So, its been a few days since we blogged about Good Housekeepings write-up on tuna and we thought perhaps it was time to reach out directly to the folks who affix that well known seal to products we use everyday. Lets see how they respond and keep in mind the integrity of that seal is based on the magazines interest in waging a campaign against misrepresentations (their words, not mine.) The article and the research itself is based on misrepresenting the EPA mercury limit as one thats applicable to everyday commercial seafood.

September 2, 2010

Ms. Samantha Cassetty

Nutrition Director

Good Housekeeping Research Institute

300 West 57th Street

29th Floor

New York, NY 10019

VIA Email

Dear Ms. Cassetty,

Im writing to you to express my concern about the thoroughness of the reporting on the news item on tuna and mercury that ran in the September 2010 issue (Is Your Tuna Toxic, September 2010). No one at the Good Housekeeping Research Institute contacted the National Fisheries Institute (NFI) about this item despite the fact that NFI very publicly addressed the shortcomings of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas (UNLV) study when it was first published. News outlets like the Las Vegas Review-Journal contacted us not only for background on the research but comment as well. We even blogged about it (click here and here.) Our position on this issue is clear and on the record. Even a minimum of research would have discovered that.

Consumers should not be concerned by the UNLV study. Canned tuna continues to be a safe and healthy source of lean protein packed with hearty-healthy omega-3’s. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) level of 0.5 parts per million of mercury (ppm) referenced in the report is not relevant. The EPA levels are applicable to sport-caught fish found in lakes, streams and other internal waterways where the EPA has jurisdiction and are designed to help that agency regulate industrial facilities and their emissions.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration level of 1.0 ppm is designed for consumption of commercial seafood like tuna. Furthermore, the FDA’s level of 1.0 ppm has a built-in 1,000% safety factor. The FDA says such a standard, “was established to limit consumers’ methyl mercury exposure to levels 10 times lower than the lowest levels associated with adverse effects.” This means a single can would have to exceed the FDA’s level by ten times to begin to even approach a level of concern. Even the highest levels reported in the UNLV study did not come remotely close to that point.

A failure to highlight the fact that the average mercury level for all brands was well below the FDA’s level and that there is a 1,000% safety factor built in to that level represents an egregious failure in reporting this story. Independent research also shows that reporting that exaggerates the risks of mercury leads many Americans to avoid eating fish altogether, something that would explain why researchers at Harvard recently concluded that 84,000 people die each year because they dont get enough of the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish. Meanwhile, no evidence of a case of mercury poisoning caused by the normal consumption of commercial seafood in this country has ever been recorded in peer reviewed medical literature.

I know I dont have to remind you that your readers have come to rely on Good Housekeeping and the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. To consumers, both the seal and the brand represent testing that is thorough and complete. However, it seems clear to us that your reporting on the UNLV study was anything but that. Whats worse, you published a story that could very well contribute to an existing public health problem.

NFI requests an explanation of how such reporting made its way into the pages of Good Housekeeping.

Please note that NFI regularly shares communications like these with the public, and we intend to do so in this case as well.

Sincerely,

Gavin Gibbons

National Fisheries Institute

CC: Rosemary Ellis, Editor in Chief

Sarah Scrymser, Managing Editor

In the last five months, we’ve had quite a few reasons to be disappointed with Today Show anchors, reporters and producers over errors theyve made about fish consumption. We first tangled with Today dietitian Joy Bauer over seafood and mercury beginning last March (click here, here and here). We got back in touch with her again in July when she suggested substituting one fish for another rather than just adding both to your back to school menu (click here).

Earlier this week, the show got it wrong again during a segment on “age proofing” your brain that featured host Lester Holt and his guest, Courtney Smith, editor of Prevention. While the segment started off on the right foot by discussing some of the latest research about how eating fish can help you stay sharp mentally as you age, it all went wrong when Holt asked Smith about mercury in tuna. In response, Smith said that individuals should limit their consumption of tuna to 6 ounces per week.

This is a classic example of misinterpreting the FDA guidance on fish consumption for pregnant women, women who are nursing, want to become pregnant and young children and applying it to the rest of the population.

For starters that advice says that group show feel free to have 12 ounces of light tuna a week and notes that: “[W]hen choosing your two meals of fish and shellfish, you may eat up to 6 ounces (one average meal) of albacore tuna per week.” Once again, these restrictions only apply to that limited group and by no means apply to older folks who might want to increase the amount of fish they’re eating in order to keep mentally sharp as they age.

While its frustrating to see NBC, Prevention and many others continue to repeat this mistake, its far more worrisome if you consider the potential negative effect on public health. Misinformation like this has a tendency to encourage people to remove seafood from their diet altogether. Researchers from Harvard have already concluded that 84,000 Americans die every year because they don’t get enough of the Omega-3 fatty acids found in seafood like tuna. So, while NBC and Prevention might be patting themselves on the back for promoting caution they really need to be taking responsibility for making a public health issue worse than it needs to be by not doing their homework.

We recently came across another of those lists that the media is so famous for. In this case, the culprit was a Web site called Great Schools and its five foods for school children to avoid. Included in the list was microwave popcorn, hamburger, high fructose corn syrup and fruit snacks.

And in a quintessential case of which of one-of-these-is-not-like-the-other, Great Schools included canned tuna in their list. That’s right, canned tuna, a lean protein packed with omega-3 fatty acids and Vitamin D, tacked on to a list of processed foods. Foods packed with sodium, cholesterol and the sort of sugar that could contribute to diabetes if you just looked at it wrong.

As we’ve pointed out at other times, you could cut these other foods out of your diet and suffer no ill effects. But if you cut canned tuna out of your diet, well, you’re going to be hard pressed finding an affordable lean protein packed with Omega 3s that you can serve to your kids on a regular basis.

The folks behind Great Schools make a very poor case for why tuna belongs on that list. In fact, much of the research they used to back it up has been marginalized and appears to have come from Google searches not interviews with Doctors, dietitians and researchers.

They referenced a February 2008 New York Times story on sushi that was thoroughly debunked by NFI and attacked by numerous third party critics. The newspaper’s Public Editor admitted that the piece wasn’t terribly well balanced and delivered a rare rebuke to his paper’s own reporting.

The piece mentioned Michael Hawthorne at the Chicago Tribune and his “Mercury Menace” story, while ignoring sources that clearly disputed his findings.

Finally, it references reporter Sue Kwon from KPIX in San Francisco.But conveniently ignores the extensive work NFI has done presenting facts that undermined her reports. Lets keep in mind that in the past Kwon has shown to be less than impartial on this issue, for instance dolling out advice on how activists can organizing against the fishing industry.

Great Schools failed to perform even basic research on this topic before committing pen to paper — or pixels to the screen in this case. In fact, if a typical American high school student tried to hand in this article for a grade, they would have received an “F” for failing to research the subject adequately. You see, in the schools we attended, our teachers taught us that if you were going to present a piece of evidence in a research paper, you were required to also present sources that had a different point of view. You could disagree with those sources, but you were still required to present them and say why you thought they were incorrect.

Taken together, it’s could be concluded that the crowd at Great Schools are more concerned with teaching our children what to think instead of how to think. When you read any other advice they parcel out, please keep that in mind.

Yesterday at Greenpeace UK, posted an item on tuna and sustainability and not surprisingly it fails to tell the whole story.

There is little argument over the fact that stocks of theiconic Bluefin tunaare not in good shape. But Americans don’t really eat bluefin, its something of an exotic fish. Per capita Americans eat about the weight of a few paperclips in Bluefin each year. Bluefin winds up in high end sushi bars, not the place most Americans trying to feed a family on a budget dine.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of other tuna species that are in fine shape. As we pointed out in a letter to the editor that appeared recently in The Californian, skipjack tuna makes up nearly 70 percent of all the canned tuna eaten in the U.S. The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation’s stock status for skipjack shows that the species is not being overfished in any ocean on earth. Meanwhile, even the Monterey Bay Aquarium admits that skipjack is a “resilient” species and that the majority of its populations are healthy and abundant.

While Greenpeace claims to want to educate consumers about which tuna is which, it continues to surreptitiously tie the admittedly sad situation with bluefin tuna to canned tuna. The fact is the tuna most Americans eat, or at least the ones I know, is far from facing a sustainability crisis.

AOLs coverage of the Gulf from a food safety perspective has been thorough and accurate. But this article unfortunately plays right into the hyperbole and hysteria created by Food & Water Watch with little or no perspective on the realities of imported seafood.

For starters a minimum of research would expose Food & Water Watchs suggestion that many foreign shrimp farms densely pack their ponds to produce as much as 89,000 pounds of shrimp per acre as patently ridiculous. In the same paragraph it is suggested that properly run shrimp farms yield up to 445 pounds per acre. Both are fairly close to absurd.

An acre should be capable of producing somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 to 22 thousand pounds. 89,000 lbs is a gross exaggeration, while 445 lbs would suggest the farm has serious production problems and mortality issues that should set off alarm bells.

Meanwhile, throughout this article there is a drum beat that suggests FDA isnt doing a good enough job and sites myriad import alerts as evidence of dangerous products making it to our shores. But doesnt that just illustrate that the system is working? So far this year, the FDA has issued 34 significant alerts involving hundreds of seafood suppliers throughout the world, sounds like theyre doing a pretty good job.

But before we get too far into the weeds of regulatory jousting lets look at the big picture. As they say the proof is always in the pudding. Outbreaks/sicknesses are a fairly good measure of the impact of a certain product on public health. And Food and Water Watch has already told you in this article that with imported shrimp, we see pathogens like E. coli and salmonella.

Well, a check of the CDCs data base on such things finds, for the last two available years (06,07), there were 0 outbreaks and 0 illnesses associated with E. coli and salmonella from shrimpthats none. And while were on the topic, what about all finfish? In that case there was 1 outbreak and 44 illnesses.

Is all of this finger pointing and hand wringing over 44 illnesses in 2 years? With the egg debacle going on now were talking about 1,300 illnesses in 2 weeks.

Facts and perspective are sorely needed.

Earlier this year NFI tangled with the Las Vegas Review-Journal over its reporting ona University of Nevada Las Vegasstudyabout mercury in canned tuna. You can click here and here to read the letters that we sent to reporter Keith Rogers and the newspaper’s Managing Editor, Charles Zobell.

If you don’t recall, the UNLV study claimed that 55 percent of the canned tuna the school tested exceeded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency safety level for mercury in fish of 0.5 parts per million.

There is a fairly simple problem with thestudy’s conclusion and subsequent reporting: the EPA safety level for mercury in fish is 0.5 parts per million and is designed to aid in the regulation of industrial facilities like power plants and incinerators. It is not a level used in relation to human consumption of commercial seafood.

That sort of regulation has been the sole province of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. FDAs level is 1.0 parts per million and was designed with human health in mind. Additionally it includes a 1,000 percent safety factor. That means before consumers would begin to approach mercury levels of concern they would have to be exposed to 10 parts per million of mercury over an entire lifetime, not simply from one single can of tuna or piece of fish.

Unfortunately, a little less than nine months later, we see that one of the great names in American publishing, Good Housekeeping, has taken a couple of sentences from the UNLV study and made a recommendation that could very well dissuade its readers from eating tuna, one of the healthiest lean proteins around that is also one of the best sources of both omega-3 fatty acids and Vitamin D.

The short piece, written by Samantha Cassetty, a registered dietitian and Nutrition Director from the Good Housekeeping Research Institute, simply repeats the UNLV findings and neglects to mention any of the facts we presented to the reporters and editors at the Las Vegas Review-Journal earlier this year. Ms. Cassettys write-up does not explain the difference between the EPA and FDA level or how they are used, nor did she appear to investigate itan unsettling lack of research that, quite frankly, calls into question just how much the vaunted “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval,” is really worth.

And for the devil-is-in-the-details file we also noticed; Cassetty neglected to specify that the study in question was published by the University of Nevada-Las Vegas: UNLV and not simply the University of Nevada which is in Reno.

I’m sure many of you are familiar with Jillian Michaels, better known as a personal trainer who appears on the NBC Television program The Biggest Loser. As it turns out, Michaels has quite a following of her own on Facebook, and she recently told her fans that she was cutting down on tuna after tests revealed elevated levels of mercury in her blood.

Upon reading this questionable posting we did a little research and then put out a media advisory that notes Michaels is far from being an unimpeachable source on health and nutrition, in fact shes been sued four times this year in connection with her endorsement of nutritional supplements. A pair of nutrition experts interviewed by ABC.com said that while the supplements probably aren’t harmful, it’s clear that they don’t work. One even went so far to call one of the supplements “bogus” and “an absurdity.”

Jennifer McGuire MS RD, said Jillian should have had her omega-3 levels tested instead. According to a study from Harvard researchers, 84,000 Americans die each year because they dont get enough of the omega-3s found in fish. Thats the real danger to public health, not mercury.

After looking at her Web site, we can’t find any evidence that Michaels has any professional medical or nutritional training. The best way to get the nutrients you need and maintain a healthy weight is eating whole foods, not supplements, and there isnt any dietitian who would disagree. If you want the best information on nutrition, turn off your television and talk to your personal physician or a registered dietitian instead, said McGuire.

It would appear that Dr. Oz is at it again… and so are we. Have a look at our latest letter:

August 18, 2010

Mr. Glenn Mott

Managing Editor and Director of Publishing

King Features

300 West 57th Street 15th Floor

New York, NY 10019-5238

Dear Mr. Mott,

I am writing you again to request corrections to two errors concerning fish and nutrition that were made in a recent column written by Drs. Oz and Roizen. You can read our original letter to you by clicking here.

The National Fisheries Institute is not the only organization questioning Drs. Oz and Roizen’s nutrition advice. TheTufts University Health & Nutrition Letter in a recent article “Nutrition in the news: time for a reality check” pointed out the same inaccuracies in a larger story about frequently misreported food facts:

• Drs. Oz and Roizen wrote that flaxseed, walnuts and even hemp are good sources of omega-3 fatty acids. But the Tufts article points out that the type of omega-3s found in those plants is not the same as the more powerfully beneficial kind found in fish. The human body cannot efficiently convert omega-3s found in plants to the kind from fish.

• According to Tufts, the same article also said that people concerned with toxins in fish should consider algae. Tufts correctly points out that an Institute of Medicine expert panel has already concluded that the benefits of fish outweigh the risks, which means there is no nutrition reason for consumers to opt for algae to get their omega-3s. Says Tufts: “Besides, you’re unlikely to make dinner from a plateful of algae; one of the many advantages of eating more fish is that it takes the place of less-healthy protein sources in your diet.”

While you might dismiss an appeal from the seafood community as parochial, can you dismiss errors pointed out by one of the preeminent nutrition schools in the country? In both of the above cases, your readers would be better served if you shared this information with them in a correction appended to a future column.

Until the record is corrected, the National Fisheries Institute intends to share evidence of these errors with the public and the press as we have in the past.

Sincerely,

Gavin Gibbons

National Fisheries Institute

In case you missed the piece in the Toronto Sun about Greenpeace I have to say its a must read. The column titled Trespassing For Dollars outlines how Greenpeace breaks the law, abuses its standing in the media and raises money all the while.

More than once weve pointed out Greenpeaces stunningly transparent fund raising schemes that usually include half truths, exaggerations and or as they call it emotionalizing the issue lying.

Trespassing For Dollars includes a litany of all of these offenses and points out some really stunning numbers, like: Greenpeaces budget last year was nearly $270 million. They need to bring in more than $700,000 a day just to keep the lights on.

It goes on to suggest that, at least in Canada, an argument could be made that Greenpeace is a criminal enterprise profiting off of criminal actions and could potentially be prosecuted.

Might Greenpeace be seeing Canadian Mountie red in the future?

I know I don’t have to remind our readers that we’ve had to confront Dr. Mehmet Oz, better known to millions as television’s Dr. Oz, over a number of errors and distortions he’s committed during the course of this year. And though it’s taken some time, it appears that others have started to notice what we’ve been writing about.

The July issue of the Tufts University Health and Nutrition Letter contained an article that corrects a number of popular misconceptions about nutrition that have been promulgated by the mainstream media. Cited are articles from USA Weekend, Bon Appetit and Health, as well as television programs like Today and Oprah. Also mentioned is a recent column by Dr. Oz and his business partner, Dr. Michael Roizen.

The article corrects a number of errors. First, the pair wrote that flaxseed, walnuts and even hemp are good sources of Omega-3 fatty acids. But Tufts points out that the type of Omega-3s found in those plants is not the same as the ones found in fish. It also turns out that the human body converts Omega-3s found in fish more efficiently than the fats found in plants.

According to Tufts, that same column suggested that people concerned with toxins in fish oil supplements should consider algae instead. Tufts quite correctly points out that an Institute of Medicine expert panel has already concluded that the benefits of eating fish outweigh the risks, which means consumers don’t have to turn to algae to get their Omega-3s.

Says Tufts: “Besides, you’re unlikely to make dinner from a plateful of algae; one of the many advantages of eating more fish is that it takes the place of less-healthy protein sources in your diet.”

Bravo. In the meantime, we’re going to share the Tufts article with the editors at King Features, the company that syndicates the column by Drs. Oz and Roizen. We will continue to demand they uphold their oaths to do no harm and correct these errors to set the record straight.