KidSafe Seafood teamed up with programmatic partner Mission Blue to write about healthy, sustainable family-friendly seafood.

Parents face a difficult decision when it comes to serving seafood at the dinner table: does the risk that fish contains toxic contaminants outweigh its nutritional benefits? TheEnvironmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration sometimes provide contradictory information about what quantities of seafood are safe to consume, and the extent of contamination for many populations and species of fish remains unknown.

Fish become contaminated in a variety of ways. Mercury, for example, can makes its way into an aquatic ecosystem from power plant runoff,. Rivers feed into the ocean, and so the contaminant finds its way into the marine ecosystem as well. Microbes change the element into methyl mercury, which travels up the food chain and bioconcentrates in larger and larger fish. Methyl mercury binds to muscles, while PCBs bind to fats. Hazardous waste sites may be dredged, but ultimately some contaminant traces will remain in the ecosystem and continue to diffuse into the ocean.

“People once thought of the ocean as being such a big, infinite source that we couldn’t possibly contaminate the whole thing, but that’s not true,” says David Carpenter, the director of the University at Albany’s Institute for Health and Environment. “We’ve really screwed up the ocean in a big way,” he says.

By Rachel Nuwer

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