December 5, 2012 — Menhaden fish is a very good source of DPA, one of the essential fatty acids. But is it a good source of the others, DHA and EPA? Dr. Alex Byelashov discusses this and other food sources of DPA.
December 5, 2012 — Menhaden fish is a very good source of DPA, one of the essential fatty acids. But is it a good source of the others, DHA and EPA? Dr. Alex Byelashov discusses this and other food sources of DPA.
WASHINGTON — December 4, 2012 — Salmon that’s been genetically modified to grow twice as fast as normal could soon show up on your dinner plate. That is, if the company that makes the fish can stay afloat.
The Food and Drug Administration in 2010 concluded that Aquabounty’s salmon was as safe to eat as the traditional variety. The agency also said that there’s little chance that the salmon could escape and breed with wild fish, which could disrupt the fragile relationships between plants and animals in nature. But more than two years later the FDA has not approved the fish, and Aquabounty is running out of money.
‘‘It’s threatening our very survival,’’ says CEO Ron Stotish, chief executive of the Maynard, Mass.-based company. ‘‘We only have enough money to survive until January 2013, so we have to raise more. But the unexplained delay has made raising money very difficult.’’
The FDA says it’s still working on the final piece of its review, a report on the potential environmental impact of the salmon that must be published for comment before an approval can be issued. That means a final decision could be months, even years away. While the delay could mean that the faster-growing salmon will never wind up on American dinner tables, there’s more at stake than seafood.
Aquabounty is the only U.S. company publicly seeking approval for a genetically-modified animal that’s raised to be eaten by humans. And scientists worry that its experience with the FDA’s lengthy review process could discourage other U.S. companies from investing in animal biotechnology, or the science of manipulating animal DNA to produce a desirable trait. That would put the U.S. at a disadvantage at a time when China, India and other foreign governments are pouring millions of dollars each year into the potentially lucrative field that could help reduce food costs and improve food safety.
Already, biotech scientists are changing their plans to avoid getting stuck in FDA-related regulatory limbo. Researchers at the University of California, Davis have transferred an experimental herd of genetically-engineered goats that produce protein-enriched milk to Brazil, due to concerns about delays at the FDA. And after investors raised concerns about the slow pace of the FDA’s Aquabounty review, Canadian researchers in April pulled their FDA application for a biotech pig that would produce environmentally-friendly waste.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe
December 1, 2012 — A year after a Globe investigation found restaurants and stores across Massachusetts were routinely selling cheaper, lower-quality fish than they promised customers, a new round of DNA testing shows the vast majority are still mislabeling seafood.
Ken’s Steak House in Framingham again served Pacific cod instead of a more expensive Atlantic species. Slices of fish sold as white tuna at Sea To You Sushi in Brookline were again actually escolar, an oily species nicknamed the “ex-lax’’ fish by some in the industry because it can cause digestion problems. H Mart, an Asian supermarket chain found to have sold mislabeled red snapper last year, this time was selling inexpensive freshwater Nile perch as pricier ocean grouper at its Burlington store.
The results underscore an ongoing lack of regulation in the nation’s seafood trade — oversight so weak restaurants and suppliers know they will not face punishment for mislabeling fish. Over the past several months, the Globe collected 76 seafood samples from 58 of the restaurants and markets that sold mislabeled fish last year. DNA testing on those samples found 76 percent of them weren’t what was advertised.
Some restaurant operators who repeatedly mislabeled fish blamed suppliers. Others said naming inconsistencies were the result of clerical errors. Several made only partial revisions to their menus. Some, like at Hearth ’n Kettle in Attleboro, corrected their menus, but waitstaff still wrongly described the fish as local. And a few said the issue was not a priority.
“We’re too busy to deal with such silliness,” Janet Cooper, of Ken’s Steak House, said after several phone interviews during which she could not explain why the restaurant was still selling far less expensive Pacific cod as locally caught fish.
After the Globe’s “Fishy Business” series last fall, state and federal lawmakers pledged quick action to strengthen oversight of the seafood industry. US Representative Ed Markey, Democrat of Malden, filed a bill in July to require traceability of fish from the boat to the dinner plate, but the legislation hasn’t moved out of House subcommittees.
Elsewhere, little progress has been made to protect consumers from paying too much for inferior fish. The Food and Drug Administration, which maintains a list of acceptable market names for fish species, has historically focused efforts on food safety, rather than economic fraud such as seafood substitution. The agency recently began conducting its own DNA testing, but the results so far have provided little insight into where mislabeling occurs in the supply chain.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe
November 1, 2012 — Four decades ago, Danish medical students Jørn Dyerberg and Hans Olaf Bang traveled west across the Greenland ice sheet on dogsleds to test a theory. For many years prior to their journey, there had been anecdotal reports that Greenland Eskimos had an extremely low incidence of heart disease, and Dyerberg and Bang speculated that this was linked to the high levels of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) in the fish the native people consumed on a daily basis. After collecting and analyzing scores of blood samples, their hypothesis was borne out, and ever since, the medical and scientific community has been on a quest to determine exactly how PUFAs impart protective effects, and what amount must be ingested in order to achieve such benefits. Nearly 40 years and thousands of published studies later, however, these questions remain largely unanswered.
Cardiovascular disease continues to have an enormous impact on the world’s health and economy, making it all the more urgent that health-care practitioners find and implement low-cost prevention strategies. Dietary intake of PUFAs, specifically the n-3 PUFAs found in fish (commonly known as omega-3s), could serve as a perfect solution, but the lack of understanding of how PUFAs work—and continuing controversy over whether they really do work—has made it nearly impossible to properly implement their use in the clinic. Thus, a coordinated effort is needed to establish a mechanism for how n-3 PUFAs function in normal metabolism in order to develop proper therapeutic paradigms and to clarify their effectiveness in the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease.
The results of large-scale meta-analyses and clinical trials involving PUFAs and heart-disease risk have been mixed, raising concerns that initial evidence regarding their effectiveness was misleading. A review published in September in The Journal of the American Medical Association, for example, found that increased PUFA intake failed to reduce the risk of stroke, heart attack, or death.4 Reasons for this disparity can be attributed to a variety of factors, including studies that lack sufficient statistical power and the use of differing methodologies to determine serum and tissue levels of PUFAs. Probably the greatest limitation to properly evaluating the results of many clinical trials is that they varied so widely in the type of n-3 PUFA given, dose, formulation (e.g. capsules or oil), and duration of intake. This widespread variation reflects the paucity of understanding regarding mechanism. If we better understood exactly how these compounds act in the body, then clinical trials regarding their use could be vastly improved and designed to be more reproducible. What researchers have learned about mechanisms of n-3 PUFA therapy has led us to propose a novel hypothesis that may help reconcile the controversy, uniting well-characterized n-3 PUFA effects with as-yet unresolved questions.
Read the full story at The Scientist
November 13, 2012 — The Commerce Department released its annual report to Congress last month that tracked how much fish was harvested in U.S. waters, exported, imported, and consumed by Americans. What shocked most reporters was that 91 percent of the seafood we eat is imported. But they missed the real story: Americans don't eat fish. The overall numbers were small. We consumed a paltry 15 pounds of seafood per person in 2011, compared to 195 pounds of eggs, pork, beef, and chicken — according to various government sources.
The USDA suggests we should eat at least two servings of fish per week and make it a fifth of our protein consumption. But we clock in at less than one serving and about seven percent of our protein overall.
How do we increase the percentage of seafood Americans eat? Instead of marketing familiar "safe" products, perhaps we should move somewhat counter-intuitively in the direction of novelty. I hated fish as a kid because my only experience of seafood was breaded flounder for dinner every Friday. Familiarity, it does seem, breeds contempt. Variety is enticing.
Finding variety in seafood isn't as difficult as it may seem. And it doesn't mean we need to look further than our own shores.
An often-heard trope about why we don't eat more domestically harvested seafood is that we don't produce enough to feed ourselves. This claim is simply untrue. We harvested 10.1 billion pounds of wild and farmed seafood and shellfish in 2011. We ate 4.5 million pounds. In other words, we hardly ate anything our fishermen caught. The question isn't whether we can produce enough for our population but what less-familiar species we are willing to eat.
Another issue is whether we can get access to the great stuff from our own coastlines. U.S. fishing interests have cultivated supply lines to Asian markets that buy whole fish and also to processors of health supplements and cat food, rather than to wholesalers catering to the American consumer market. From a U.S. consumer's point of view, the supply chains are broken — but they can be fixed.
Read the full article at The Atlantic
November 5, 2012 — Why aren't scallops more popular than oysters, shrimp and clams? Why do other molluscs — not to mention crustaceans — get all the attention?
Price has a lot to do with that. Scallops are less plentiful than those other creatures in the wild, and far less commonly farmed. Although the spendiest, most sustainable scallops are hand-plucked by SCUBA divers off the sea floor, "the majority of wild scallops are caught using a fishing gear called a New Bedford dredge, which is a fifteen-foot-wide steel frame that is used to drag a chain bag along the seafloor," explains conservationist Gib Brogan, Northeast representative of the nonprofit Oceana
Having spent nearly a decade striving to reform the Atlantic scallop fishery, whose 300-plus boats now catch over $500 million worth of scallops every year, Brogan doesn't love the New Bedford dredge:
"The frame suspends the scallops in the water, where they are caught in the bag. This gear has significant impacts on the sea floor and results in significant catch of species other than scallops including flounder, monkfish and skates. The gear has a history of catching threatened and endangered sea turtles, but will be required to be modified in the near future to reduce turtle catch."
Scallop farming — common in Asia, but still only experimental in US waters — presents a far safer, more affordable alternative. The Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch gives farmed scallops its top rating — higher even than that of most diver-caught scallops. And while shrimp farming is notoriously unsustainable, scallop farming is a totally different story, says ecologist Carl Safina, founder of the Blue Ocean Institute:
"It's pretty simple: When you farm shrimp, you have to clear out wetland areas to create the farms. Then you have shrimp crowded together at an unnatural density. This results in total destruction of those wetlands."
Shrimps have to be fed.
"But bivalves — clams, oysters, scallops — make a living by filtering their food out of the water. If anything, while being farmed they would go back to performing their natural environmental service of filtering, which lets more light into the water for sea-floor plants and can bring an area back closer to the way it's supposed to be. A shrimp farm is a very unnatural place, but a scallop farm is a remarkably natural place," Safina told me while preparing to cook — on a wood-burning stove — scallops he had hand-harvested himself and stored in his freezer, which lost power along with the rest of his Long Island house during Hurricane Sandy.
Raising the number of American scallop farms could boost the economy, provide jobs, and lower the price of this master mollusc.
Read the full story at the Huffington Post
November 2, 2012 — With most supermarkets giving shoppers some insight into the environmental impact of their seafood offerings, Wellesley-based Roche Bros. knew it needed to institute a sustainability program of its own.
Conveniently for Roche Bros., Foley Fish – the Massachusetts supermarket chain’s seafood provider for more than 30 years – was already developing technology that would let consumers know where and how their fish was caught.
New Bedford-based Foley Fish began developing Sea Trace during the spring, around the time Roche Bros. approached the business, said Foley co-owner Laura Foley Ramsden.
The product was released to Foley clients in September. Smithfield, R.I.-based Computer Associates programmed the system for Foley.
The system allows customers to scan a Quick Response (QR) code with their smartphones. The phone then displays information about the catch, including the boat it was caught on, where and how it was caught, and where it has been since the ship brought its haul to land.
So far, more than 200 Massachusetts fishermen have been listed in the database.
Read the full story in the Patriot Ledger
October 31, 2012 — Figuring out what kids like to eat that also pleases their parents has long been a challenge for restaurant operators. Parents want healthy fare for their growing offspring, but kids want something fun and tasty. Seafood is one item that can easily fit the bill, but has yet to widely infiltrate kids menus.
“There’s a tremendous missed opportunity with most of the industry,” said Julie Casey, aka The Restaurant Mom, founder of online kids' dining resource mykidsplate.com. “Kids and parents are agreeing they want to see seafood on kids’ menus.”
According to the 2012 Kids and Parents Discovery Survey, conducted for Kidzsmart Concepts with The Restaurant Mom and Cincinnati-based Directions Research, both kids and parents want to see seafood on kids’ menus. For example, when asked what food items from the adult menu they would like to see on the kids’ menu, more than a quarter of kids surveyed said seafood. When asked what items from the adult menu their kids ordered or would order if they were on the kids’ menu, nearly a quarter of parents surveyed said seafood.
But while seafood presents a big opportunity for restaurants, only 20 percent of kids' menus currently include seafood, down from 21 percent in 2011, according to foodservice research firm Technomic. Of kids’ menus that do include seafood, shrimp appears the most. Other seafood dishes frequently showing up on kids’ menus are fish and chips, salmon, fish sticks and fried fish.
CORVALLIS, Ore. –- October 24, 2012 — Samples of albacore tuna caught off the West Coast of the United States show minute traces of radiation that can be traced to the Fukushima reactor disaster, according to an interdisciplinary team of scientists from Oregon State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The radiation levels in fish analyzed to date are far below anything that would pose a risk to humans who consume the fish, the research team emphasized. The findings are preliminary; additional fish remain to be tested.
But the findings could reveal new information about where Pacific albacore travel during their migratory lives – and how what happens in one part of the ocean can affect the food web thousands of miles away.
The team has collected and tested fish caught off the U.S. West Coast both before and after the devastating March 2011 Japanese tsunami and subsequent release of radioactive material into the ocean by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor.
“We're still processing new fish, but so far the radiation we're detecting is far below the level of concern for human safety,” said Delvan Neville, a graduate researcher with OSU's Radiation Health Physics program and a co-investigator on the project.
People are constantly exposed to radiation from the natural environment, Neville pointed out. “To increase their normal annual dosage of radiation by just 1 percent, a person would have to eat more than 4,000 pounds of the highest (radiation) level albacore we've seen.”
Neville will present the team's preliminary findings on Oct. 27 at the Heceta Head Coastal Conference in Florence. Richard Brodeur, the NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center biologist who serves as lead investigator on the project, reported the same findings to the recent annual meeting of PICES, the North Pacific Marine Science Organization, in Japan. The researchers also plan scientific journal articles.
The OSU team's findings are consistent with those of California researchers who announced in May that they had found traces of Fukushima-linked radionuclides in bluefin tuna caught off the California coast. The bluefin news came as a surprise to the scientific and regulatory community. Shortly after the March 2011 Japanese tsunami and reactor disaster, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration and NOAA jointly expressed “high confidence” in the safety of U.S. seafood products, suggesting it was unlikely that migratory fish such as tuna would be contaminated to “significantly elevated radiation levels.”
October 27, 2012 — Some of the best and healthiest parts of a fish never make it into the American diet. An e-book called "The Whole Fish — How Adventurous Eating of Seafood Can Make You Healthier, Sexier, and Help Save the Ocean" shows simple ways to use fish heads, skin and bones in appealing new ways.
"Omega 3s increase serotonin levels and they really do work as aphrodisiac," said author Maria Finn. "Plus fish adds healthy vitamins and minerals, so it actually does help increase your sexual desire and sensitivity."
Finn is a former Homer fisherman who said her whole fish philosophy stemmed from years of field work with Fish and Game.
"When I was on the Yukon Delta I worked with a lot of Yup'ik people at their fish camps. They showed me how to use the whole fish — the heads, the eggs and milt, the bones, and what they didn't use was pickled or fed to the dogs," she said.
Now Finn lives near San Francisco where using the whole animal is the trend in high-end restaurants.
Finn has seen salmon bellies featured as entrees, salmon roe as garnishes, tuna heart grated over pasta, and salmon bones ground with salt to provide calcium and Omega 3s. The e-book has recipes and also draws attention to sustainability issues and food webs.
Read the full story in the Anchorage Daily News