September 29, 2014 — Next week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is hosting a three-day forum focused on the increasingly politicized topic of mercury contamination in fish. Why should you care? Because of all the scattered skirmishes in the ongoing food wars—from soda sizes to trans fats —the activist-led attack on seafood is unique. That’s because if you stop eating those other foods, nothing bad is going to happen to you. But if you stop eating seafood, you’re actually putting yourself at risk.
This warning would be easy to dismiss as rhetoric were it simply coming from the seafood industry. But it is based on countless independent, peer-reviewed studies showing that when we don’t eat enough seafood we see cognitive impediments in children, and more preventable cardiovascular deaths in adults. It’s a warning repeated by the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and the National Institutes of Health, among others.
But for too long, these cautions have been drowned out by well-funded activist groups whose ideological agenda—and whose bottom line—depend on scaring the daylights out of Americans.
Their boogeyman of choice is mercury. And they have been beating that drum for decades, warning that amidst the witches brew of pollutants spewed by coal-fired power plants, mercury was making its way into the fish on our plates. All manner of dreadful, irreversible health consequences were alleged to follow, for ourselves and our children. We’ve all heard the scare stories and dire warnings for pregnant women and the lectures from wannabe celebrity gurus. It’s scary stuff, and as the activists themselves readily admit, an effective fundraising message.
“People start to care much more, and understand the threat to the ocean, when you tell them that their tuna fish is contaminated,” one activist told Fortune magazine about the focus on mercury. “It’s a dramatic, eye-opening moment for people.”
There’s only one problem: essentially none of this narrative is true.
Read the full opinion at Forbes