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Fish Dinner Abridged Version From a news story by
For someone who watches her diet as much as Wendy Moro, the symptoms didn’t add up. ”(I had) Severe fatigue and vertigo, very weak. I was at one point able to leg press two hundred pounds, (but) I could barely walk down the block,” says Wendy Moro. Why would someone who eats so healthily feel so unhealthy? She says doctor after doctor mis-diagnosed her condition. Then, Wendy and her current doctor begin to suspect the answer was on her plate. ” A few times a week I was having fish, whether it was once or three times or four times,” says Wendy. ”What kind of fish? Swordfish, ahi, tuna and sea bass, the highest mercury-content fish sold in the commercial market,” says Dr. Jane Hightower. Mercury enters the ocean with commercial pollution. It works its way up the food chain. Apparently mercury goes into to some of the most popular fish on the market. Wendy’s doctor, Dr. Jane Hightower, was suspicious. She began testing dozens of her Bay Area patients. All of her patients ate substantial amounts of fish. An overwhelming majority tested high for mercury in their systems. ”I was seeing hair loss, fatigue, muscle ache, headache, feeling just an ill feeling.” Hightower said. The symptoms began to clear up when Hightower cut the amount of fish in their diets. Her published findings drew national attention. But there is still fierce debate over how much fish is safe to eat, and how much mercury consumers are actually ingesting. So we decided to do our own test. CBS 5 joined with Jane Kay, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. We drove to more than half a dozen high-end fish markets around the Bay Area. We purchased tuna, Alaskan halibut, swordfish, and Chilean sea bass. Our samples were packed in ice and sent to a testing lab in Washington State. According to the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the safe level of mercury intake for a 120-pound woman like Wendy is a little over 38 micrograms per week. (A microgram is one-millionth of a gram. It is a measurement of weight. One ounce of weight equals more than 28 million micrograms) Our results? Only halibut was under that limit. On average, a single serving of tuna purchased here in the Bay Area contained more mercury than the EPA recommends a woman of Wendy’s size eat for an entire week. Sea bass had nearly twice that level, and swordfish nearly six times the EPA’s safe mercury intake for a week, in a single serving. ”When you realized that the problem was on your plate, what did you say?” ”If I had known, I could have prevented so much heartache and illness in my life,” said Wendy. There is little scientific data on how the body reacts to high levels of mercury. However, it has been linked to many symptoms: muscle pain, hair loss, birth defects, and muscle fatigue. The evidence is mounting that the larger the fish, the more the exposure. ”I’m very frustrated,” Wendy said. “I feel the government, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), had this knowledge. This information should have been shared with the public.” Note: The Environmental Protection Agency website explains how mercury gets into the fish we eat: “Mercury occurs naturally in the environment and can also be released into the air through industrial pollution. Mercury falls from the air and can accumulate in streams and oceans and is turned into methylmercury in the water. It is this type of mercury that can be harmful to your unborn baby and young child. Fish absorb the methylmercury as they feed in these waters and so it builds up in them. It builds up more in some types of fish and shellfish than others, depending on what the fish eat, which is why the levels vary.” Followup notes For more information about about mercury in fish, see the websites below:
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