November 19, 2013
Ryan Wallace
Senior Editor
Yahoo! Health

Dear Mr. Wallace,

I am writing to express concern over an article featured on your website titled 5 Reasons To Never Eat Shrimp Again. The article contains misleading statements about shrimp that does a fundamental disservice to Yahoo! Health readers. The author, Leah Zerbe, has been challenged in the past for writing inflammatory and skewed articles about seafood in the past that push a hidden agenda.

To begin, Ms. Zerbes article references advice from Andrew Sharpless, CEO of Oceana a self-described oceanic conservation organization, not a nutritional group. We would hope Yahoo! Health would source from doctors, dietitians, or nutrition experts and not eco-activists when it publishes an article advising readers to give up an entire food group.

Ms. Zerbe claims, Shrimp farms are breeding grounds for bacteria and viruses. Nice rhetoric, but the reality is that imported seafood makes up just 0.12% of reported illnesses from food according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC). The CDC found of the more than 120,000 illnesses reported from 2005-2010, less than 2% are attributable to imported food. And of that number, just 0.12% of the report illnesses from food were attributable to seafood.

Ms. Zerbe goes on to claim that Only 2% of all imported seafood is tested by the Food and Drug Administration. This demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of FDAs regulatory system for seafood. FDAs Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) is an internationally recognized risk-based system that seeks to solve challenges along the supply chain at multiple control points before they become a problem at the dock. The HACCP model refers to the prevention of hazards during production rather than simply inspection for them in the finished product. Ms. Zerbe misleads readers into thinking no seafood is unregulated until it reaches U.S. borders.

An article advising Yahoo! Health readers to never eat shrimp again is irresponsible and unwarranted. Americans are already deficient in seafood, and whats worse science shows low seafood consumption is the second-biggest dietary contributor to preventable deaths in the U.S., taking 84,000 lives each year (for perspective, low intake of fruits and vegetables takes 58,000 lives each year).

The USDAs 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) urge the general population to increase the amount and variety of seafood consumed by choosing seafood in place of some meat and poultry. The DGAs recommend that 20% of the total intake of protein foods comes from a variety of seafood. This includes shrimp.

We ask that you remove this article from your website and rethink pushing Rodale News agenda by syndicating their outdated, misleading, and out-of-context reports.

Please let me know how you plan to address these editorial issues.

Gavin Gibbons
National Fisheries Institute

cc: Phat Chiem
Deputy Editor