An Oregon man named Allen Heckard once reportedly sued Michael Jordan and Nike because Mr. Heckard apparently looked too much like the basketball star in his Nike gear and the unwanted attention was apparently causing him “emotional pain and suffering.” He thought a payment of $832 million would help him get over the horrors of being mistaken for arguably the greatest professional basketball player who ever lived.

This is of course an example of an absurd abuse of the legal system that naturally did not pan out for the plaintiff.

Theres another such example that doesnt quite have the same star power as Mr. Heckards but on the merits of science its just as ludicrous and comes to us from a group whose desperate attention-getting antics of the past have proven they have little if any shame.

The group of course is the wildlife extremistsat GotMercury? Whose misleading and misguided crusades are not designed to help consumers but simply cause them to eliminate fish from their diet because of the organizations concern over sea turtles (not public health), thusly explaining why the groups actual charter lies with the Turtle Island Restoration Network. Mr. Heckard looks a whole heck of a lot more like Michael Jordan than this organization resembles a science based, health organization.

Think back to a chillier time during the Holidays when millions of Americans donated canned food to charities around the country, GotMercury? issued an announcement asking charitable organizations not to distribute donations of canned tuna. The reason: turtles and the group’s exaggerated claims about trace amount of mercury in the fish.

That announcement showed us just how desperate the radicals at Got Mercury? had become. Canned tuna is unique because it provides a rare combination of nutrition and affordability. No other lean protein can provide such a powerful array of Omega-3 fatty acids and Vitamin D. Substituting for it in America’s food banks isn’t just impractical, it’s impossible, and denying it to people who come to food banks for help at the holidays is not only counterproductive but cruel. That stunt illustrated the only thing that matters to these sea turtle campaigners is their radical agenda, and they’re not above using the poor to make their point, no matter who gets hurt.

Now theyve revved up the ole scare monger machine and have filed a legal petition with the FDA asking for warning signs about fish in stores and a lower limit on the amount of mercury allowed in seafood. They chirp sanctimoniously about protecting the public from mercury and artfully craft language that appears to warn consumers that eating seafood and thus mercury ingestion can lead to death.

Even the sea-turtle-campaigning Queens of hyperbole have reached a new level of rhetoric with this legal boondoggle. Either they feel the proverbial tide of ground truth science pulling them further out of the mainstream sea or they have literally no idea what the current state of seafood science says about mercury in fish.

And what does it say?

Well, despite the dire predictions from GotMercury? The brand new published, peer reviewed Dietary Guidelines for Americans says, seafood consumption of 8 oz (two servings) per week [is] encouraged during pregnancy and it specifically notes that the benefits of consuming seafood far outweigh the risks, even for pregnant women.

Im not sure how far from the mainstream of medical and nutrition knowledge any one single organization can be than insinuating people can die from a product that experts concluded, after an exhaustive two year review of the science, is a safe healthy food that people, even pregnant women, need to eat more of.

Wait… perhaps they could be more outside the mainstream of medical and nutrition knowledge when we find that as part of the American Heart Associations 2020 Impact Goal it suggests one of the 7 things you can do to improve heart health in the nutrition category is increase consumption of fish.

Oh and while a handful of wildlife extremists petition the FDA to ignore the current body of science in hopes of curtailing seafood consumption, a growing petition launched last May by two of the worlds top experts on seafood science calls on the FDA to update its 2004 advice on fish and pregnancy because it is out of date, noting that the very misnomers promoted by GotMercury? may be inadvertently causing harm. That request came in the form of an open letter and petition from Professors Thomas Brenna of Cornell University and Michael Crawford of London Metropolitan University to FDA Commissioner, Dr. Margaret Hamburg that was posted online. While researchers and clinicians from the National Institutes of Health, Oxford University, Johns Hopkins, Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, as well as representatives from 15 different countries, make up some of the more than 130 signatures on the petition GotMercury? continues its anemic campaign by, this time, doing what Michael Jordans apparent doppelganger did… filing a laughable legal petition.

GotTooMuchTimeOnYourHands?

Guilty as charged.