In the final 15 minutes of yesterday’s edition of Today, the show’s diet and nutrition expert, Joy Bauer, appeared in a segment that examined the five foods kids should be eating. The question is getting a lot of attention these days thanks to all the reporting about childhood obesity and First Lady Michelle Obama’s efforts to address it by encouraging healthy eating and exercise.

Right off the bat, Bauer rattled off a number of facts concerning the health benefits of seafood. Most prominently of all, she took the time to talk about omega-3 fatty acids and how including them in your diet can optimize brain performance.

That’s all great information, and something that we talk about all the time over at HealthyTuna. But what had us concerned was when Bauer also advocated swapping out a tuna fish sandwich or tuna topped salad made with white albacore tuna and replacing it with a salmon filet.

That’s a shame, because tuna, especially albacore tuna, is one of the richest and most affordable sources of omega-3 fatty acids. And as we’ve said so many times before, only a small percentage of the U.S. population eats enough fish — two servings per week — in order to enjoy the full health benefit from omega-3 fatty acids and other nutrients. So when you substitute one fish serving for another, you’re not getting any closer to a worthy health goal that’s been endorsed by the American Heart Association, among others.

So, instead of swapping out tuna for salmon, why not keep both on the menu? Besides improving your health, your taste buds will thank you too.

Busted.

This time a New Jersey seafood importer is headed to the clink for 22 months for fraudulently importing pangasius and was ordered to pay $64 million in restitution for evading tariffs.

64 million bucks and 22 months in the poky were not talkin Lindsey Lohan time here, folks, were talkin a decent chunk of change and some questionable new roommates.

The Better Seafood Board has been saying for years, whatever you call it; short weight, species substitution, mislabelingits all fraud.

The species really doesnt matter its the scam that gets ya. It could have been tilapia sold as snapper or Pollock sold as Cod or Yellowtail sold as Mahi Mahiany way you slice it its against the law and more and more we are seeing authorities cracking down on this type of thing.

It was in this very space seven days ago that the ills of a business model that includes stifling competition by attempting to regulate imports out of the market with exaggerated attacks and twisted food safety claims was discussed as one that threatens the integrity of an entire industry.

And here we are not a week later and the Catfish Farmers of America can be found in the press insisting there are alarming health dangers associated with their competition.

As the late Ronald Reagan said, There you go again.

Perhaps its time we call a spade a spade and lay waste to the rhetorical jousting and slick lobbying and just shine a light on whats happening here.

Lets start with two facts: One imported pangasius is a delicious, healthy fish, safely imported from international trading partners. Twodomestic farm raised catfish is a delicious, healthy fish, safely harvested in the U.S.

Those are the facts.

Having said thatno one believes the Catfish Farmers of America actually think this is a health and safety issue. No one. Everyone knows the game they are playing. Everyone.

When they fain distress over an issue made even more shocking in the face of the new report compiled by … Exponent that exposes the alarming health dangers its an embarrassing window on a special interest group that appears to either think the audience is dim or special interest group that has truly lost all perspective.

Shock, over a report they commissioned? Alarming health dangers, from a study whose supporting material finds bacterial issues in the domestic and imported product that were not significantly different?

The proponents of protectionism say theyre, not asking for imported catfish to be treated any differently than (catfish raised in the United States)no kidding. Theyve both been overseen by FDA since the dawn of regulation. They never have been treated differently.

This thin faux food safety argument continues to represent a dangerous tactic that could hurt the entire seafood community in order to stifle a single aspect of competition.

In explaining what he called the folly of protectionism, again, Ronald Reagan said, over the past 200 years, not only has the argument against tariffs and trade barriers won nearly universal agreement among economists, but it has also proven itself in the real world where we have seen freetrading nations prosper, while protectionist countries fall behind.

The special interest, anti-competition lobby is expert at misrepresenting data and warping anecdotal tales of woe into food safety scares that have little or no validity.

Today they are at it again on Capitol Hill. The Catfish Farmers of America will stand shoulder to shoulder with their lobbyist brethren to tell Americans that imported fish like pangasius from Vietnam (which they will call catfish despite having said “that fish and ours are as close taxonomically as a house cat and a cow,” when it served a different lobbying need) is a food safety risk.

Despite whatever statistical analysis theyve conjured up this time their argument will fall flat on a number of points. First, up until now a large helping of their statistics have come from Alabama Agriculture Commissioner, Ron Sparks, who is running for governor. And wouldnt you know it he banned a catfish competitor from sale on Wednesday November the 4^th and then was the beneficiary of a planned $50,000 campaign fund raiser sponsored by catfish farmers on Tuesday November 10^th .

Curious timing?

Perhaps.

Next, they will talk about the negative impact on public health of the imported fish like pangasius but wont be able to point to any large scale CDC recorded instances of people actually becoming sick from the product.

But wait, they could point to the fact that the CDC found that 10 people became ill from a product labeled catfish back in 1991 at a restaurant in New Jersey. So, while the CDC estimates that 76 million Americans get sick from food-borne illnesses each year, this effort appears to be targeted at reducing the 10 illnesses reported in the past 19 years. Thats a pretty comprehensive public health effort.

Is pointing out the fact that catfish-industry-supported gubernatorial candidate Ron Sparks distributed more than $3 million in funds to 138 Alabama catfish producers in February and more than $12 million dollars to them in just 18 months, a snarky way to say he does not appear to be a dispassionate public health official concerned about the welfare of consumers?

Yes.

Is noting that the domestic catfish lobby claimed eight years ago that their competition was an entirely different species than they say it is now, a bit of a dig that parrots what the Wall Street Journal called a linguistic backflip?

It is.

What about suggesting the anti-competition lobby was diligently testing imported fish to ensure 10 people over the course of two decades didnt come down with symptoms of upset stomach? Is that a question loaded with white hot derision, perhaps?

Guilty again.

But it all serves one purpose. To demonstrate how ludicrous their arguments are and how weak their execution is. It will take only a few educated journalists to ask the right questions in order to expose this special interest charade for what it is.

Are you one of those journalists? Or will you simply smile and eat up their latest batch of deep fried distortion?

The integrity of the seafood industry doesnt lie solely in the marketing of a single fish or the sustainability story of a single species. It lies with the ability of a community of competitors to look outside the industry and confidently say yes, thats how we do business over here and we stand behind both our messaging and our methods.

The cola wars have been a well know battleground for both product and marketing innovation. But never have we heard Coke erroneously claim Pepsi is a dangerous product that could sicken consumers. Could Coke commission some quasi-science about sugar content, dyes and artificial sweeteners and then go guns blazing after Pepsi with a half cocked misinformation campaign? Sure, it could. But would it? No.

Coke knows false allegations, exaggerations and spin would strike at the integrity of the whole soft drink industry and its smarter than that.

Some members of the domestic catfish industry continue to rely on a worn out strategy of distorting science and abusing public trust in the discussion about food safety by targeting foreign competition with unsubstantiated public health claims and, quite frankly, xenophobic attacks. This strategy is and has been an embarrassment to the seafood community and continues to undermine the whole industrys integrity.

It doesnt help the rest of the industry when major newspapers like the Wall Street Journal make note of the domestic catfish industrys protectionism veiled as food safety (07.14.09) or comment that, this Keystone protectionism would be funny if it werent so serious (05.20.10). Likewise, having the Washington Post mock the domestic catfish strategy by leading its reporting with what follows is a fish tale, though this one is actually true (03.11.08) does nothing but make the whole industry look bad.

A business model that includes stifling competition by attempting to regulate imports out of the market with exaggerated attacks and twisted food safety claims is one that threatens the integrity of an entire industry.

If not careful, reaping what we sow can be a painful process.

If you read this blog with any regularity you know we’re constantly reminding the press about our objections to many of the seafood pocket guides that have been proliferating in recent years. In short, we find them often contradictory and confusing, something that we know can actually lead to consumers eating less fish and not eating enough to enjoy the full health benefits from Omega-3 fatty acids and other nutrients like Vitamin D.

Furthermore, as the guides have no independent oversight, we find that many of the determinations concerning sustainability to be scientifically flimsy at best.

The latest example of the media falling for one of these guides comes from Oprah.com which ran a story by Graham Hill, the founder of TreeHugger.com. Hill is hardly a disinterested party, he’s a full-fledged environmental activist. As for Monterey Bay Aquarium, they are an environmental lobbying group, not a nutrition organization, and ought to be treated as such.

One wonders why Oprah.com didn’t send an actual reporter to talk to an expert from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administraton (NOAA). That agency is famous for publishing FishWatch, its own independent online seafood guide one that is transparent and clearly science based.

It’s been a little more than a year since the Hearst Corporation ceased publication of the print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Since then, the newspaper has lived on as an online only product. As a result, the online successor relies very heavily on unedited reader blogs instead of full-time journalists. If this article on fish and mercury is any indication, there are a number of pitfalls that come with that new model.

Why do I say that? For starters, the column by Tami Gustafson mentions the infamous sushi test that the New York Times conducted back in early 2008 — one that NFI thoroughly debunked and the newspaper’s own public editor criticized.

But the errors and distortions don’t stop there. As we’ve noted many times, no evidence of a case of methylmercury poisoning from the normal consumption of commercial seafood has ever been found in peer-reviewed medical literature. Gustafson’s article prominently mentions man-made pollution, yet neglects to mention that the traces of mercury found in commercial seafood is from natural sources like underwater volcanic activity — a scientific fact that has been upheld by twoCaliforniaCourts.

Gustafson also ignored some of the latest science that has found that governments need to do more to communicate the benefits of eating fish. That also includes news of an extraordinary online petition calling on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to update its 2004 advisory on fish and pregnancy because it may be causing “inadvertent harm.”

Put simply, there’s a lot going on concerning the science of seafood and nutrition that the activist community would like you to ignore. I’m sorry to see that Gustafson didn’t bother to do the sort of due diligence in order to get the story right.

* The Seattle Post-Intelligencer noted on the above blog entry that it was unedited and encourages readers to pass along their comments. We’ve done just that with the above entry.

Profiting off of tragedy or at least attempting to is a theme weve seen before with the Gulf oil spill. Call it cashing in on a crisis, call it profiteering, call it whatever you want but its going on and its not just the big name regulars we see in this genre these days.

Now were seeing folks like this blogger who describes himself as an Industrial Disaster Threat Forecaster (say that 3 times fast) whos hocking his services along side claims that oysters from the Gulf have been found to leak oil onto dinner plates and that Red Lobster took contaminated shrimp off its menu.

What?

No commercially harvested Gulf oysters are leaking oil onto dinner plates and Red Lobster absolutely did not pull contaminated shrimp off its menuwrong on both counts.

But whats accuracy when youre trying to make a buck off tragedyright?

We don’t mean to beat a dead horse, but every time Jeremy Piven comes out to tell his story about sushi and mercury, NFI feels the obligation to remind the rest of the world that we think his story doesn’t amount to much.

Originally, when Piven appeared on “The View” on June 25, 2010 to tell the story about his departure from David Mamet’s production of “Speed the Plow,” weissued a media advisory. But now that ABC Television decided to re-air that same program earlier today in a number of markets, we feel compelled once again to remind the rest of the world of what we’ve been saying about Piven for the better part of 18 months — his story just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Why outlets like ABC Television continue to give Piven a platform without asking him any tough questions is baffling.

The economy may be down but the television doctor business is booming these days. You cant turn the channel with out bumping into characters like The Doctors or Dr. Oz. It was only last week that both programs took home Daytime Emmy Awards. The Doctors won an Emmy for best informative talk show, while Dr. Mehmet Oz won for best talk show host.

But is what’s good for the syndicated television business good for public health? Regrettably, after watching some recent programs, its pretty clear that the answer is no.

Readers of this blog know weve had a beef with Dr. Oz and some of his quasi-science for quite some time now.. We’ve more or less been sending him letters about his January 2010 program on fish and mercury for months, only to get a perfunctory answer from his lawyer instead of real medical answers to our legitimate questions that are based on independent science.

More recently, we sent a letter to the producers of The Doctors after Dr. Travis Stork made an uninformed offhand comment about fish and mercury that could lead the audience to believe advice specifically targeted at women who are pregnant was meant for the overall population. After about three weeks, we’re still waiting for an answer.

And how about that bastion of informed science The View, the talk show produced by long-time ABC television personality Barbara Walters. Last week, the program had Jeremy Piven on as a guest, and when it did, the hosts simply sat back and let the actor repeat his scientifically unsound charges about fish and mercury without asking any hard questions. In response, NFI sent a letter to Patrick Ignozzi, the program’s Senior Producer, asking for an opportunity to talk to the program about Piven’s comments in an effort to correct the record.

Ignozzi simply didn’t respond. Instead, producers chose to have Dr. Steven Lamm, the program’s in-house doctor, on to answer a question from the hosts about Piven’s claims. Lamm walked down the same road Stork did on The Doctors, claiming that mercury in fish is something the entire population needs to be concerned about, despite the fact the the FDA has said, “for most people, the risk from mercury by eating fish and shellfish is not a concern.”

So what’s the lesson here? When you’re looking for sound advice, perhaps it’s better to shut off the television and talk to a doctor or dietitian.