Mercury in Fish

A number of months ago, I read an article that highlighted the increasing prevalence of mercury in fish.

Now, for many years, I had heard of this problem.  It doesn’t affect me that much directly, since I do not particularly like seafood, but I was known in my younger years to indulge somewhat frequently on tuna salad sandwiches, and I would splurge on a hearty swordfish steak if I were ever taken out to dinner.  Even today, I occasionally make salmon patties and the “men” (I’m including my two young sons in this group) in my family really get enthused when mom has no time to cook and they all sit down to a sardine feast.

As I write, I shudder when I recall that I even think that I ate some of that swordfish when pregnant with my first son who is now autistic.   (More on autism and metals in a future post!)

Well, aside from that out-of-the-ordinary swordfish splurge, I pretty much stayed away from seafood when I was pregnant.  During my second pregnancy, I was so nauseous for the entire nine months that I was lucky to get anything down :-).

So I never paid much mind to the seas and what was going on there — until I read the aforementioned article.  Here is an excerpt:

Sperm whales feeding even in the most remote reaches of Earth’s oceans have built up stunningly high levels of toxic and heavy metals, according to American scientists who say the findings spell danger not only for marine life but for the millions of humans who depend on seafood.

Read more here.

Needless to say, this got my attention.

I don’t point this out to you to engender fear, but I bring it to your attention so that you can see what is going on around us and then decide what you need to do for yourself and for your family.

There is a lot of information available to us now–often too much. We need to take it in and digest it and then prayerfully, thoughtfully, decide what our response should be. And we need to try to keep the response reasonable.

For my family, we are restricting our seafood intake to the occasional sardine splurge and salmon patty dinner. My husband indulged in some shrimp at a party in our city this winter, but I suspect that that will be the last time that happens for a very long time.

We are also supplementing with liquid zeolite.  You can follow read more about it in this post about Heavy Metal Toxicity. I will post more about our experience with it another time. When we first started using zeolite, we used a quite high dose, taking about 30 drops per day (for my husband). Now we are each only using approximately 2-5 drops per day. At that rate of use, one 2 ounce bottle lasts a really long time, even for a family of four.

I will probably step it up again at some future point since we are all working on metal detox, but I feel confident that at this level we are at least dealing with some of the contaminants that may have gotten into our systems.

This seafood contamination problem, however, is indicative of a larger problem than just how to get the toxins out of our bodies.  We need to think about how we are being stewards not only of our bodies but also of the world around us.  It’s just like this mess I document in 5 Causes of Gut Dysbiosis

Tune in regularly. There will be a future post about environmental issues.

Come to think of it, due to the grand scope of the topic, make that post(s)–Plural.

Do You Avoid Fish?