By Mickey Z., Planet Green
Five of the eight species of tuna would not be in danger of extinction (according to the latest Red List of Threatened Species, compiled by the Swiss-based International Union for the Conservation of Nature) if humans didn’t kill and eat them. Thus, in that spirit, I present … six reasons why we should leave tuna (and other large fish) alone.
1. Mercury is toxic
The FDA says: “Nearly all fish and shellfish contain traces of methylmercury. However, larger fish that have lived longer have the highest levels of methylmercury because they’ve had more time to accumulate it.”
What can methylmercury do to us humans? For starters: brain damage, memory loss, personality change, tremors, spontaneous abortion, and damage to a developing fetus. Fatigue and memory loss caused by mercury poisoning from eating fish is so common that doctors even have a name for it: fish fog.
2. Tuna deserve respect, not extinction
Tuna are migratory fish that travel many thousands of miles in their lifetimes — swimming more than 100 miles in a day. They can accelerate faster than a Porsche and reach speeds as high as 50 miles per hour.
3. Save the dolphins and whales
“Tuna is about as ‘dolphin-friendly’ as a boat propeller,” say the folks at PETA. “Even if dolphins aren’t ‘accidentally’ trapped in tuna nets, they are still killed intentionally by Japanese tuna anglers because they prey on tuna. Entire pods of whales and dolphins are rounded up and driven into shallow water where all but the youngest (who are captured and sold to aquariums) are slaughtered with knives and machetes.”
4. Eating tuna creates a large carbon footprint
“Once caught,” writes Matthew McDermott, “the fish are packed into refrigerated coffins and flown to auction in Tokyo, where they are bought for up to $100,000 per tuna (bluefin are quite large…). From there, if not consumed locally, they are flown again around the world for sale in the United States, Europe, or China.”
5. Overfishing is killing our oceans
Greenpeace explains: “Populations of top predators, a key indicator of ecosystem health, are disappearing at a frightening rate, and 90 percent of the large fish that many of us love to eat, such as tuna, swordfish, marlin, cod, halibut, skate, and flounder have been fished out since large-scale industrial fishing began in the 1950s.”
6. You don’t want food poisoning
Every year, there are roughly 75 million cases of food-borne illness reported in the U.S. (no including, of course, episodes mistakenly attributed to stomach flu or virus). This leads to hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. I’ll give you one guess what’s the number one cause of food poisoning in the U.S.: seafood.
Related:
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters featured article: Ten Years Of Media Lens – Our Problem With Mainstream Dissidents.
