About Seafood

I am always on the hunt for kid-friendly and adult-appealing recipes (seafood and otherwise). Since I had canned salmon in the pantry, I whipped up some Corny Salmon Cakes from the lovely Meal Makeover Moms ladies, fellow RDs Liz Weiss and Janice Bissex.

The Dartmouth University Toxic Metals Superfund Research Program contains a section on mercury, which includes a short documentary video and a number of links to Information About Seafood and Nutrition. Unfortunately, the video does more to confuse the facts about the presence of naturally occurring organic mercury in our oceans than it does to clarify them, and the sources cited on the page are a whos who of seafood fear-mongers, long on ulterior agendas and short on nutritional expertise.

Consider Oceana, whose representatives are given ample air time in the video. Oceana is a self-described oceanic conservation organization, not a nutritional group. And yet, as their CEO Andrew Sharpless admitted, they have targeted naturally occurring mercury in seafood to amplify their agenda. People start to care more and understand the threat to the ocean, when you tell them their tuna fish is contaminated. Its a dramatic, eye-opening moment, Sharpless said. Its also a disingenuous moment. Oceana relies on unverifiable anecdotes to suggest that mercury poisoning is a real problem in the United States, a contention no peer reviewed scientific study has ever backed up. But all that matters to the group is that the public is frightened into paying heed to their agenda, no matter the nutritional repercussions.

The same goes for the Natural Resources Defense Fund (NRDC), a collection of activist trial attorneys and revolving-door government-officials-turned-lobbyists. Nutrition experts, these are not, and yet NRDC sees fit to offer a sustainable seafood guide which the Superfund site dutifully links to. Consumers beware. NRDC has a long history of getting science wrong or making it up and contributing to unnecessary and costly public health scares. They simply cant be trusted.

Or consider the The Gelfond Fund for Mercury Research & Outreach, which claims to not want to discourage people from eating seafood, but which, since its inception in 2009, has specialized in misleading propaganda that seems dead set on scaring people off of fish. The fund is named after millionaire Richard Gelfond, who bankrolled the operation with a $1 million donation, and who claims he suffered from a case of mercury poisoning as the result of eating seafood daily. Like other such claims, this sounds awfully strange in a world where citizens of nations like Japan eat far more fish per capita than Americans do, without suffering from any widespread negative health effects and a longer life expectancy. The Gelfond Funds advisory board, by the way, features no nutritional experts.

In fact, none of the groups linked on the Dartmouth site are primarily concerned with nutritionone group linked is actually an aquarium!and yet they are presented as experts.

So what do the real experts have to say about eating seafood? The latest official nutritional guidelines from the USDA recommend eating a wide variety of seafood, which is high in protein, low in saturated fat, and contains omega-3 fatty acids associated with improved cardiovascular health and fetal brain development. In fact, the USDA says Americans arent eating enough seafood, and recommend increase[ing] the amount and variety of seafood consumed to at least 8 or more ounces per week, up from about 3.5 ounces a week now, to get maximal cardiovascular benefits.

That advice applies to pregnant women who eat a paltry 1.89 ounces of seafood a weekas well. In fact, the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture organization of the United Nations stress that it is important to communicate to pregnant and breastfeeding women the risks of not eating seafood, a finding backed by multiple, peer-reviewed studies in publications like The Journal of Pediatrics and The Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The online-only Nutrition Journal, one of 200 journals churned out by a British for-profit conglomerate, recently released a study on the consumption habits of pregnant women that baselessly and speciously concluded expecting mothers should avoid consuming whole categories of safe, reliable products, including seafood, canned food, and even tap water.

The report was authored by Kelly Huffman, who has a background in psychology, and includes contributions from a Ph. D. candidate and an undergraduate, none of whom have expertise in nutrition. The journals standards say they only publish peer-reviewed work, but when one peer reviewer with training in nutritional science expressed concerns about the studys unfounded conclusions, Nutrition Journal ignored them and published the report anyway.

The reviewer pointedly wrote that the psych-major and her coauthors make very general recommendations about what should and should not be consumed by pregnant women, which goes beyond the scope of the original data they present in the paper. Indeed, the reviewer writes that the main thrust of the report, essentially an opinion survey conducted on a small sample of women, could and should be presented as a separate paper, with only a very succinct, quantified summary of known, scientifically valid recommendations for pregnant women. But did the authors take this experts advice? Apparently not. In a comment on the revised draft, the peer reviewer stated flatly: The revisions do not adequately address the problems I raised in my original review.

The authors opining at length about prenatal nutrition, beyond the scope of their research, might not be so bad if they relied on the best science. But when it comes to fears over mercury in seafood and the net effect of seafood consumption on health the authors sources are shoddy.

They cite, for instance, Philippe Grandjean, whose 15-year-old study found elevated levels of mercury and neurological problems in children of the Faroe Islands. But the elevation was due in large part to the consumption of whale meat, which 1) is not eaten in the United States, 2) carries far higher concentrations of mercury than fish such as canned tuna, which are regularly eaten by Americans, and 3) doesn’t contain nearly as much mercury-mitigating selenium as fish like tuna. Take whale meat out of Grandjeans study and the data falls apart.

Similarly, the report cites the work of Jane Hightower, a physician who sees mercury poisoning as the culprit for just about every health problem conceivable. Hightower hasn’t published a single peer-reviewed article showing an association between seafood and mercury-related symptoms, and none of her work on the topic would hold up to rigorous scientific scrutiny. She also has ties to the ideologically driven Mercury Policy Project (MPP), made up of environmental extremists whose many factual shortcomings and distortions have been well documented.

Indeed, MPPs Edward Groth III, who also works for the fringy Gelfond Fund (bankrolled by a lone multi-millionaire with little more than a gut feeling that his sushi habit has impacted his health) makes his way into the citations as well. Not via a rigorous scientific study, mind you, but via a Consumer Reports buyers guide. This also happens to be Huffman and co.s most recent citation on mercury and seafood. You read that right. The authors latest source for clinical recommendations on prenatal nutrition comes from the folks who review vacuum cleaners.

Its no wonder a nutritionally literate peer-reviewer wanted the authors to dramatically scale back their very general recommendations and ensure that they were better rooted in good science.

But it is puzzling why Nutrition Journal saw fit to publish the specious study in spite of this reviewers unanswered concerns. Why did they let a trio of psychologists hold forth, freestyle, on a subject as important as prenatal nutrition?

The journal emphasizes its speed of publication, and even brags about publishing provisional versions of articles immediately upon acceptance, putting out finalized versions only later. So maybe we can hold out hope that Nutrition Journal is only provisionally giving credence to this slipshod study. Good science takes time.

August 9, 2013

Kingsley Smith
Vice President
News Director
My Fox LA
KTTV-TV

Dear Mr. Smith,

I am writing to express serious concerns over an interview that aired on your station yesterday. Billed as a discussion centered on new research from UC Riverside your anchor talked with Dr. Kelly Huffman about her prenatal nutrition survey.

It would appear your anchor and or producers did little if any research about the study and offered no substantive questions about many of the problems found in this research. Likewise, they failed to research and or question the nutrition qualifications of the guest.

For starters, as discussed, the study suggests pregnant women not eat salmon specifically to avoid PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls.) All fish, not just salmon, make up a total of 9% of the PCBs found in the American diet. While vegetables account for 20% of the PCBs. Is Dr. Huffman suggesting that pregnant women also not eat vegetables?

This type of fundamental contradiction found in this study was neither addressed nor acknowledged on the air by your staff. This type of overt journalistic failure calls into question the thoroughness with which they researched this topic.

Dr. Kelly Huffman herself suggests pregnant women avoid canned tuna because of its mercury levels and instead suggest women try Halibut. According to the FDA Halibut contains 0.241 ppm of mercury, while the most popular canned tuna contains 0.128 ppm, yet another almost nonsensical contradiction. Whats more, the USDA Dietary Guidelines (Federal Nutrition Policy) states, the benefits of consuming seafood far outweigh the risks, even for pregnant women.

I am sure these types of errors, both in the research itself and in the formulation of the segment are as much a concern to you as they are to me. I appreciated your attention to this matter. Please let me know how you plan to address this situation and or if I can provide you with any resources.

Gavin Gibbons
National Fisheries Institute

cc: Kevin Hale
VP, General Manager

Ramona Schindelheim
Managing Editor

Josh Kaplan
Senior Executive Producer

Who do you want giving you nutrition advice when youre pregnant, doctors and dietitians or a psychology student? If you trust a new study that eclipses the negligent rating and catapults itself into ranks of the straight-up-wacky, youd pick the psychology student.

The study is published in the little-known Nutrition Journal, not to be confused with the venerable Journal of Nutrition. A distinction most aptly illustrated with an eighties sports car reference that would compare a Fiero and a Ferrari.

The study, titled Consumption habits of pregnant women and implications for developmental biology: a survey of predominantly Hispanic women in California, contains numerous recommendations that fly in the face of the most up-to-date nutrition science.

The entire study loses any credibility out the gate when the authors had to categorize foods into healthy or unhealthy. Lets see here, healthy, fresh fruit. OK. Unhealthy, sugary desserts. Im following. Healthy, milk. Sounds good. Unhealthy, tuna and salmon. Ummmm. Why? Well, we took a look at the studies the authors cite to justify categorizing these lean sources of protein and brain-nourishing omega-3s as unhealthy eating habits and heres what we found. They are, on average, at least a dozen years old and not a single one looks at the net effect of eating fish during pregnancy on babies. The most recent citation, from 2011, is not from a published study at all, but from the consumer buyers guide, Consumer Reportsalso a terrific reference for buying stereo equipment and computer printers.

At one point the authors point to the dangers of salmon for pregnant women because it contains polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). What the psychology students failed to note is that the highest contributors of PCBs and dioxins to the American diet are beef, chicken, and pork (34% of total); dairy products (30%); and vegetables (22%). All fish and shellfish contribute 9%. I guess based on this logic, pregnant women should stop eating vegetables.

While the authors categorize tuna and salmon as unhealthy eating habits, here are a couple groups that dont:

United States Department of Agriculture and United States Department of Health and Human Services 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, January 2011

• A panel of 13 nutrition experts and physicians reviewed 46 studies to reach the conclusion that intake of omega-3 fatty acids, in particular DHA, from at least 8 ounces of seafood per week for women who are pregnant or breastfeeding is associated with improved infant health outcomes, such as visual and cognitive development. Therefore, it is recommended that women who are pregnant or breastfeeding consume at least 8 and up to 12 ounces of a variety of seafood per week Women who are pregnant or breastfeeding can eat all types of tuna, including white (albacore) and light canned tuna, but should limit white tuna to 6 ounces per week because it is higher in methyl mercury Obstetricians and pediatricians should provide guidance to women who are pregnant or breastfeeding to help them make healthy food choices that include seafood.

World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Joint Expert Consultation on the Risks and Benefits of Fish Consumption, September 2011

• A panel of 17 nutrition experts, physicians, and toxicologists reviewed nearly 150 studies and articles to reach the conclusion that experts should emphasize the net neurodevelopmental benefits to offspring of women of childbearing age who consume fish, particularly pregnant women and nursing mothers, and the neurodevelopmental risks to offspring of women of childbearing age who do not consume fish.

Oddly (or not, based on their opinions about fish) the researchers consider tap water and all canned foods unhealthy. Looks like a canned salmon sandwich with a glass of water is pretty much the kiss of death.

Dont get us wrong, this is a study worth reporting on. But the story is not that 25% of pregnant women eat salmon. The story is that studies like this that have the true potential to confuse and harm moms-to-be are a). allowed to be crafted by psychology students and b). get published in a nutrition journal.

A new report published in the scientific journal Epidemiology by researchers at the University of Rochester has found no relationship between eating fish during pregnancy and increased risk for autistic behavior in their children. The Seychelles Child Development Study drew from over 30 years of research examining the effects of methylmercurya naturally occurring organic compound found in the worlds oceans, and in trace amounts in seafoodin pregnant women who ate 12 meals of fish a week. The report adds to the long list of independent studies showing the developmental benefits for babies when their mothers eat fish regularly during pregnancy and serves as further proof against the fearmongers who continue to claim seafood consumptioneven in far more modest amountsis somehow dangerous especially for pregnant women and their unborn children. The federal governments Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends expecting mothers eat no less than two servings a week. Currently pregnant women eat less than 2 ounces of seafood a week, or less than one serving.

The U.S. seafood recommendation is far lower than the average womans fish intake in the rest of the world, including the women who took part in the Rochester study, who ate 10 times the amount of seafood of the average American women and had 20 times the amount of methylmercury in their systems. In fact, the Rochester study found that the children of women with the largest concentrations of methylmercury actually had higher brain development scores, perhaps due in part to the overriding benefits of eating fish.

The study comes at an important time as the “11th International Conference on Mercury as a Global Pollutant is set to kickoff. Among the panels are discussions on Health Impacts from Mercury: Emerging science and unanswered questions, which involves examining the risks and benefits of eating seafooda non-issue for pregnant women, as the Rochester and countless other studies have shown.

So as environmental zealots use this platform to justify the righteousness of their clean environmental cause and scare pregnant women about eating or choosing their fish wisely, journalists covering the conference should ask themselves these questions:

1) Why should the public believe environmental extremists claims of theoretical harm over independent scientific studies showing that eating fish is both beneficial and necessary for pregnant women and their babies?

2) Why perpetuate fear that the amount of fish a pregnant women eats needs to be limited when according to FDA she eats less than 2 ounces a week on average, far below the government recommendation she eat 8 to 12 ounces?

3) Why complicate messages about the importance of eating fish during pregnancy with messages suggesting the species of fish she chooses is fraught with danger?

4) Are these groups ready to take responsibility for willfully promoting harmful advice that causes mothers to deprive their babies of essential nutrients found in fish and needed to build babies brains?

Instead of listening to a group of unqualified environmental zealots whos entire environmental agenda rests on creating fear among pregnant women about eating fish, and asking for money to do it, Americans should listen to research experts like those at the from the University of Rochester, and countless others, who continue to show us missing out on fish is the real harm.

For a person who makes his living as a writer, Mark Bittman has contracted an awfully convenient case of writers blockthat or he simply cant be bothered to respond to our letters. The New York Times food columnist recently penned a column offering disingenuous and harmful advice to the American public, suggesting that people limit the amount of tuna they eat based on thewhollynon-scientific advice of Dominique Browning, an environmental activist.

NFI brought a long list of concerns to the Times and its public editor, Margaret Sullivan including Bittmans failure to disclose Brownings ties to an activist environmental group, his false claims about the mercurys effects on infant health, and his ignorance of the fact that a lack of seafood consumption contributes to approximately 84,000 deaths in America every year, among many other items. These concerns were completely ignored. Even after the same concerns were raised by other outlets, Sullivan failed to address them choosing instead to write about such pressing concerns as Sesame Street and Kanye West.

When we reached out to Bittman directly, we asked a series of questions about his glaring omissions, and requested that he clarify or correct his dangerous advice.

He has so far remained silent.

Bittmans inactions suggests a lack of integrity, and readers would be wise to cast a skeptical eye on his future work. We invite the readers to take a look at our questions for Bittman and learn the truth about the health benefits of tuna.

When Philly.com asked how much tuna kids should eat we took a close look at their reporting and found it… lacking. Here’s a letter to their editors and watch this space for any response.

June 24, 2013

Karl Stark

Assistant Managing Editor

Business, Health and Science coverage

Philly.com

Dear Mr. Stark,

Todays GreenSpace column by Sandy Bauers (How much tuna should kids eat?) fails the most basic standards of journalism. It contains misleading, dangerous advice based on pseudo-science propagated by activists.

Specifically:

Ms. Bauer presented a primary source in her column, Adam Finkel, as an unbiased observer. As Ms. Bauer portrayed it, Mr. Finkel is a father and scholar who became concerned about how much tuna children are eating based on two recent reports.

At least one of these reports was generated by the Mercury Policy Project (MPP), a well-known activist organization. Yet Ms. Bauer failed to disclose Mr. Finkels connection to the Mercury Policy Project that dates back at least three years.

Mr. Finkel joined other activists in signing two letters lobbying the federal government on mercury in seafood. I found the letters one signed in 2010 and the other in 2013 — on the Mercury Police Project website using a quick Google search.

Why was this important, and easily found, connection not disclosed to readers?

Ms. Bauer also did not provide any background on the Mercury Policy Project, a group she describes innocuously as a Vermont nonprofit. In fact, MPP is an agenda-driven activist group with a notorious history of promoting hysteria that is utterly at odds with the whole of the medical and science establishment. I provided Ms. Bauer with information about the Mercury Policy Project, but she apparently ignored it.

Ms. Bauer also gave considerable import to a report written for MPP by Edward Groth, an activist turned consultant. Heres what I told Ms. Bauer in an email prior to her columns publication:

Reports like the one from MPP do far more harm than good for Americas children. Their study was not peer reviewed, not published and was based on what can only be described as a new low in quasi science. The lead author relied on what he heard was served at the school of a friends grandson in New Jersey. MPP did zero research into the actual frequency of tuna being served in school lunches. None. How can you do an exposure study if you dont research how often a subject is exposed?

I also provided a link to an article detailing the problems with the study.

None of this was mentioned in Ms. Bauers column.

As I mentioned, I sent Ms. Bauer a lengthy email with a statement and spoke to her on the phone. Heres a portion of what she declined to use:

The idea that children should eat fewer tuna sandwiches is embarrassingly out of step with what actual nutrition experts say (World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)Harvard School of Public Health, the Institute of Medicine (IOM).)

Hyperbole rather than honest perspective often colors these types of narratives. Lets put it in perspectivepeople in Japan eat 10 times as much seafood, including tuna, as Americans. Yet there is no epidemic of mercury poisoning there. In fact on many leaves the population, including school children, is measurably healthier than ours.

Please feel free to use anything you find in these resource links as on the record comments:

https://absprod.wpengine.com/press/media-blog/mercury-policy-project-continues-its-track-record-doing-more-harm-good

https://absprod.wpengine.com/press/media-blog/mercury-policy-project-reveals-new-low-quasi-science

https://absprod.wpengine.com/content/mercury-policy-project

Instead Ms. Bauer relied on activist misinformation. The result was an article thats heavy on dangerous hyperbole and light on important facts.

Ms. Bauer wrote: Mercury is emitted by coal-fired power plants and other industries. It gets into waterways, then into fish, accumulating as it moves up the food chain to top predators such as tuna.

In fact, mercury in the ocean, where commercial seafood comes from, is by and large naturally occurring. Trace amounts of mercury have always been in every fish since the beginning of time because it is naturally occurring in our oceans, mainly from underwater volcanoes and mineral deposits. In fact, methylmercury levels in commercial seafood are nearly identical to levels recorded over the last 100 years.

Ms. Bauer wrote: Mercury can harm memory, intelligence, and hand-eye coordination, so federal guidelines advise limited consumption for young children and women who are or may become pregnant.

Yet Ms. Bauer failed to mention that there are no cases of mercury poisoning from the normal consumption of commercial seafood in any peer-reviewed medical journal in this country.

Heres something else Ms. Bauer ignored: Research shows that children of women who ate the most Omega-3-rich fish while pregnant score the highest on intelligence and motor-skills tests. A study from the National Institutes of Health found children whose mothers eat no fish during pregnancy are nearly a third more likely to have abnormally low IQs. Yet another study found a link between prenatal mercury exposure and improved intelligence at age 17 — likely because traces of mercury in a pregnant womans blood showed she was eating a diet rich in fish.

Ms. Bauer wrote: Finkel considers tuna a needless risk and says the smaller the child, the less tuna he or she should eat. Groth’s report recommends that children weighing less than 55 pounds eat tuna no more than once a month.

Even in schools where tuna is served sparingly, the problem is the unusual kid who loves it and eats it at every opportunity, Groth and Finkel say.

In fact, no U.S. government study has ever found unsafe levels of mercury in children who eat canned tuna.

According to testing conducted by FDA, canned light tuna has an average of 0.12 parts per million (ppm) of methylmercury per can. Canned albacore tuna has an average of 0.35 ppm. To put these amounts into perspective, FDA has set a limit of 1.00 ppm for mercury in fish and that limit has a tenfold safety factor. That means a person would have to eat 10 times more fish than the current safety threshold every day for the rest of his life to reach a level associated with any known risk.

Ms. Bauer had a chance to educate her readers by focusing on the benefits of seafood how its rich in nutrients including protein, vitamin D and Omega 3 fatty acids that are essential to healthy development in children. Instead, she scared parents away from it. (Just imagine parents reaction reading the columns subhead: Studies underscore health risks for children consuming the mercury-tainted fish at school.) And that will only hurt children the very people Ms. Bauer is apparently trying to help.

As noted by a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “avoidance of modest fish consumption due to confusion regarding risks and benefits could result in thousands of excess coronary heart disease deaths annually and suboptimal neurodevelopment in children.”

Please explain how this column was published with so many glaring problems and please explain how you plan to set the record straight, as well as what steps you will take to ensure similar misinformation is not published again. Your readers deserve better.

I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Gavin Gibbons

National Fisheries Institute

cc David Sullivan

Assistant Managing Editor

In 2008, the New York Times publicized a bogus study from an activist group testing mercury levels in sushi, prompting the papers public editor to admit the article was less balanced than it should have been, and required careful judgment and missed.

Five years later, the New York Times has stepped on the same rake again.

Times food writer Mark Bittman just penned a commentary piece

(Giving up Tuna? Beathing Is Next) that relies almost entirely on misinformation from well-funded activist groups like the Environmental Defense Funds Moms Clean Air Force. The result is a hodgepodge of errors and exaggerations that profoundly misleads readers.

Here are some of the many irresponsible errors and deceptions in Mr. Bittman’s piece:

Mr. Bittman states: If youre like most people (including me, up until a month or two ago), you know that tuna and other top-of-the-food-chain fish contain unsafe levels of mercury and that childbirth-age women and nursing mothers, especially, are warned off these fish.

That is false: The only types of fish the federal government instruct women to completely avoid during pregnancy and breastfeeding are shark, swordfish, king mackerel and tilefish. The 2010 Dietary Guidelines issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommend that pregnant women eat at least 8 and up to 12 ounces of seafood every week during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Unborn babies require their mothers to pass along the important nutrients in seafood for optimal brain and eye development.

In fact, research shows that children of women who consume the most omega-3-rich fish while pregnant score the highest on intelligence and motor-skills tests. One study from the National Institutes of Health found children whose mothers eat no fish during pregnancy are 29 percent more likely to have abnormally low IQs. Another study found a link between prenatal mercury exposure and improved intelligence at age 17 — likely because the mere presence of some mercury in a pregnant womans blood signaled she was eating plenty of fish.

Mr. Bittman states: Mercury itself, of course, is bad enough: Its a neurotoxin that attacks brain cells (watch this vivid, slightly retro and certainly scary enough video of how mercury produces brain damage) and, depending on dose, a variety of other symptoms (including, in extreme cases, death). Its worth noting that 200,000 babies are born in the United States each year with mercury levels high enough to cause concern about symptoms from lower I.Q. to reduced hearing, seeing and speech to impaired mobility and more.

What Mr. Bittman failed to mention: There are no cases of mercury toxicity from the normal consumption of commercial seafood found in any peer-reviewed published medical journal in this country. Toxic methylmercury exposure is extremely rare. Case studies on such exposures are based on extraordinary circumstances involving widespread, accidental industrial contamination. And, according to the CDC, “finding a measureable amount of mercury in blood or urine does not mean that levels of mercury cause an adverse effect.”

The irrefutable science demonstrates that Americans should be eating more seafood, not less. Regulators note you would have to eat seafood that contains mercury 10 times above the FDAs action level every day for the rest of your life to begin to even approach a level that would cause concern.

The problem with Mr. Bittmans commentary is not only that its erroneous and misleading, its harmful to Americans. Research shows articles like his can cause people to reduce the amount of seafood they eat, or eliminate it altogether. And that has a significant impact on the publics health.

A comprehensive study on seafood consumption, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found “avoidance of modest fish consumption due to confusion regarding risks and benefits could result in thousands of excess coronary heart disease deaths annually and suboptimal neurodevelopment in children.”

Authorities from across the globe including the World Health Organization, the Institute of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, and the Harvard School of Medicine all agree that the predominant risk associated with eating seafood is not eating enough of it. Researchers at Harvard determined low seafood consumption is the second-biggest dietary contributor to preventable death in the U.S. The study found some 84,000 cardiac-related deaths could be prevented each year with a diet rich in seafood.

As Dariush Mozaffarian of the Harvard School of Public Health concluded: Seafood is likely the single most important food one can consume for good health.

The North American diet already contains the second-lowest percentage of fish in the world 7 percent second only to the Sudan. Commentary like Mr. Bittmans simply makes a bad situation worse.

The New York Times should know better by now.

With speculation growing about Beyonce is she pregnant or not? fans spotted a possible hint on her Tumblr page: Her dinner menu in France included Salad Nicoise, a popular salad topped with tuna.

A few celebrity bloggers seized on the clue and immediately predicted that Beyonce was NOT pregnant because her photo zoomed in on tuna, a food that pregnant women used to think should be limited during pregnancy. Joyce Chen at Us Weekly began the brouhaha, which gained even more traction when JustJared re-posted it.

Too bad these gossip bloggers know nothing about pregnancy diets. And thank goodness they arent doctors, never mind Sherlock Holmes types. Because if they actually knew something about what pregnant women need to be eating, they would understand that fish, including tuna, is actually one of the most important foods women need to eat more of because 50% of a babys brain is made up of essential fatty acids found in seafood.

If Beyonce is pregnant, she is likely seeing top-notch doctors who would advise her, based on U.S. and international government guidelines and research, to eat more seafood including tuna because of the essential nutrients in fish so important to babies brain and eye development. Of course, seafood is also indispensable for expecting and breastfeeding moms because it lowers the risk of heart disease, the number one cause of death for American women.

We cant say for sure whether Beyonce is pregnant. But what is absolutely certain is that if youre an expectant mom, you can definitely have Salad Nicoise for dinner. Bon apptit!