Nutrition

June 18, 2013 — Researchers from Michigan Technological University, New York Medical College and the Mayo Clinic found that taking fish oil pills seemed to be protective against the effects of mental stress on the heart, particularly heart rate and muscle sympathetic nerve activity (key in the fight-or-flight response). Fish oil contains omega-3 fatty acids, which have been shown in research to hold numerous health benefits.

"In today's fast-paced society, stress is as certain as death and taxes," study researcher Jason Carter, a researcher at the university, said in a statement. "Moreover, our eating habits have deteriorated. This study reinforces that fish oils may be beneficial for cardiovascular health, particularly when we are exposed to stressful conditions."

The study, published in the American Journal of Physiology: Regulatory, Integrative, and Comparative Physiology, included 67 people without hypertension who were assigned to take either 9 grams of a fish oil supplement for eight weeks, or a placebo of olive oil for eight weeks. Before starting the supplements and at the end of the study period, all the participants underwent blood pressure, heart rate and other testing.

At the end of the study, researchers had the study participants do an arithmetic test, during which their stress responses were measured. They found that the participants who took the fish oil supplements had blunted the reactivity of the muscle sympathetic nerve activity, as well as the effects of mental stress on heart rate. However, fish oil did not seem to have an impact on the reactivity of blood pressure to mental stress.

"These findings support and extend the growing evidence that fish oil may have positive health benefits regarding neural cardiovascular control in humans," the researchers wrote in the study.

Read the full story at the Huffington Post

 

June 17, 2013 — Oleksiy Makhmutor, a fisherman who trawls the sub-Antarctic and sells his catch to McDonald’s Corp., is joining Filet-O-Fish fans at tables across Australia as the world’s largest restaurant chain introduces diners to the folks who supply its beef, fish and buns.

McDonald’s “Track My Macca’s” iPhone application in Australia, where locals refer to the chain as “Macca’s,” lets users scan Big Mac, Filet-O-Fish and Chicken McNuggets boxes to track where the ingredients came from and learn more about the suppliers, such as the fact that Makhmutor has been fishing since he was 13 and loves life on the trawler deck.

As portable screens get bigger and networks become faster, advertising is migrating from the desktop to devices on the go. The free McDonald’s app is part of a new generation of mobile marketing that’s more engaging than simple banner ads and pop- ups. They’re attracting eyeballs through apps, interactive billboards, digital window displays and sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

“Mobile advertising is going to be huge and the majority of our traditional Internet business will migrate to mobile,” said Paul Gunning, chief executive officer of Omnicom Group Inc.’s Tribal DDB Worldwide unit, the New York digital ad shop that created the McDonald’s app.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

 

 

June 14, 2013 — Most people have only ever seen a scorpion fish in an aquarium. Unless they dine at Carolina Crossroads Restaurant in Chapel Hill, N.C., where they’ll find the spiny, venomous creature on the menu.

It’s called trash fish dining, and it’s catching on with chefs around the country searching for fresh ways to fill their menus with sustainable — and delicious — seafood.

“The fishermen would be like, ‘This is all trash, junk,’ but I said, ‘I’ll pay fair price for it if you’ll bring it back to the dock,’” says James Clark, the restaurant’s executive chef. “Eat some butter-poached scorpion fish and you’ll swear it’s lobster.”

Chefs such as Clark go beyond the usual recommendation to eat small, lower-food-chain fish like sardines, and instead delve full force into little-known local catches that many anglers regard as nuisance or “trash” fish. Clark’s menu also offers triggerfish, drum, white grunt and other obscure species.

Meanwhile, New Haven, Conn., sushi restaurant Miya features invasive species such as shore crabs and moon snails. At San Francisco’s Incanto, chef Chris Cosentino serves sea slug, tuna spines and roasted fish heads. And at Arrows restaurant in Ogunquit, Maine, award-winning chefs Mark Gaier and Clark Frasier built a “Trash Fish Dinner” around whiting, mackerel and other less desirable species.

Besides introducing the public to lesser-known fish, these top chefs also are promoting a broader concept of how to eat sustainably from the ocean, a concept that conservation experts say could help secure the world’s seafood supply. Just three fish — shrimp, canned tuna and salmon — account for more than half of all U.S. seafood consumption, according to the trade association the National Fisheries Institute.

“We have created a system based on demand, rather than on what the oceans supply,” says Barton Seaver, a former chef who is now director of Harvard University’s Healthy and Sustainable Food Program. “We’re so busy trying to make salmon sustainable that we forget to ask what’s available.”

Read the full story at Salon 

June 12, 2013 — The world quietly reached a milestone in the evolution of the human diet in 2011. For the first time in modern history, world farmed fish production topped beef production. The gap widened in 2012, with output from fish farming—also called aquaculture—reaching a record 66 million tons, compared with production of beef at 63 million tons. And 2013 may well be the first year that people eat more fish raised on farms than caught in the wild. More than just a crossing of lines, these trends illustrate the latest stage in a historic shift in food production—a shift that at its core is a story of natural limits.

As the global demand for animal protein grew more than fivefold over the second half of the twentieth century, humans began to press against the productivity constraints of the world’s rangelands and oceans. Annual beef production climbed from 19 million tons in 1950 to more than 50 million tons in the late 1980s. Over the same period, the wild fish catch ballooned from 17 million tons to close to 90 million tons. But since the late 1980s, the growth in beef production has slowed, and the reported wild fish catch has remained essentially flat.

The bottom line is that getting much more food from natural systems may not be possible. Much of the world’s grassland is stocked at or beyond capacity, and most of the world’s fisheries are fished to their limits or already crashing. Overstocked rangelands become obvious as the loss of protective vegetation leads to soil degradation, which at its worst can cause punishing dust and sand storms. Overexploited fisheries are less readily visible, but fishing patterns over time reveal that more effort is required to achieve the same size catch as in years past. Boats are using more fuel and travelling to more remote and deeper waters to bring in their haul. Fishers are pulling up smaller fish, and populations of some of the most popular food fish have collapsed.

Historically, people’s taste in eating animal protein was largely shaped by where they lived. In places with extensive grasslands, like in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, and Australia, people gravitated toward grazing livestock. Along coasts and on islands, as in Japan, wild fish tended to be the protein staple. Today, with little room for expanding the output from rangelands and the seas, producing more beef and fish for a growing and increasingly affluent world population has meant relying on feedlots for fattening cattle and on ponds, nets, and pens for growing fish.

Read the full story at the Earth Policy Institute

 

 

June 10, 2013 — Fish is good, especially if it's wild, little and local, says Andy Sharpless, who with Suzannah Evans has written a new book, "The Perfect Protein: The Fish Lover's Guide to Saving the Oceans and Feeding the World."

Sharpless is the CEO of Oceana, the nonprofit that made headlines earlier this year when it reported that Americans are eating mislabeled or misrepresented fish about one-third of the time. Portland fared better than most cities in the survey: We struck out about one-fifth of the time.

In about 200 pages, Sharpless makes a case that healthy oceans are good for fish and fish is good for us — as long as it's wild, little and local. And he's prevailed on 20-some chefs to offer recipes to tempt readers into trying some different kinds of fish: Fried anchovies with lemon-dill aioli?

Sharpless' answers have been edited for space and clarity.

What do you mean when you say fish is the perfect protein?

Fish are full of omegas. Fish are good for your brain, your heart, your nerves. If you substitute fish for red meat, you get a reduction in obesity, heart disease, cancer. It's interesting how our own biology is so tuned up to benefit from fish.

They don't increase biodiversity loss the way terrestrial agriculture does. A well-managed ocean does two things at once: It potentially feeds hundreds of millions of people a healthy meal every day and it does so without requiring additional expansion in farmland, which is the biggest driver of biodiversity loss on the planet.

Read the full story at The Oregonian

 

 

June 4, 2013 — Sea algae is the key ingredient in SeaCrunch, a gluten-free bar made of almonds, sesame seeds, cranberries, maple syrup and kelp that Roth created.

The energy bar is one of the newest seaweed-based products his growing company VitaminSea Seaweed in Scarborough, produces and markets to health food stores throughout New England.

Roth began harvesting Maine seaweed seven years ago, initially to pay for the construction of a red skiff.

“We started off with our first order of two little 40-pound bags [of rockweed],” said Roth, who sold the seaweed to lobster co-ops for packing lobsters and shellfish. “That developed into 200 bags a week in a matter of a month.”

A commercial fisherman for 28 years, Roth decided to sell his two fishing boats and invest in the seaweed industry. He joined the Maine Seaweed Council, did his research, and began developing seaweed-based products.

“I just love being in the water in the kelp beds,” said Roth. “It’s phenomenally beautiful when you get to see the kelp swaying back and forth in the tides. The colors of the different kelps. It’s just an amazing thing to see.”

To reflect the nutritional value of their products, Roth and his wife, Kelly, named their company VitaminSea.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

 

 

June 3, 2013 — In Anne Arundel County, Vin 909 is among the dozen eateries that received a state certification for using local crab meat. This is the second year for the Department of Natural Resources’ True Blue program, which promotes restaurants that use a majority of Maryland crab meat in their meals.

After submitting an application, DNR officials randomly have them submit invoices to prove that they are continuing to use the state’s true blue crabs. In turn, they get `True Blue’ logos to advertise the product. There are more than 100 participants statewide.

Participants said the program hasn’t had any noticeable impact on their customer base. But it allows them to tout the local fare’s sweet, fresh taste as well as support the local economy and watermen. Crabs have not been plentiful this season — which is largely because of the colder than usual spring — so consumers will have to pay more until the supply increases.

For some businesses, that means nearly doubling 2012 prices.

“Too often (customers) might be getting imported crabs and think they’re buying local crab meat,” said Steve Vilnit, the DNR’s fisheries marketing director who runs the True Blue program. “There was a cold spring and the water has to get to a certain temperature before crabs start moving.

“The heat wave we’re having will get the water warmer and get the crabs moving. It’s a little bit expensive right now.”

Read the full story at CBS Baltimore

 

May 23, 2013 — National Maritime Day on May 22 is a holiday created by Congress in 1933 to honor America’s sea-going industry. It marks the day when the steamship Savannah set sail from Georgia on the first ever transoceanic voyage under steam power.

As celebrations are underway, another maritime benchmark will be set as the first full container of 18 tons of fresh salmon from Chile is offloaded from a cargo ship in California after an iceless month at sea.

How can that be? By using fuel cell technology in a new way.

A fuel cell is an electrochemical energy conversion device that converts hydrogen and oxygen into water, and in the process, produces electricity.

“We use that capability and take out the oxygen from a palletized, plastic wrapped container of fish to less than 200 parts per million. So we basically cause the fish to go dormant and extend their natural shelf life,” explained Mark Barnekow, CEO of California-based Global Fresh Foods. “It all gets done at the processing plant before it even gets loaded on the truck.”

More than 30 shipments of fresh Chilean farmed salmon, as well as tilapia and barramundi from Asian countries, have been delivered so far to the east coast of the U.S., to Japan and vans will soon set sail for Europe. The company plans to expand to shipping other seafood species as well.

“Throughout each shipment our fuel cell wakes up every 10 minutes and reads the atmosphere. If it detects the oxygen levels have risen, it actually scavenges it to keep the level low,” said Barnekow of GFF’s patented SAF-D system.

The technology also fits with GFF’s green” shipping philosophy.

Read the full story at The Seward Pheonix LOG

 

 

 

PORTSMOUTH, N.H., — May 23, 2013 — An event at the Commercial Fishing Pier on Sunday intends to help New Hampshire fishermen cope with drastic cuts to catch limits on the most popular fish species by raising awareness about how delicious some lesser-known species can be.

The 2013 N.H. Fresh and Local Seafood Kickoff is an inaugural event that organizers hope will help spread the word about underutilized species such as redfish, soft-shell lobster, hake, pollock and dogfish. While fishermen are struggling under the weight of major quota cuts, including a 78 percent cut to Gulf of Maine cod catch limits, their quotas for these other species are stronger and increased demand could help the fishermen survive in these difficult times.

The problem, said organizer Gabriela Bradt, a fisheries extension specialist at the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension, is that most consumers are not aware of how the other species can be properly utilized and stick to the more-popular haddock and flounder.

"The community can play an important role in sustaining our 400-year-old fishing heritage," said Erik Chapman, also with the UNH Cooperative Extension.

The event, which runs from noon to 3 p.m., will provide participants a chance to meet their local fishermen, learn more about how the industry works and taste some unique dishes prepared by some of the area's top chefs. Chefs from Portsmouth's Black Trumpet Bistro, 100 Club and Moxy, the Oaks Country Club in Somersworth, and Stages at One Washington in Dover, will all be on hand to produce dishes utilizing the lesser-known species.

Read the full story at the Portsmouth Herald

 

May 17, 2013 — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is seeking a preliminary injunction against New York City Fish, Inc. and several of its employees for manufacturing and distributing ready-to-eat fish products under insanitary conditions causing them to become adulterated. The products have been sold in stores in Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed for the injunction on behalf the FDA in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York to prevent the company from distributing smoked and cured fish products until it is in compliance with the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act (Act). “These companies have ignored previous warnings by the FDA and have continued to produce and distribute products in violation of federal law,” Melinda Plaisier, the FDA’s acting associate commissioner for regulatory affairs said in a statement.  “This lawsuit shows that the FDA will aim to protect public health by seeking enforcement action against companies that are identified as violating federal requirements.”

Read the full story at the Food Poisoning Bulletin