna is a migratory species and where it is caught or processed has virtually no effect on the levels of mercury one sample might contain. A tuna spotted off the coast of Ecuador could be swimming 100 miles out to sea closer to the latitudes of Columbia, Peru, or even Mexico in a matter of days. To suggest tuna is a country-specific fish and that the country might have an effect on its mercury level is irresponsible. Mercury levels in tuna may vary based on the age and size of the fish, but where this highly migratory fish is caught plays little role in that variation. Throughout the report, the meaning of federal mercury levels is grossly mischaracterized, and the full science used to calculate those levels is only partially explained. The study maintains that, eating just one six-ounce can of this tuna a week would cause a 140 pound womanand nearly all children to exceed the EPAs reference dose for mercury. This characterization is wrong. The EPAs reference dose pertains to a daily exposure over a lifetime. The authors also fail to explain that the EPA reference dose has a built in 10-fold safety factor, meaning that for anyone to even begin to approach mercury levels associated with theoretical concern, he or she would have to eat a sample with mercury levels exceeding the EPA reference dose by 10 times everyday for the rest of his or her life.

The original draft listed canned tuna as a high-mercury product. But then, fda officials met privately with representatives of the country’s three largest tuna companies (Bumble Bee, Tri-Union, and StarKist), the US Tuna Foundation, and the National Food Processors Association.

There is no such thing as a private meeting with the FDA. Minutes from all official meetings should be available by request through the Freedom of Information Act.

Still, the industry has blamed the advisory for a 10 percent drop in sales within a year, and it’s worked hard to mute the message. In 2005, the tuna companies launched a $25 million campaign to counteract the FDA’s advisory, with full-page newspaper ads touting the brain-building benefits of omega-3 fatty acids (“Tuna: A Smart Catch”) and reassuring women that “No government study has ever found unsafe levels of mercury in women or young children who eat canned tuna.” (True, but none has ever looked.)

This is not true. The tuna companies have never launched a $25 million campaign that directly addresses the advisory. Whats more the industry has also never publicly blamed the advisory for a 10 percent drop in sales, while the media has.

Luke Lindley is one of the people Gibbons says it would be irresponsible to write about. As an undergrad at Stanford, the now-24-year-old medical student was “deeply immersed” in bodybuilding, so he ate “tuna for breakfast, tuna for lunch, tuna for dinner” for years.

The totality of Gibbons interaction with this reporter can be found here, nowhere is it mentioned Mr. Lindleys name.

Fatal in high doses, mercury at lower levels has been linked to heart disease in older men and developmental problems in babies.

If referencing traces of mercury from eating seafood, as opposed to ingested alone, published studies show a significant net benefit from eating fish on heart disease and brain development. Hence the American Heart Association recommendation to eat fish, particularly fatty fish, at least twice per week and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations advice that without enough omega-3s from fish, normal brain development does not take place.

The new FDA advisory warned pregnant and nursing women to eat no more than 6 ounces of albacore, and no more than 12 ounces of chunk light tuna, per week. The FDA recommended following the same guidelines for children, with the vague suggestion that they eat “smaller portions.” A 44-pound preschooler who follows the FDA guideline would consume four times the mercury the EPA considers safe.

The Institute of Medicine exhaustively reviewed the benefits and concerns of eating fish, and reported in 2007 that children up to age 12 can consumer up to 6 ounces of while albacore tuna per week. Available data suggest levels of MeHg are not associated with adverse health effects if consumption is limited to two 3-ounces servings per week.

Dr. Jane Hightower has made something of a cottage industry out of treating fish consumers suffering from elevated mercury levels. In 2003 the San Francisco physician published a paper in Environmental Health Perspectives after surveying her entire patient load and testing more than 100 people whose questionnaires suggested they consumed a lot of fish. The majority had blood mercury levels well above what the EPA considers safe. One was a 10-year-old named Matthew Davis who suffered serious neurological problems his doctors suspected were from the three to six ounces of canned albacore he ate daily. His fingers curled involuntarily, and his hands shook when he tried to write. The problems mostly resolved after he quit eating tuna.

Dr. Jane Hightower has published the natural conclusion that eating fish increases blood mercury levels, but her opinion that mercury caused symptoms she observed in patients, is just that, opinion, and not a published, peer-reviewed result. I’m sure it’s hard to believe that there’s more, but there is. I’ll handle a number of our other objections to this story in Part II.