 |
You can refer back to our 8-28-03 HMM report titled
“The FDA Does It Again! Now It’s Canned
Tuna", were we strongly recommended you limit eating wild fish to no more than twice a week.
This new HMM report re-affirms and strengthens our position to limit the amount of fish you eat per week. This is based on a new study that has recently been released.
Pacific sockeye salmon, after spending most of their lives in the ocean where they absorb a wide variety of pollutants such as cancer causing PCBs (polychlorinated benzenes), flock to Alaska’s lakes in huge numbers to spawn and die.
Each sockeye salmon accumulates just a small quantity of PCBs, but when the salmon die together in the thousands after spawning, their decaying carcasses produces a many fold increase in concentrated PCB’s and other pollutants in the Alaskan waters of the spawning lakes, a study found which was reported in the Sept. 18, 2003 issue of Nature magazine.
“They (salmon) die in such huge numbers that it almost looks like you can walk across the lakes,” an author of the study, Jules Blais, said. “When they die, they release everything they’ve built up over the course of their lives. There’s the possibility that the PCB’s they give off are having an effect on the freshwater environment.”
Blais, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Ottawa in Canada, and his team were drawn to Alaska after learning of studies that found killer whales in the Northwest to be among the most contaminated marine mammals.
Other scientists had shown that salmon, a huge part of the killer whale’s diet, along with grayling fish, could carry the PCB’s in their fat stores from the seas to the lakes. Curious about this situation, Blais and his team, made up mainly of scientists from Canadian universities, decided to find out where the PCB’s ended up.
Analyzing sediment and muscle tissue from the sockeye salmon they collected in eight lakes throughout Alaska, the scientists found that the lakes with the highest numbers of spawning salmon had the highest concentrations of PCBs.
Crustaceans and insects that graze on the contaminated salmon carcasses become food for small fish, which, in turn, are eaten by salmon. Over time, PCB levels in the lakes grow further contaminating the fish food chain.
The salmon, acting as biological pumps, carry pollutants upstream where they can reach bears, eagles and people whose diets consist of fish, seals and whales.
“This speaks to scientists about how pollutants are being transported...by fish, not by air,” said Dr. Derek Muir, an environmental chemist who has studied PCBs in the Artic for 20 years.
PCBs are not biodegradable and will take a very long time before our oceans are free of them. Not in our life time will we see the end of PCBs, so eat fish, but no more than twice a week.
To your good health! Because you're worth it!
Ira Marxe
CEO, Good Health Supplement
Copyrighted © 2003 - All Rights Reserved |
|
