Warnings advising pregnant women to reduce fish consumption may come too late for certain persistent contaminants.
Yes intentionally expose people to mercury by feeding them fish (like tuna) for 14 weeks, the level of mercury in their bloodstream increases, as you can see in the graph below and at 0:14 of my video. Avoid fish for five years before pregnancy. As soon as arrest By eating fish, it goes back down so much that they can detoxify by half in about 100 days. (Therefore, the half-life of total mercury in our blood is about 100 days.) Even if you eat a lot of fish, within a few months of stopping, you can eliminate much of the mercury from your blood. But what happens to your brain?
The results of modeling studies are everywhere, Provide “Some extreme estimates (69 days vs. 22 years)”. However, when put to the test, the autopsy findings suggest that the half-life may be even longer, 27.4 years. Once mercury reaches our brain, it can take decades before our body can get rid of even half of it. So, better than detoxing is not “toxing” in the first place.
That’s the problem with the notices that say pregnant women to reduce fish consumption. For contaminants with long half-lives, such as PCBs and dioxins, “temporary decreases in daily contaminant intake related to the fish advisory will not necessarily translate into measurable decreases in maternal POPs.” [persistent organic pollutant] body burdens”, which help determine the dose the baby receives.
Consider this: As you can see in the chart below and at 1:32 of my videoa baby can be exposed to a tumor-promoting contaminant called PCB 153 if his mother ate fish. But if Mom ate only half the fish or no fish for a year, the levels wouldn’t change much. A substantial drop in childhood exposure levels can only be seen if the mother had eliminated all fish for five years before becoming pregnant. That is the “warning about eating fish”. “[T]he only scenarios that produced A significant impact on children’s exposure forced mothers to eliminate fish from their diets for 5 years before their children were conceived. The model predicted that replacing fish with agricultural products would reduce prenatal and infancy exposures by 37% each and subsequent childhood exposures by 23%.” Therefore, “a complete ban on fish consumption may be preferable to specific advisories on fish consumption based on life stages…”
However, if you are going to eat fish, which is less contaminated: wild-caught fish or farmed fish? In a recent study, researchers Measured levels of pesticides, such as DDT, PCBs, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and toxic elements, such as mercury and lead, in a large sample of farmed and wild-caught seafood. Overall, they found farmed fish to be worse. Think of the suspect as cultivated and dangerous. Measured levels of most organic and many inorganic contaminants were higher in farmed fish products and, consequently, so were consumer intake levels if such products were consumed. For example, as you can see in the graphs below and at 3:09 in my videothere was significantly more contamination from polycyclic hydrocarbons, persistent pesticides, and PCBs in all farmed fish samples, including salmon and sea bass (although it didn’t seem to matter for crayfish), and wild-caught mussels were actually worse. If adult and child consumers are divided into those who only eat farmed seafood and those who only eat wild-caught seafood, the level of contaminant exposure was significantly worse with farmed seafood.
In total, the researchers, who were Spanish, investigated a total of 59 pollutants and toxic elements. They conclude: “Taking all these data together, and based on the consumption rates of fish and seafood of the Spanish population, our results indicate that a theoretical consumer who chose to consume only aquaculture [farmed] The products would be exposed to levels of investigated contaminants approximately twice as high as if this theoretical consumer had chosen only products from extractive fisheries. [wild-caught fish].” So when it comes to contaminants, you could eat twice as much fish if you stuck to wild-caught fish. Although it is easier said than done. Rates of mislabeling of fish and other seafood in the United States are between 30 and 38 percent, so the average fraud rate is around one in three.
In my previous video on this topic, How long to detox from fish before pregnancy?I mentioned a study that suggests detoxing from fish for a year to reduce mercury levels, but other contaminants take longer to leave our system.
For optimal brain development, consider a contaminant-free source of omega-3 fatty acids. Verify Should vegan women supplement with DHA during pregnancy?.
Aside from contaminants, there are other reasons why we may want to avoid excessive amounts of animal protein. See Flashback Friday: The Effect of Animal Protein on Stress Hormones, Testosterone, and Pregnancy.
