Nutrition

November 10, 2014 — New research shows that eating fish in infancy (especially before 9 months) can decrease the risk of asthma, eczema, hay fever and food allergies.

This past June, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) encouraged Americans to eat more fish. They pointed out that fish has lots of health benefits; not only is it a great source of protein, it's a great source of other nutrients, including some that can help developing brains. That's why they particularly want pregnant women and children to heed the advice.
But there's another really important reason to feed your children fish, as my colleague Dr. Ari Bernstein told the FDA last week: It may help prevent allergies.

Read the full story from The Boston Globe 

 

SEAFOODNEWS.COM by John Sackton  November 5, 2014 — The FDA held a public risk communication meeting November 3rd, and 4th to discuss its draft advice for pregnant women to eat more seafood.

The new advice says women should "eat 8 to 12 ounces of a variety of fish each week from choices that are lower in mercury. The nutritional value of fish is important during growth and development before birth, in early infancy for breastfed infants, and in childhood."
 
At the meeting, Rima Kleiner, a dietitian and consultant to NFI, said “‘Decades of misinformation perpetuated by media and unknowingly wrong healthcare professionals have created a generation of low seafood eaters."
 
She urged the FDA to strengthen its advice, sayintg "“‘The real risk of seafood during pregnancy is not eating enough," and suggested that the higher amount be descirbed as a 'goal.'
 
FDA and EPA in June released a draft guidance calling for women who are pregnant or who may become pregnant, those breast feeding, and young children to eat considerably more fish than they are currently after finding benefits to unborn children. The guidance is based on newer science that finds developmental and brain benefits of increased fish consumption up to a point outweigh the risks of methylmercury exposure. The guidance encourages consumers to ‘eat 8 to 12 ounces of a variety of fish each week’ that are low in methylmercury.”

This story originally appeared on Seafood.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

LANSING, Mi. — November 1, 2014 — Health authorities in Michigan are awaiting test results for elevated levels of chemicals and metals in people who eat lots of Great Lakes fish.

Blood and urine from volunteers in Michigan and two other states were tested for PCBs, pesticides, mercury, lead and cadmium.

Each state focused on a community. Michigan tested anglers along the Detroit River and Saginaw Bay.

Minnesota tested members of the Ojibwe tribe near Lake Superior. New York tested licensed anglers and Burmese refugees and immigrants along the Buffalo River, Niagara River, Eighteenmile Creek and the Rochester Embayment on Lake Ontario, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, which organized the project.

Read the full story from the Traverse City Record Eagle

October 21, 2014 — The FAO's Committee on World Food Security elected to prioritize higher fish consumption among its key dietary recommendations for pregnant women and young children, the latest contribution in a movement to promote seafood as a key part of a healthy diet.

During its forty-first session, held in Rome this week, the Committee made “Encourage[ing] consumption of fish especially by pregnant and breastfeeding women, children…” a key recommendation in its report. 

This recommendation is in line with the very latest in nutrition science,” said Rima Kleiner MS, RD, Registered Dietitian for the National Fisheries Institute. “And while what the group says is important, where it’s said is also worth noting. It is literally found as part of the very first issue addressed. Encouraging maternal fish consumption should be a top nutrition policy issue for the public health sector and that’s reflected in this document.”

The report goes on to recognize seafood as a “primary source of protein and essential nutrients” and as a key contributor to “food security.”

The Committee is a group of renowned world food and nutrition experts that was created in 1974 as a forum for review of nutrition and food security policies. The NFI said the Committee's endorsement advances a push to get more Americans to eat more seafood as part of a healthy, well-rounded diet

In June the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released its own draft of new advice to pregnant women on eating seafood. In their report the FDA said Pregnant and breastfeeding women and young children should eat at least 2-3 servings of seafood per week. This was the first time a a minimum seafood consumption standard has been set for this consumer group.
“This new recommendation makes it all that much more important that the FDA get its final advice right,” said Kleiner. “Here we have a world body calling for encouragement of maternal fish consumption as a global nutrition priority.  American women have been warned away from seafood with unclear, nuanced guidance for more than a decade. It’s time we come in line with volumes of published, peer-reviewed science and with the world’s top nutrition policy minds.”

This story originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It has been reprinted with permission.

 

October 21, 2014 — Cafeteria lunches, to some, have never looked so good.

The Manchester Essex Regional School District has recently joined Gloucester High School in its efforts to serve fresh seafood regularly, and the students are on board.

The program, orchestrated by Cape Ann Fresh Catch, will receive its first shipment of fresh, locally caught fish this Friday.

“We did a food tasting for the students and the faculty last week and it went over really well,” said Donna Marshall, director of Cape Ann Fresh Catch. “It’s important for morale for everyone, it’s important to support the local economy.”

Manchester Essex School Nutrition Director Sheila Parisien noted that the program stands as an example of the regional school district’s commitment to sustainability.

“I think it’s great,” said Parisien. “It gives the community fresh, local caught fish, and it certainly helps our fishermen.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

October 20, 2014 — Past research has said that up to 42 percent of all treated cases of depression do not respond to antidepressants, although it has remained largely unclear why. Now researchers have found that diet can impact how a patient responds to their medication, where fish consumption can help.

That's at least according to a study recently published in the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology, which shows that increasing fatty fish intake appears to increase medication response rate in patients who do not normally respond to antidepressants.

According to lead researcher Roel Mocking, he and his colleagues took a closer look at "two apparently unrelated measures," the metabolism of fatty acids and the regulation of stress hormones – what is often unbalanced in people suffering from chronic depression.

"Interestingly, we saw that depressed patients had an altered metabolism of fatty acids, and that this changed metabolism was regulated in a different way by stress hormones," he explained in a recent release.

Read the full story at Nature World News

October 13, 2014 — Alaskan Coho salmon burgers and roasted monkfish steaks are mainstays of power lunches at Oceana, the upscale, marble-bedecked New York seafood shrine adjacent to iconic Rockefeller Center.

Since 2006, executive chef Ben Pollinger has lured in diners with his refined cooking. He’s held on to a coveted Michelin star, successfully transitioned Oceana into new, mammoth-sized digs, and now the ambitious New Jersey native has just released the informative School of Fish (Gallery Books) with Stephanie Lyness. Through more than 100 recipes, ranging from a baked dorade filet emblazoned with potato scales and paired with Swiss chard, to roasted lobster with basil-garlic butter accompanied by olive oil crushed potatoes, Pollinger squashes the myth for kitchen newbies and skilled home cooks alike that preparing seafood always makes for mystifying, grueling work.

What inspired you to start writing School of Fish?

I needed another challenge. Three years ago, when I first started thinking about writing it, I had been at Oceana five years. It was time to do something else that kept me an engaged and well-rounded chef.

Every chef has a cookbook these days. What did you hope to accomplish with yours?

One of the first conversations I had with my publisher and editor was about what kind of book this would be. We were going to take one of two routes: either a coffee table book with restaurant recipes—kind of like Oceana’s greatest hits — or a consumer-oriented book that would teach people how to cook fish with recipes they would actually use. Off the bat I preferred that route. I felt better being able to reach more readers and share what I have learned in a professional kitchen.

Read the full story from the Food Network's Healthy Eats

October 8, 2014 — The good news here is that for pennies we have an almost infinite local source for making crab risotto, etouffee, gumbo, soupe de poisson, cioppino, and bouillabaisse, any number of wonderful fish dishes made especially delicious with local crab stock at a cost of almost nothing. More good news: the crab risotto you serve your family does the ocean a world of good. 

The bad news is that the source of all this goodness — green crabs, Carcinus maenas — are an invasive species that threaten, possibly on one hand’s number of years, to destroy shellfish beds from Cape Ann to Canada. No more white cardboard boxes brimming with fried clams. No more plump steamers bathed in butter. No more wild mussels shining in white wine, parsley, and garlic.

Carcinus maenas, native to central Norway, the Baltic Sea, and a small part of Iceland, arrived here most likely as ship ballast as early as 1810. DNA tracing reveals subsequent invasions, maybe as ship ballast, or nestled into seaweed used for packing, or shipped aquaculture. The green crab now makes appearances around the world. They own the Eastern seaboard as far south as South Carolina and as far north as Nova Scotia.  They have infiltrated the Pacific coast from Baja, Calif., to Alaska, and far as Australia, earning the dubious accolade as one of the 100 most invasive species in the world. 

At a green crab summit last year in Orono, Maine, Dr. Brian Beal, professor of Marine Biology at the University of Maine at Machias, declared there would be no shipment of Maine clam stock for 2015, as green crabs had that much compromised Maine’s soft shell clam beds. Our local Massachusetts market depends on Maine shipments, as there are not enough soft shell clams dug here to supply the appetite for fried clams, clam fritters, and steamers.

One green crab can eat 40 half-inch clams a day, or 30 small oysters. A half-acre wild mussel bed in Plum Island Sound, that locals considered an easy visit for a bushel of mussels, is gone, according to Rowley Shellfish Constable Jack Grundstrom. Green crabs also destroy native eel grass, a critical nursery for marine life, by burrowing into the mud, thus shredding the grasses at their base. Grundstrom actually points his 83-year-old finger right at green crabs for the collapse of the entire fishing industry, as these voracious beasts are devouring the food chain at its base. 

“Most of the food for the entire ecosystem comes from the North Shore’s Great Marsh, (The Great Marsh is the largest continuous stretch of salt marsh in New England, extending from Cape Ann to New Hampshire, including over 20,000 acres of marsh, barrier beach, tidal river, estuary, mudflat, and upland islands extending from Gloucester to Salisbury.)  Once that food is cut off, as green crabs are doing, all of our fishing culture is destroyed.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

SEAFOODNEWS.COM [SCOM] — October 8, 2014 — The Seafood Nutrition Partnership (SNP), a non-profit whose mission is to teach Americans about the health and nutritional benefits of seafood, is launching two pilot public health education campaigns this week in Memphis, TN andIndianapolis, IN.

SNP will partner with a coalition of local stakeholders including chefs, community leaders, public officials and health professionals in each city to teach citizens about the health benefits of seafood.

The programs feature cooking demonstrations, free health fairs and screenings for Omega-3 Index levels, distribution of health education literature and recipes, and encourage citizens of both cities to take the Healthy Heart Pledge to eat at least two servings of seafood each week as recommended by the USDA Dietary Guidelines.

“These pilot programs allow us to be on the ground to build awareness and educate the citizens of Memphis and Indianapolis about the health benefits of a diet rich in seafood and help Americans gain the skills to select, order, prepare and eat seafood as part of a well-balanced, nutrient-rich diet,” said Linda Cornish, Executive Director of the Seafood Nutrition Partnership.

U.S. Congressman Steve Cohen (TN-9-CD) and City of Memphis Mayor A C Wharton, Jr. will kick off the
Memphis pilot program today at The Church Health Center.  “It’s important to have a healthy Memphis, and I’m very glad to partner with the Seafood Nutrition Partnership in this campaign,” said Mayor Wharton. “Seafood just twice a week will help combat things like heart disease and diabetes, which are prevalent silent killers in our community. I hope all Memphis citizens will take part in this effort. If we do, it could really change lives.”

The First Lady of Indianapolis, Winnie Ballard, will host a kick-off at the Indianapolis City Market on Friday, October 10th at 10:00AM to launch the pilot program in Indianapolis. She will be joined by SNP Board Members: NBA star and former Indiana Pacers Detlef Schrempf; renowned omega-3 scientist and Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee member Dr. Tom Brenna from Cornell University; and Linda Cornish.

In addition to cooking demonstrations and free health screenings, the Indianapolis effort will partner with the Indianapolis Restaurant and Lodging Association on Friday, October 17th for a “Fish is the Dish” event with many of the city’s restaurants featuring and highlighting seafood specials.

This story originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It has been reprinted with permission.

October 6, 2014 — We have all heard it: we need to be eating more fish. Cooking fish at home is relatively simple and always more affordable than ordering it off a restaurant menu, but gauging the freshness and quality of fish can be tricky for home cooks: Where did this fish come from? When was it caught? Is that color natural?

“I think the consumer should be a little suspicious of whatever fish they’re buying from at any market in general,” says Chef Ed McFarland, of Ed’s Lobster Bar in New York City.

“That’s not to say that the fish that you’re getting in the supermarket is bad,” he explains. The problem is that the shrink-wrapped filets you see stacked in a row of Styrofoam simply leave too much mystery. “It’s generally something from the large tail, so it’s mass-produced product….They’re buying in such bulk that really, I don’t think they’re inspecting the way they would at a local fish store would.”

“In the beginning the only option really is a fish monger,” he concludes.

Shopping at a market that has its own fishmonger—McFarland, a New York native, recommends Whole Foods, Dean & DeLuca and Wegmans—is a great chance to educate yourself about anything you are buying. Even consulting a fishmonger about the shrink-wrapped stuff will teach you more about the product.

Still, the idea of “freshness” can be a bit of a misnomer. Yes, a fish caught that morning, then put on ice and handed to you smelling pleasantly like the ocean is great quality. But even fish that was caught a few days ago is good. “If it was caught on Monday, got to the fish market on Tuesday and got to the fish store on Wednesday and you’re buying it Wednesday afternoon, it’s a still a fresh fish on Wednesday afternoon, nothing wrong if it’s been packaged correctly.”

Read the full article and watch the videos at Forbes