The Dr. Hyman Show - A Fish Story: How To Improve Your Health While Protecting The Oceans with Paul Greenberg

Episode Date: February 12, 2020

Fish is one of the most nutritious food sources on the planet, especially when it comes to protein. But I’m usually scared to eat it. That’s because some seafood is at risk for toxicity that can harm our health, not to mention certain aquaculture methods are contributing to declining populations and even the acidification of our oceans. It’s not all bad, but it is complex. There are several important things we should think about in order to reap the health benefits from fish and act as environmental stewards at the same time.  To better understand seafood I sat down to talk with Paul Greenberg for this week’s episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy. Paul is the bestselling author of Four Fish, American Catch, and The Omega Principle. A regular contributor to the New York Times and many other publications, Mr. Greenberg is the writer-in-residence at the Safina Center, a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation and the recipient of a James Beard Award for Writing and Literature. He appears frequently on American and international radio and television programs and is the featured correspondent and co-writer of the 2017 PBS Frontline documentary The Fish On My Plate which, along with his TED talk, has reached millions of viewers. This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox. ButcherBox is committed to humanely raised animals that are never given antibiotics or added hormones and since they take out the middleman you get extra savings. Right now ButcherBox has a special offer, get 2lbs of wild-caught Alaskan sockeye salmon and 2 grass-fed filet mignon steaks for free in your first order PLUS $20 off your first box - just go to ButcherBox.com/farmacy. Make sure you order before February 25, 2020 to take advantage of this great deal. Here are more of the details from our interview:  Why I’m scared to eat fish and why Paul is optimistic about our oceans (6:55) Overfishing and the declining fish population around the world (17:57) How our monoculture is leading to the creation of dead zones in our waters (25:48) Pros and cons of aquaculture (27:26) The nutritional value and toxin levels of farmed salmon (31:37) The decline of our oceans from an environmental point of view and the death of phytoplankton (38:36) The most effective way to test for mercury exposure (44:10) The best types of fish for you to eat (53:13) Fish oil, omega-3 deficiency, and veganism (1:00:47) The issue of microplastics in the ocean (1:15:44) Learn more about Paul Greenberg at www.paulgreenberg.org and watch his TED talk at https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_greenberg_the_four_fish_we_re_overeating_and_what_to_eat_instead. Follow him on Facebook @fourfish, on Instagram @4fishgreenberg, and on Twitter @4fishgreenberg.   Resources: Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) https://www.msc.org/home  Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) https://www.asc-aqua.org/  Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) https://www.bapcertification.org/  Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch https://www.seafoodwatch.org/ Greenpeace’s Carting Away the Oceans Report: 2018 Supermarket Seafood Ranking https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/research/carting-away-the-oceans-10/ Seek out a “Community Supporting Fishery” or CSF through www.localcatch.org 

Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. I want people to come to the fish conversation not feeling like all is lost. I want people to come to the fish conversation to know that the oceans are still extremely vital. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark Hyman here. Now I'm always being asked how to source high quality meat and seafood. So I want to share one of my favorite resources with you that I use to get high quality protein in my own diet. Now, unfortunately, most meat and seafood at the grocery store is not serving our health or

the planet for that matter. Conventionally raised animals have higher levels of inflammatory fats, not to mention all the antibiotics, hormones, and other harmful compounds that we just should not eat. And the seafood, well, that can be full of heavy metals and other toxins or just lacking nutrients in general because they're farm-raised. And don't even get me started on the environmental and the inhumane aspects of conventional meat and seafood production either. That's another huge issue that we can improve by shopping more consciously. And that is why I love ButcherBox.

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you can try the best of both worlds and get two pounds of wild caught alaskan sockeye salmon and two grass-fed filet mignon steaks free in your first order plus 20 off your first box. Just go to butcherbox.com forward slash pharmacy. That's F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, pharmacy with an F. Make sure you make your order before February 25th, 2020 to take advantage of this great deal. I promise you, you'll see why I trust them when it comes to my own diet. Hi everyone, it's Keo,

one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. Before we continue with this week's episode, Dr. Hyman wants to share a little bit about his groundbreaking new book, Food Fix. Thanks for tuning in. Hey, everyone. You've probably seen in the headlines that eco-anxiety is rising and really just anxiety in general. Everywhere we turn, it feels like bad news, that the future is bleak, the climate is warming, the oceans are rising, the economy is unstable, chronic diseases like diabetes and dementia are skyrocketing. But I'm here to tell you that the future is much brighter than you might think. There's actually a lot of good news because we can solve these big

issues through our own actions, especially in how we choose to eat. That's why I created a manifesto to transform the food system, my newest book, Food Fix. It's amazing how much control we do have in changing the most urgent issues of our time. In Food Fix, Food Fix. It's amazing how much control we do have in changing the most urgent issues of our time. In Food Fix, I walk you through realistic steps that take the overwhelm out of these large-scale problems. We can stop the spread of preventable illnesses. We can reduce the burden of chronic disease on our economy, reverse climate change, and heal the environment, and even create social justice. It all starts with fixing our food system. And the best part of it is it also means taking care of your health on a whole

new level and passing that down to future generations. And it's not even hard. So for more information, I encourage you to head over to foodfixbook.com to pre-order the book right now, and you'll get a whole bunch of amazing bonuses that'll help you reclaim your health. So just head over to foodfixbook.com and join me in creating a brighter future and a food revolution. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you ever wondered if you should

eat fish, how much you should eat, what you should eat, if it's toxic, if it has microplastics, mercury, what we're doing to the oceans, this is the conversation you should be listening to because it's with Paul Greenberg, who is a fisherman. Well, sort of that, but he's much more than a fisherman. He's a journalist. He's got a curious mind about fish and oceans

and all things aquatic. He's the best-selling author of Four Fish, which is about the four fish that we're all eating, which is basically salmon, tuna, shrimp, and whitefish, which is all kinds of different things, but mostly cod and how we're screwing it all up. He wrote a book called The American Catch, The Omega Principle About Omega-3 Fatty Acids, which we'll have a lot to talk about. He's a regular writer and contributor to the New York Times, a second-rate publication, but okay.

Fake news. Many other publications. He's a writer in residence at the Safina Center, a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation, and a recipient of the James Beard Award for Writing and Literature. That's amazing. He appears frequently on American and international radio and television

and is featured correspondent and co-writer of the 2017 PBS front-line documentary, The Fish on My Plate, which, along with his TED Talk, which I would watch, has reached millions of viewers. He lives at Ground Zero in Manhattan, where he produces, to his knowledge, the only wine grown and bottled in downtown New York. There must not be a lot of bottles made because it can't have a lot of grapes grown down there. Well, don't alert the authorities. I don't know if what I'm doing is entirely legal, but I do produce one bottle of wine a year down there.

One bottle of wine? Yes. From one grapevine? Sometimes, too. It depends. I call the wine Chateau Nul, Nul being zero. In French, if you want to call somebody a loser, you say they're a Nul. So the wine.

Like Null, right? Right, exactly. So the wine is similarly vintage. All right. Well, let's get into fish. Yeah. Because it's kind of a fish story. Yes.

I really, as a doctor, would say fish is probably one of the most important sources of nutrients in our food supply. It's full of omega-3 fatty acids, essential for brain, heart health, neurologic development, memory, mood, many, many other things, skin, hair, nails, you name it. It's full of iodine, which we need. It's got selenium, vitamin D, things you can't actually get in many other places. And in fact, most of the human population evolved in coastal areas where the levels of fish in the diet were quite high. And in fact, in the Northwest, the Native American tribes up there used the small little oily omega-3 rich fish

to trade as a trading currency. So fish is really, really important part of our history, both from an evolutionary point of view, a biologic point of view. And we're faced now with the fact that I'm scared to eat most fish because one, we're either overfishing the oceans and destroying natural fisheries. We're eating fish from aquaculture that's fish farms. It's basically factory farm fish that has all kinds of health and environmental issues. We're eating fish that is often polluted with mercury, not because it naturally has mercury, because we release so much coal in the environment that it pollutes the oceans

and that gets into the algae and the little fish eat the algae and the big fish eat the big little fish and so on up the food chain and we're the top of the food chain yeah and then we are also seeing problems now with microplastics which are invisible plastics that come off and from washing our like polypropylene polyester clothes in the washing machine those microplastics get in the water, get in the fish, and create this level of toxicity. So eating fish to me is like a scary thing now. I love fish. I think it's great food, but we're sort of stuck in a moment in time where our oceans are also being threatened, not just because of overfishing, but because of climate change and the destruction of coral reefs, which are often the spawning grounds for much fish. Our rivers are being dammed and destroyed, which natural fish

can't spawn like salmon. We're just experiencing so many crises around fish. And I'm like, ah, what do we do? And you've been really fishing a long time. So you came at this naturally. You fished in Peru and Norway, Alaska, off the waters of Long Island Sound, where you learned to fish with your dad when you were just five years old. So when did you start to understand that this was more than just a hobby, that this was a calling and that overfishing and other forms of harm to our oceans were causing far-reaching environmental issues? And what is the story with fish? Well, first of all, I mean, that preamble is very sad. I know.

I'm so depressed. And it doesn't actually have to be that sad. It's something of a point of perspective that you bring to the conversation that other people have different perspectives on. One thing I like to kind of throw out there just to start is that every year we take between 80 and 90 million metric tons of fish

out of the sea every year. That's the equivalent of the human weight of China taken out of the sea every single year. How many humans live in China? That's the weight. If you weighed all the billion plus people it would be that much fish? That's what we're taking out to sea.

You said that before. I was like, what do you mean? He weighed China? He got China on his ship? Yeah, I have a lot of assistants. No, why? No, no. But to back up a second.

Even now that China is one of the fattest countries in the world? Or was that before they were? Those numbers are from. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Go ahead. But look at the perspective on that, right? On the one hand, you could say, oh, my God, what a horrible raping of the ocean,

80 to 90 million metric tons, the human weight of China taken out of the sea each and every year. Depends how much is there. Well, yes. And on the other hand, that's been stable for about 10 years. And so the ocean, which, you know, people who come to this conversation, you this conversation just on hearsay and just, I've heard all the oceans are blah, blah, blah, they think the oceans are dead. But the ocean right now, every year, is producing 80 to 90 million tons of wild protein that humans harvest every single year. So on the one hand, you could say terrible raping of the ocean.

On the other hand, you could say, whoa, the ocean, in spite of everything we're doing to mess it up, is still producing 80 to 90 million metric tons of protein every single year. Yeah, but in your TED talk, you're like, oh, my team, all your fish that used to catch aren't there anymore. You only have four people on your team instead of a whole basketball team. Yeah. To me, that's just an overarching thing. I want people to come to the fish conversation not feeling like all is lost. I want people to come to the fish conversation not feeling like all is lost. I want people to come to the fish conversation to know that the oceans are still extremely vital. We're certainly kicking it around, and we're certainly kicking fish populations around. But there's still a lot of abundance out there.

So to your earlier question, how did I get into all this? So I came, really what brought me to fish was divorce Okay, so your dad's So when I was three years old my parents divorced and I started going on these divorce dad weekends and my dad who was just Like the Jewish psychiatrist from the Upper West Side who you know, really didn't know anything about the outdoors or whatever thing He had it in his mind that a father should take his son fishing. No, he never fished in his life, right? Not really.

And in fact, he always wanted his father to take him fishing. But the one time he took him fishing, my grandfather got horribly seasick and they never went fishing again. So he took me fishing. And you probably have had this experience with your kids that when your kids really take to something, the parents can just kind of get dragged along. And I just took to fishing in this really intense kind of way. And I became a much better fisherman than my father.

My father to this day is a horrible fisherman. I always outfish him. He's like, you know, as soon as he has a bite, he's like jerks a pole and whatever. Loses the fish. And most of the time he actually spends his time on these party boats out of Brooklyn in the front playing poker. Whereas I went out to the rail to fish. Anyway. Not throwing up.

No, no, no, no, no. He was inside playing poker. And I was fishing. I got to tell you a quick story. I had the same divorced dad weekends. Yeah. And my dad, I was five when my parents split. And we would go somewhere off Long Island. Yeah. On these giant boats. Yeah. And like we'd I was five when my parents split. And we would go somewhere off Long Island on these giant boats.

Yeah, yeah. And we'd go at night. Yep. And there'd be people barfing off the side of the boat all night. That can happen. And we'd catch a couple of flounder. And my dad was like, it's OK. It's good chump for the fish.

Well, so there are certainly people who kind of do that every once in a while. But for me, every single Divorce Dad weekend was like, we're going fishing. And that's and we really did it. And then, you know, as I grew up, you know, when I was with my mom, we grew up in a series or she moved us around a series of like rental cottages in the backwoods of Greenwich, Connecticut. I would say I lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, but we rented. We didn't own. And we would always my mom just followed my lead,

and we always rented a cottage that was on a river or on a lake. And so during the week, I fished freshwater, you know, in the woods of Greenwich, Connecticut. And on the weekends, I'd do the big game with my dad in the saltwater. So I did all that. And I was really, you know, sort of blindly catching and killing fish. I'm not really that concerned about it. But it was really, the thing that changed is that, so I always say that the urge to catch fish or to hunt and kill things is kind of inversely proportional to your desire to pursue individuals of your species

of the opposite sex. So I was totally into fishing until like 13, 14, 15. And then as I started getting interested, it started to dip and I started getting more interested in going out with women. So I abandoned fishing for about 10 years, lived abroad, worked abroad, had various and sundry adventures. And then, well, you know, as the interest in the opposite sex starts to wane, surprise, surprise, fishing starts to become interesting again. So in my middle 30s, I started to fish again. And after that long pause of not fishing and going back to my same waters, I found that there was remarkably fewer fish to be caught.

And that's what it really struck me, like, wow, something has really seriously changed changed and this thing that was not just an amusement for me, but was like a real passion I mean, I think I said this maybe in my TED talk, but you know, I was not a great athlete You know, maybe it's my the great the great tradition of Jewish athletes. I was I was not a pretty good athlete and So for me my team were all the fish that came in and out of my waters every year and that's where i really felt the allegiance and so when i came back to my home waters and saw things like winter flounder were gone from long island sound mackerel that used to come in past greenwich not there anymore um you know all these different creatures that came into the into long island sound every every single year gone are severely severely

diminished so that made me kind of want to find out what was really going on here yeah i remember took a hiking trip a few years ago new newfoundland yeah and it was a massive cod fisheries there yep massive and they had whole towns that were just focused on cod fishing and you know one of them i went to visit and you could only get there by boat. Yep. And it had this massive fish processing plant. And it was a ghost town. Yeah.

And we went to the fish dock, and there was a couple of little fishing boats bringing a few tiny, small little cod. And they used to bring in these massive cod and just didn't know what to do with all the fish. Yep, yep. And then, well, you mentioned in your TED Talk that it was McDonald's fish sandwich.

So it was the Catholics' fault because they wouldn't eat burgers on Friday, so the fish, they had to make fish sandwiches. Well, I mean, so the codfish... No offense to Catholics, but... The codfish is really, that's the kind of signature story of the collapse of ocean life that I think is really ingrained in a lot of Americans' heads. And as you say, you know, codfish was really the bedrock of so much American coastal activity.

The triangular trade of the slave era was in part fueled by codfish because merchant vessels would bring manufactured goods to England, but then they would take dried salt cod down to the plantations of the south, and that's what actually fed slaves. But then going forward, this huge body of fish, these codfish that were off of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland off of Canada, there was a huge upsurge post-war in freezing and catching and freezing these fish. The freezing technology that allowed you to quick freeze fish, invented by Clarence Birdseye, allowed this whole kind of array of industrial products to emerge. Fish sticks, fish tenders, and then as you say, the Filet-O-Fish sandwich that McDonald's brought to us. And I should say that story is that when McDonald's was on its initial rise in the 60s,

there was a franchise owner in Cleveland who found that on Fridays, nobody came into the shop to buy a burger. And the reason being, they were mostly Catholics in his community. So he went to Ray Kroc and he said, Ray, I have this idea for a sandwich. What's the idea?

It's like, it's a fish sandwich and it'll be on a bun and it'll be called the Filet-O-Fish. And Ray Kroc was like, nah, nah, I got another burger. A Maui burger. The Hula burger. The Hula burger.

It's like, because it was the time of the 60s and Mad Men and pineapples. And so he was going to put a slice of pineapple on a bun and that was gonna be the solution to that fish on Or to that no meat on Friday solution and Red Croc said well, let's go head-to-head and we'll see who wins Well the fish one the fish one. Okay, so so so we're in the situation and we still harvest enormous amount of fish Yeah, but the fish populations around the world are declining right right? Declining or, if not, overfished. I mean, so the world catch has quadrupled since World War II. So we went from about 20 million metric tons to 80 million metric tons over the course of about 70 years.

It has flatlined for the last 10 years. So we ain't going to catch any more. Is it harder to get them? It is harder to get it. What's called the catch per unit of effort has definitely gone down. So like more effort to catch fewer fish. And some people put it out there that the only reason that we're maintaining this 80 to 90 million metric tons a year is because we're fishing further out, deeper. There's a larger fishing fleet out there trying to catch these fish so that,

in fact, we may actually be mining deeper and deeper into our principle, if you hear what I'm saying. And is there anybody who has a sense of how much fish is out there? I mean, you know, I've tried to talk to different people about that. And you should also keep in mind that the edible fish, the fish that we harvest is actually a relatively small portion of all the fish that are out there. So, you know, there's all sorts of other kinds of fish that are either too small, too deep, too weird for us to eat. Like there's this whole layer in the ocean called the deep scattering layer that rises and falls depending sort of in sync with diurnal, with day patterns. And that layer,

which is normally below the level at which we fish, has a huge biomass of fish. But it's mostly little fish, weird fish, things that we're never going to catch. That's sort of a dog leg. The fish that we focus on, the sort of larger vertebrates that we're eating, that 80 to 90 million metric tons, that's what we're talking about when we're talking about what we take from the ocean. What is that as a proportion of the larger biomass that's out in the ocean? I'm not sure anyone really quite knows. I mean, are you worried about the oceans and fish? I am certainly worried about it. So what are you worried about?

I'm worried about, so when you think about fish, it's helpful to have metaphors. And I think one metaphor that really works is a bank account. So we, in a healthy fishing situation, we should really only be eating the interest that our bank account is generating. So imagine there's all these fish out there, large fish that are breeding, producing offspring. And every year there is something of an amount that we can take without affecting that principle, that base population. Different fishery scientists have different ideas of how much that percentage is. But in that huge upsurge in fishing that happened from World War II to the present We really started eating into our principal and that's what happened like for example with codfish off of the Grand Banks We we have a situation with the Grand Banks where?

the overall biomass of codfish I'm Probably went down by 90 to 95 percent incredible So like, you know imagine like if you had a hundred thousand dollars in your bank account and say you were getting you know Whatever three percent interest you have $3,000 a year. But if your principal went down to like $5,000, I mean, that's pennies. You know what I mean? So that's what I'm concerned about. And that is the case in probably, you know, it depends.

What are the at-risk fish? Sorry? What are the fish that are at risk that we're over-consuming? Well, it's hard to identify by species name because fish are kind of like, if you just say codfish, right? There are codfish all over the world. There are Pacific cod, which is a slightly different species. There are cod in the North Atlantic, off of Norway in the Barents Sea. Each of those different populations is like a nation of fish. And each nation has a different degree of health. So Canadian codfish off of the Northeast

and North American codfish off the Northeast, those nations are severely depleted. But codfish off of Alaska, for example, Pacific cod are in relatively good shape. Off the Barents Sea, where Norway fishes and where Russia fishes, those populations, because they've actually radically reformed their fisheries management, are actually in pretty good shape. And if you notice now, if you go to a Whole Foods, you go to the supermarket to buy codfish, chances are it'll say product of Norway, product of Iceland. Because those fisheries are actually being managed pretty well. They are no longer dipping into their principle. They have gotten to the point where they're harvesting a healthy fish stock. But you say there's overfishing, so what are you talking about?

Well, so I would say about, you know, the latest numbers I've seen is about 30% of the commercial fish stocks out there are overfished. In other words, we're dipping into the principle at this point. And a certain percentage of those, the overfishing may have stopped. And we're stopped, you know, the catch has been severely, you know, reduced, and we're waiting, we're in a sort of rebuilding period, hopefully get to the point where we can take a certain amount every single year that is, you know, enough to, you know, be a decent commercial harvest for us. But you know, the world population is growing. In countries that have the money to spend on good fisheries management, where you have observers aboard vessels, where you have a scientific approach to quota and so forth like that, then these are places like the United States, like Australia, Norway.

These countries have pretty good fisheries management in place. But if you're looking at China, coastal China, coastal Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, technically there are ideas of quotas and things like that in place, but they are in various depleted areas, depending on the fishery. Many areas have been severely depleted. I studied Chinese in college, and in America they talk about abundance

being the land of milk and honey. In China, the same expression is the land of milk and honey. Yeah. In China the same expression is the land of fish and rice. Interesting. No it's interesting and you know China meanwhile is the largest harvester of fish in the world and the largest grower of fish in the world. Why are they the largest harvester of wild fish in the world? Well it's because they've depleted their coastal resources so much that they have a huge and expanding

international fleet that is now fishing all over the world, buying quota from all sorts of countries, from Africa to South America, et cetera, et cetera, to satisfy that fish and rice Jones that they have in that country. So, you know, is...

Do you think we need better international regulation of our fisheries? I think that we all need to get on the same page. The major fishing nations of the world have to understand that we can't just endlessly delve into the principle. I mean, the problem and the frustrating thing about overfishing is that country after country has been faced with this lesson, and some countries have learned from it. You know, the United States, I would say at this point, has kind of learned its lesson. And we've actually, over the course of the last 40, 50 years, actually the last 20, 30 years, have rebuilt something like 30 different populations of fish around the United States. And that was because of really progressive, great reform that happened. Something in 1996 was called the Sustainable Fisheries Act, which mandated that every commercial fish population in the United States had to be rebuilt by a certain date. And we're actually coming up upon those dates. Not every country

has that policy. And especially when you have developing countries, right? Where there's hungry for food. Everyone's hungry for food, particularly hungry for protein. And, you know, especially when you have developing countries, right? Where there's hungry for food, right? Everyone's hungry for food, particularly hungry for protein. And, you know, the horrible thing, which I'm sure, you know, I know that you've written about, is that there's this idea that American, historical American levels of animal food consumption, you know, is somehow a sign of affluence and well-being and stuff like that. So if everybody follows our model, then the world can't. What's also more frightening is that the coastal areas where a lot of the fish are

are being decimated through not only pollution but nitrogen pollution, which has run off from the fertilizer on the farms in the Midwest that go into the Gulf of Mexico and literally created dead zone the size of New Jersey. And they kill two hundred and twelve thousand metric tons of fish a year and there are four hundred similar dead zones around the world the size of Europe killing all those fish that put the food for half a billion people at risk that's right and it's a clear case what I say it's like we're trading seafood for land food

right because what are we doing? Why is that situation happening? It's happening because we're growing huge amounts of corn and soy. We're taking out these really protective streamside ecosystems, forest ecosystems, putting down tons of soy and corn, which is typically pretty leaky crops. So you put a lot of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer on that stuff, washes into the water, causes algal blooms in, as you say, the Gulf of Mexico. Lake Erie. Lake Erie. When the algae dies, oxygen is sucked out of the water,

and you have these dead zones. You have these huge fish kills. And in a way, we're kind of trading this really healthy wild seafood for a less healthy option. I mean, saturated fat beef and pork and chicken that we're growing on crops of corn and soy. Yeah, not a good plan. When we could be having all this wild seafood that is high in omega-3s, as you said at the beginning, all these different nutrients. Okay, so we have to sort of reform our fisheries.

And people often don't realize that, you know, I think aquaculture and farm fish, well, that solves the problem, all these different nutrients. Okay, so we have to sort of reform our fisheries. And people often don't realize that, you know, I think aquaculture and farm fish, well, that solves the problem, but not so fast, right? And what's interesting, and most people don't realize, is that there's this whole concept of bycatch. In order to, you know, produce, find the fish that we like, we kill a lot of fish. And also to get fish fed, we often use other fish.

So we grind up other fish. So we use maybe 10 pounds of fish from the ocean that's ground up to feed the fish that we like, the ones we want to eat like salmon. So you're like, it's not a very efficient process. And it's also taking away a lot of the important fish in the ocean, right? Well, so there is this thing that is invisible to most Americans and probably most people called the reduction industry. And the reduction industry takes about one out of every four pounds of fish caught, goes to this reduction industry, which does what it says. It reduces all this fish biomass into meal and oil,

and that in turn gets fed largely nowadays to farmed fish. So in the early days of aquaculture, the amount of fish that you needed to grow a pound of salmon, say, was pretty appalling. Like in the early days, six pounds of wild fish to produce a single pound of salmon. The industry has changed in the last few years. It's now probably about two to one, largely because we're putting all sorts of other stuff in the fish feeding them soy and corn and corn and we're basically turning salmon

more or less into a farm animal just like you know anything you anything you would farm um but yeah so but the really important thing here though is all of those little fish that are ground up play a really important ecosystem role. The little fish are actually the way that solar energy gets converted into tissue energy, which then passes on to larger fish. So like you have creatures like anchovies, like sardines, they're eating plankton that otherwise couldn't transfer onto the bigger fish. So without those, if you take all those little fish, if you take the anchovies, you take the sardines out of the middle of the food chain,

then you're going to reduce the amount of big fish that are out there, which are the big fish, surprise, surprise, that we would like to eat. So it can be a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. That said, I would be inconsistent if I just came out as some sort of huge anti-aquaculture person, because I'm not, because I actually think there are many fixes we could do to get us to a

point where aquaculture is actually producing a net amount of marine protein for us. But there's a lot of problems with aquaculture, right? They use antibiotics. There's a lot of pollution. What they feed the fish is kind of funky is it healthy for us you know what what's the story with with farm fish so farm salmon is it healthy or not what's the level of omega-3s what's the level of toxins yeah you know what are the the downstream consequences of these aquacultures on the environment you know tell us about that just like every wild fish population has different degrees of suffering or different degrees of success or failure, there is good aquaculture and there's bad aquaculture.

The worst aquaculture loads the coastal environment with nitrogen and phosphorus just like any kind of terrestrial or agricultural system would do. Just to be clear, most aquaculture is penned areas in oceans that are on the sort of shoreline. Yes, these are like circular, they're called net pens, and you'll see them sort of in like big kind of constellations in coastal areas. And they're throwing all that crap into the ocean. They throw all, first of all, they pack the fish in fairly tight.

They throw in all this feed. And in some countries, you know, you mentioned antibiotics. Some countries don't permit antibiotics. Some countries do. Again, Asian countries tend to be a little, well, I would say a lot more lenient on that kind of thing. Norway has largely moved away from antibiotics and moved to inoculating fish

rather than putting antibiotics in the feed. So it varies from place to place. It's hard to say where do you want to come at this first. Let's take salmon, for example, because salmon is right now the most consumed fish. Well, the most consumed fish in America right now. So salmon are coming to us largely from Norway and from Chile. Norway has, as I said, improved their antibiotic situation,

increasingly using less and less. Chile has recently made a pledge not to use antibiotics in their farm salmon. It's a work in progress, I would say, at this point. As I say, the feed has changed dramatically. Used to be that it was almost all fish going into the feed, and now it's a combination of soy and other kind of products going in. So that the amount of damage we're doing directly to these little fish from salmon farms has gone down to some degree. That, though, and to your point about nutrition, has changed the nutritional profile of farm

salmon. So it used to be that farm salmon were primarily a vector for bringing omega-3 fatty acids into our bodies. But now that you have soy and all these other kinds of agricultural additives to the feed, you're going to have more omega-6s. And as I think you've probably explored, omega-6s and omega-3s actually compete for space on the same enzymes. So that can then, you know, impact our ability to lengthen short-chain omega-3 fatty acids from vegetable sources.

And it also possibly, and again, this is science that I think is very much on the edge. I'd be happy to hear your opinion on the whole thing. But there's some that say that omega-6 tends to lead us down the pathway of inflammation, whereas omega-3 is lead us- It's the balance, right? We need both, but it's really the balance. We used to have 20 to one, I mean four 5 to 1 uh omega-3 to omega-6 then we have 20 to 1 up to 21 that's right six omega-3s and some people that's right processed food right and as you were

saying you know you'd eat fish all the time in part because right it it's one way of locking in that good balance right if you if you make yeah if you made wild oily fish you know your primary protein you'd probably have a pretty good balance but But if you start putting in farm salmon, if that's your go-to fish. Then your omega-3s are not getting the bang for your buck. You're still getting quite a few omega-3s. Like farm salmon has quite a lot of omega-3s in it, but they're also going to be carrying omega-6s to you as well. And what about other toxins?

Because you hear farm fish have more PCBs and more environmental toxins. So, you know, this is emerging and changing. The thing that really got people in a twist about farm salmon was something called the Heights Study that came out in 2002. I believe it was funded by the Pew Charitable Trust. And that study looked at farm salmon from around the world and looked at PCBs, polychlorinated bifenols, which, as you know, are a byproduct of a lot of different industrial manufacturing processes. Anyway, after they compared farmed salmon samples around the world, from Norway to Chile and everywhere in between, they found, generally speaking, that farmed salmon had significantly higher levels of PCBs than wild salmon. Now, that was 2002.

Since then, I would say that that time, probably and somewhat motivated by the Heights report, the industry has really changed. And they've moved, you know, where were these PCBs coming from? They were mostly coming from these little forage fish, mostly harvested in the much dirtier northern hemisphere. Like the northern hemisphere, just a paragraph, parentheses within many parentheses. The northern hemisphere, generally speaking, is much polluted than this, more polluted than the southern hemisphere. of since the heights report was published in the 2002 to the present time a a lot of farm salmon producers have switched to sourcing their little fish from the southern hemisphere like the peruvian anchoveta yeah which is the biggest fishery in the world by the way 99 of which goes to reduction

that has become a real driver of the salmon industry and those fish are notably cleaner than the little tiny fish that they were harvesting in the northern hemisphere so there's that the other element is as i said earlier there's a lot of other stuff in salmon feed other than fish now all the the soy the corn all the other industrial agricultural industrial products pesticides and which might bring pesticides you know what i keep saying and and you know i've said this to the ministry of fisheries in norway and so forth like somebody's got to redo the heights study study we got to do it now we need and that was a huge epic study and when i wrote to heights at one point i said care to comment

he's like no i don't want to comment on this that That was the most, you know, like media intense study I ever did. It was really unpleasant dealing with the whole thing because, you know, the industry got really angry. But I would just love to see somebody do this again. And because, you know, it's the ocean's dynamic. We're dynamic. I would before I go out and say all, you know, you know, farm fish are laced with antibioticaced with PCBs, I want to see it. They're also grown in the ocean, so they have more mercury too? Well, but so do wild fish.

Right. I'm just saying, has there been data on the difference in mercury content? The heights? Wild versus? So far as I understand, heights did not look at mercury. And I should say that generally speaking, when we have concerns about salmon, when we're concerned when we have concerns about salmon I'm sorry when we have concerns about mercury. We're not really talking about salmon So the mercury is about wild fish or any fish wild or farm salmon

Mercury has not Traditionally been a major issue. So why well wild salmon tend to eat? The majority of the wild salmon that we eat are Pacific salmon, and they tend to eat lower on the food chain. So like sockeye salmon, for example, or pink salmon, they're going to be eating little things like krill, really, and some degree, you know, other kinds of plankton as well. Krill, by the way, is what gives them salmon that orangey pink color. Those fish, I've never heard of a sockeye salmon, a wild sockeye salmon, having a mercury issue. With farmed salmon, the feed, generally speaking, you know, as I say,

PCBs have been an issue, but in all the different research I've done around the world, I've never heard either from the environmental community or from the industry, I've never heard of mercury being a significant issue in farmed salmon. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say. I've never heard of mercury being a significant issue in farm salmon. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to say. I mean, I know with wild salmon, it's certainly less than let's say tuna. Yeah. But I wouldn't say it's zero. And the reason I know that is because I have patients who eliminate all fish and only eat wild salmon. Yeah. And what were their levels? And their levels are high. Yeah. And how often are they eating it? Frequently, but it's not a zero.

Right. And I think that's disturbing to me as well. And so I think that's sort of the next subject I want to get into. Before we get into that, I want to just ask you about the decline of our oceans from an environmental point of view. Because climate change is rising CO2 levels, acidifies the oceans. It's the biggest carbon sink on the planet. And the acidification kills the phytoplankton,

which you mentioned before, feed a lot of the fish and also produce half of the oxygen on the planet, which we breathe. By the way, yes. By the way. So we're acidifying the oceans, killing the phytoplankton,

heating up the oceans, changing fish populations. Can you explain that to people and what should we do about it? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things going on and there is a big concern about what's going on at a microscopic planktonic level. My apologies if I get a little technical here. Go. I'll stop you to explain.

But there are a couple of rungs between phytoplankton and the fish that we eat. So you have phytoplankton, which, as you say, every second breath of oxygen you take is coming from phytoplankton. But then the next level up from phytoplankton are what are called zooplankton, zoo, right, from animal. Like a zoo is called a zoo because of animal. Zooplankton eat the phytoplankton. Then you have little fish that eat the zooplankton. So this acidification issue you're talking about is probably going to have the largest effect on these zooplankton. The zooplankton are the ones that tend to have calcium in their shells. There's a creature called a

copepod, for example. It's a kind of zooplankton. If those zooplankton can't form shells, if they can't exist, then there's no way for the phytoplankton to pass on to the fish. So if we lose that middle layer, we're really, really screwed. And yes, the ocean is getting more acidic. This is one of these really dark, you know, I think we began the interview with me trying to be optimistic. And generally,

I am optimistic in terms of like, the ocean still contains a lot of life. But these big, big drivers, you know, the carbonification of the ocean, you know, as you said, the ocean is our largest carbon sink by far. At a certain point, we're exhausting the resources of the ocean. You know, as you said, the ocean is our largest carbon sink by far. At a certain point, we're exhausting the resources of the ocean to absorb the excess carbon. And when the ocean gets too carbon saturated, that's when it starts to become more acidic. And that's when it becomes ultimately... How far are we from that? Yeah. You know, we're already seeing the effects. There have been significant larval failures of oyster crops in the Pacific Northwest. We're starting to see that in the Northeast to some degree.

I mean, I'm of the crowd that, like, we really need to get our carbon situation in order pronto. And we're probably going to see it on an ocean level, on an ocean life level, before we start to see it on a kind of human basis. I mean, the coral reefs are critical to all our fisheries. To many of them, to many of them. I mean, to tropical fisheries. And we're also, you know, yeah, we are, you know, because of ocean warming, it's more of a warming issue than an acidification with coral. But we could lose coral reefs within the next 40 or 50 years. I mean, I remember when I was a kid in the 70s going to the Bahamas and snorkeling around and it was just like an incredible display of color and coral and fish.

Yep. You know, I've been scuba diving all over the world since then and just, it's all like gray and dead and a few little things here and there. And that's, you know, and of course, as things always play out in this unequal world of ours, you know, where the greatest degree of poverty and actual fish dependence

tends to be in these tropical latitudes. And that's where coral is. And so if we do lose those coral reefs, it's really going to be first and foremost people of lower income who are dependent on wild fisheries. That's right. Okay, so let's talk about this other boogeyman,

which is the pollution in the oceans around Mercury. Now you did an experiment where you decided you were going to eat fish every day, every meal for a year. Yes, indeed. First, I want to know what fish and then I want to know what happened. Yeah. So, yeah.

So this was part of, I mean, was a sort of a dare on the part of Frontline when I was doing this documentary called The Fish on My Plate. And I just decided, yes, I would eat fish for every single meal for a year, including my snacks and so forth. I tried, generally speaking, to follow the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund puts out, they have pretty good ratings of different fish and their mercury levels. And I tried generally to follow their advice. So I stuck to- So you were eating lower mercury? I was. I was. I was having wild salmon. I was having smaller fish like anchovies. I was having mussels, things like that.

Things that nobody really tags as being super high in mercury. But, you know, however many meals later, 900 seafood meals later, I had really pretty high mercury. What was the number in your blood? I think it was like something like, you know, from a hair test, which is obviously different from a blood test But I think it was like up around Six or seven ppm, you know, it's normally it's supposed to be below below. Well, you know nothing exactly That's fine. I know it was pretty high. I remember you know your blood test was You know when the blood test actually I did do the blood test blood test showed pretty much normal and that's what's interesting like i mean i'd be curious to hear your opinion because

i think that people who go and just simply get a blood test are not really getting the real information about what how yeah what they're mercury because your hair is isn't it the hair the true record of what you've been eating yes so. So the blood test looks at 90 days of consumption. So if you stopped eating fish for 90 days, you'd probably be close to zero. Yeah. Your hair test is about six months or so and does register.

But again, that's dependent on your current exposure. Right. Because if your hair grows out and you haven't eaten it, it's going to be zero. The best way to tell, and one that is not part of traditional medical care but should be, is what we call a challenge test.

So you take a pill. It chelates or binds to the metals and pulls them out and you collect your urine. That is the most effective way to see what your body burden is. There are other more sophisticated tests, for example, for lead, like bone lead levels, but those are only used in research but i think our just blood levels are you know just where we can look easily but it's not where the money is because i mean honestly i had my blood tested several times in the course of the year i never had a high reading on the blood hair though consistently yeah so so with the hair stuff was interesting I was actually at the same time working on a story for Audubon magazine about mercury and birds

Yeah And so I became friendly with a guy named Dan crystal at the University of William and Mary who was doing a very long Interesting study that was part of a settlement with DuPont over a mercury spill in the Shenandoah Valley And he happened to have a little mercury test tester. So I would just clip my hair, you know Because I was on a budget so but Dan was like, you know, because I was on a budget. So, but Dan would say, you know, would always say to me, send me more hair. But I remember at the time, I mean, I think the test you're describing is generally not available to a lot of people.

And even when I was at the Department of Health in Alaska, like they weren't using that test and they were doing hair tests. But what I will say though, is when my hair test, I actually happened to have gotten some hair test results from dan and william and mary while i was in alaska and i was actually sitting in the office of the alaska department of health and i said to the the guy from the from the from from the office it's like well what would happen what would you if somebody sent you a hair sample like mine and you saw these numbers. What would the state of Alaska do? It's like well, we'd send somebody out to your village and tell you to stop eating so much whale and walrus Yes, right. So I was I was high for an Alaska native. Yes Which goes to your points, which is that did you have any adverse effects from it?

I didn't notice any to tell you the truth and and and. But I wanted to just underline one point, is that you were saying, like, you said you looked at wild salmon, and yes, there's mercury in wild salmon. Well, that's the thing about seafood. There's a little bit of mercury pretty much in all of it. All of it, especially rivers and lakes in this country. Especially rivers and lakes. Yeah, so people think, oh, I'm going to have lake or river fish.

I mean, that's incredible. Like, you know, so I grew up going to the Adirondacks, you know, and my grandparents had a house up there. And then you look at the health advisories for Lake Placid or Mirror Lake, which look at these pristine, beautiful bodies. They're actually worse than the ocean. Why? Because as we know from the EPA, the solution to pollution is dilution.

And these water bodies, meanwhile, that are in the direct lee of all these smokestacks in the Midwest that are, thanks very much, President Administration, removing their, you know. It's not acid rain. It's heavy metal rain. It's heavy metal rain coming from burning coal.

Lead and mercury from coal, right? That's really where it comes from is the coal industry. That's right. Globally has driven up the levels of lead and mercury in the environment and in the oceans. Yep.

But this is one thing which again repeats, or this is one more thing that I think we need to study more. As far as I understand, a farmed fish where the feed is inspected and found to be relatively mercury-free is not going to have the mercury issues of a wild fish. I mean, that's the real key issue. So are you worried about eating farmed salmon or farmed fish? Generally not. I mean, I'm not, no, not, I wouldn't say that about all farmed fish.

Like tilapia from China. I don't, I'm not into eating, I generally avoid fish from China. I mean. Why? Because I just don't entirely trust, even, I just don't trust the level of inspection and certification there are major food companies who do source from china and do audit directly and like for example maybe a chinese tilapia filet that's sold by whole foods where i know whole foods for example i know they do farm by farm inspection and auditing that i I might eat. But just like some random low-rate supermarket

that says product of China, not so into it. But they usually don't say where it's from. And they don't usually say where it's from. But when it comes to farmed salmon, on the other hand, from a health perspective, would I eat Norwegian farmed salmon? Yes. And they're organic aquaculture farms, right? There are.

Are they substantially different? It has to do, you know, again, the feed is going to have to come. If there's agricultural product in the feed, it's going to have to come from organic sources, right? So if there's soy, it's going to have to be organic soy. The fish meal and fish oil is going to have to come from, I think, sustainable fisheries. There's something out there called the Marine Stewardship Council that certifies fisheries as being sustainable. And they've most recently gotten into certifying not the fish that we eat, but the forage fish that are fed to other fish. And believe me, there's a huge amount of controversy in that because some people feel like, well, what's sustainable about killing fish to feed to other fish that we're going to eat? Right. But that's a whole. like, well, what's sustainable about killing fish to feed to other fish that we're going to eat?

But that's a whole. And are there better forms of agriculture that are land-based or that can be done differently, that are integrated into regenerative farms? I mean, what is the future of aquaculture? Yeah, so most aquaculture is done in these open net pens in the sea where all the waste can go into coastal waters and cause all sorts of problems. There are increasingly aquaculture operations that are where they take the fish out of the ocean entirely, put them in tanks, raise them in tanks, and treat their wastewater. And potentially that could have a better environmental impact, at least in terms of nitrogen and phosphorus.

On the other hand, take a bunch of fish, put them in a tank. You've got to heat that tank. You've got to run filters. And so there's a huge energy cost. And pretty much every single what's called recirculating aquaculture facility, every single recirculating aquaculture facility that sent me a press release to announce how wonderful a fish farm is, by the time, you know, like you, like me, I like you have a huge email backlog, you know, by the time I get to that PR things like come see our amazing research facility and I'll click on it

and then the website goes dead and they're out of business. Because precisely because they have this whole added cost, right? The reason salmon farms are able to continue to make money is because they're outsourcing the cost of waste management to the environment right there yeah they're right the ecosystem services the ecosystem service so if you are not accounted for in the price so as long as we allow that as long as we allowed that there's no way most of the time that a recirculating aquaculture system that's out of the ocean can effectively compete interestingly I don't know if you followed the whole debate around genetically modified salmon at all. So we can get to that too. But those guys say to me, hey, we're actually incredibly

environmentally sustainable because our fish, our genetically modified fish, grow twice as fast, which means that you have to keep them half as long in those tanks, which means we use less energy. And they say it's the only way we'll ever make out-of-ocean aquaculture financially feasible, is by using genetically modified fish. Yeah. Well, the argument for that is when they escape and get into the natural fisheries. Yes. And that's a concern. And all the people who are working on genetically modified salmon have assured me that they will only ever be grown in tanks. They will never be farmed in the open ocean. But to me, it all takes is one very persuasive Chinese entrepreneur to say, well, you know, maybe we could grow these genetically modified salmon in a net pen in the ocean.

And then they escape. And then we'll see what happens. Well, they're doing that though, aren't they? As far as I know, there is no genetically modified salmon being grown in an open net pen in the ocean and then they escape and then we'll see what they're doing that there aren't they um as far as i know there is no genetically modified salmon being grown in an open net pen i mean the whole situation is so kind of bizarre right now so right now the genetically modified salmon which by the way has just recently been approved by fda for for american consumption so the eggs are produced in prince edward island they're flown to Panama and grown out in Panama with the idea then they'll be harvested, inflated, and then sent to the United States. Talk about carbon footprint.

But the reason is because while the GMO salmon has been approved for consumption in the U.S., it hasn't necessarily been permitted for production in the U.S., it hasn't necessarily been permitted for production in the U.S. So hence the eggs in Canada and the fish in Panama. That might have changed since I last looked at it, but that was the way it was the last time. So what fish should we eat? What fish should we eat? All right. So I'm just to start, let's go to where we're already at, because I always find it's hard to move consumers away from things that they're familiar with. I'm always good with wild sockeye salmon, wild Alaskan sockeye salmon, wild Alaska pink

salmon. I often say to people, people ask, what's the one switch they could make that would be better for them and better for the environment? Number one change, swap in pink or sockeye canned salmon for your canned tuna Yes, because your canned tuna as you probably know Very high in mercury and the pink and the soccer Sam's gonna be much lower The pink and the sockeye is also going to be higher in omega-3 fatty acids Yes, and you know, maybe the first couple of times you try it. You might find it a little strong

There is the whole issue that when you the way they it's really funny if you ever been to an alaskan cannery before i mean literally what they do is they take this fish and they go bum bum bum you know cut slices out of it and fit the slice literally right into the can and then goes into the cooker and if you notice when you open up a can of salmon they'll often be like the remnant of the backbone but that will actually with a fork will dissolve and it seems a little you know americans are so squeamish i mean you live the bones are a great source of calcium exactly and you know you lived in china so you know hi america welcome to some hands-on eating but right um but if we could just get past that we would just have this a

much healthier for us um be just um much more sustainable product i mean is there enough wild salmon to go around that's what worries me like if we all eat as much wild salmon as we do salmon yeah we're gonna run out i mean it's all relative because in this country we export 80 of our wild salmon yeah you talk about that the great fish swap yeah yeah so 80 of our wild salmon goes abroad and meanwhile talk about that, the great fish swap. Yeah, yeah. So 80% of our wild salmon goes abroad. And meanwhile, we're importing nearly all the farm salmon

is coming to us. Why do we do that? To make money? I think, you know, there are weird economies of scale that get going to some degree. Salmon, I think Americans like farm salmon

because it's fattier. And, you know, like when you go to like, you know, you want to have lox on a bagel right that sort of striped fat striped beautiful orange thing that you like on your bagel that's a farm salmon i mean sometimes you can get like a wild king salmon will resemble a wild farm but the king wild king smoked is going to come in at 30 40 a pound so people are mostly

not going to do that they want the cheaper farm salmon that comes in it like, you know, 15 20 dollars a pound for the smoked Friday So does do Americans have enough wild salmon to go around? Yes, if we kept all of our wild salmon in this country and didn't import farms and we could be self-sufficient in salmon The other weird thing that goes on with salmon though is a certain amount of salmon that we catch, it's caught in Alaska, frozen whole, sent to China. Processed and sent back. Defrosted, boned, and then sent back. And it comes back to a double frozen. How does that make sense?

Well, you know, it's interesting because shipping something frozen is actually not that costly. Because once you've got it down to temperature and you've sealed the box, you're just floating it back and forth. And it's actually not that intense, even from a carbon perspective. On the ships with all the super tanker fuel? Well, but you can put a lot of stuff on a super tanker. And it's floating. You're just sort of pushing it along. The bigger concern, I think, is do you really want to eat something that's been twice frozen?

I remember I was talking to Terry Gross about it, and she was like, my mother said never to eat food that was double frozen. And I was like, that's right, Terry. Why is that? Well, I mean, it does introduce you have it does introduce the possibility of passive pathogens being introduced in it I mean granted in the miracle of the imagine of the of the industrial food world They have figured out a way to more or less, you know have pathogen free on the other hand though If you freeze and defrost freeze and defrost What happens when you freeze is you bust cell membranes, right?

Because water as we all learned in grammar school expands when it freezes and the ice crystals form they break the cell membrane and then you know then you refreeze it you freeze it again and then defrost it again and the cell membranes are it's going to get rubber more and more rubbery again qualifiers sorry fish are full of qualifiers freezing technology is actually really improved. And now, they actually can freeze fish so quickly to such low temperatures that for

a once-frozen Alaskan salmon, you can actually get flesh quality that is quite similar, and some would even argue better than a five-day, six-day-old fresh salmon that's been air-freighted across the country. Yeah, Amazing. So besides salmon, what should we eat?

Okay. So beyond salmon, I am a big fan of the anchovy. Yes. My wife hates them. I love them. Yeah. You know, it's like, you know, it's definitely a Mason Dixon line in the kitchen. But so, you know, when you consider that the world's largest fishery, the Peruvian anchoveta,

99% of this huge fishery gets reduced and turned into salmon feed, right? And you consider that all of that is actually perfectly good human food. Yeah, it's the best. Low in mercury, full of omega-3 fats. Full of omega-3s. Yes, low in mercury. Because generally speaking, the lower you are in the food chain, the lower your mercury. I like them. I do this sauce at home. I call it two-can sauce. It doesn't involve a bird, but it's two cans. One can of anchovies, one can of tomato sauce. I don't know about you, but I hate having open cans in the refrigerator.

So what I do is I take the anchovy, and I generally prefer to have anchovies that are packed in olive oil. In a glass. Glass would be great. And right, because you don't want to have, although the BPA thing I think is, I think we're somewhat past that. I don't know. I mean, meaning we've taken it out of the cans or it's not a problem.

More that we've taken it out of the cans. I don't know. I mean, I'm not up to speed on that. You may be more up to speed than me. Anyway, what I like to do is anchovy packed in olive oil, drain the olive oil into your pot. Mince up some garlic. Then take the anchovies out.

Mince up the anchovies. Once the garlic has just fried for a little bit, stir in the anchovies until they dissolve. They melt. And they just melt. And then you take your entire can of tomatoes and you put that in. Now, like Marcella has on and all the Italian cooks will say, oh, two fillets of anchovies. Nah, the whole freaking can. You know, it's $1.50 at Trader Joe's.

And you've got this amazing sauce that my son, who doesn't like fish, will totally scarf down a two-can sauce. Okay, well, I hope my wife doesn't listen to this podcast. But I make this incredible sauce. And it's supposed to have anchovies in it. It's like pasta puttanesca. Yeah. And I'm not going to tell her next time. I'm just going to do that trick

and see if she likes it. Yeah, yeah. Because she actually, I think, has it out for anchovies. I bought some fresh white anchovies the other day and they were sort of, I was so excited to eat them and she unpacked the groceries

and she put it in the cupboard. And then she's like, oh, I'm sorry. No, I'm not. I left them in the cupboard and they went bad, so threw them out i hope you don't mind i'm like yeah i'm mine oh man all right but does she like any fish yeah she likes fish but she's not a big she's interesting lady she's incredibly cultured but she grew up on the ocean on the beach yeah on an island, and hates fish. It can happen. It can happen. So let's talk about fish oil. Yes. Because you wrote a whole book about this. I did.

The Omega Principle. I did. And as a doctor, I think that omega-3 deficiency is a huge contributor to all sorts of problems my patients have. And over the years, I've tested thousands, tens of thousands of people for their levels of essential fatty acids, including omega-3 fats. And I found significant deficiencies among across a wide range of populations, especially vegans. I mean, they're like zero. And that affects mood, brain development, nerve function, regulates inflammation, heart health, brain health, dementia, depression, cancer. I mean, and yet so many of the studies that have come out that have been published recently have seemed to debunk the idea that omega-3 fats are beneficial

for heart disease or cancer or anything else. So the population is left confused, as usual, by nutrition advice because we're all told that fish is healthy. If you eat fish, looking at the studies on fish, you will have better health outcomes. But then there's all this contradictory information that if you eat omega-3s from pills, it doesn't do anything. So what's the deal? Where are we at? Okay, well, first of all, let's just clear the air about fish. Fish is just great because it's a lot of protein per calorie. It's a lot of nutrients per calorie. And if you're

eating fish for your, you know, often for dinner, you're not eating other bad stuff, right? So if you swap in fish for beef, I think generally speaking, you're going to be ahead of the game. That's just sort of my general opinion on this. You may differ from me. I would qualify that saying in a perfect world, yes. Right. But in a world of factory farm meat and pristine fish, 100%. Yep.

In a world of regeneratively raised grass-fed meat versus polluted ocean fish. I'm not so sure. Right. Right. Okay. But let's keep in mind what the average American is doing, right? The average American is having feedlot meat. Yes. And if they have a choice between say like cheapish wild fish that it could pick up in the market versus that feedlot beef, I think they're ahead. So, so there's that. Um, the omega three question I think has a lot to do with what people have called the threshold effect. You know, it's very true that if you go on a vegan diet, that your omega-3 levels are just going to plummet. And I know this personally because I actually have been experimenting with a vegan diet. My body is a laboratory.

So you have no omega-3s, but no mercury now. Right, exactly. Exactly. And my... So my... You know, I went to Omega Quant, which is one of the tests. Yes.

It's just like a finger prick test. And I had below 5% blood, omega-3 blood lipid levels, which, you know, I would say you would qualify as being deficient, right? Yeah. Are you more depressed?

That's a whole other story but when i was but when i was eating fish every day meanwhile for three meals a day my omega-3 blood level blood lipid levels were 11 12 percent yeah you know somebody said to me when they saw that um probably similar to those of a sicilian fisherman syrica 1890 yes that's that's and then probably 1890. Right, exactly. And probably what we should have had maybe in Neolithic times. So in between vegan and fish every day, though, I think that there's a compromise, which is equivalent to about two portions of oily fish per week. And that if we do that, I think we'll probably hit that threshold effect. A couple of cans of wild sardines. A couple of cans of wild sardines. A couple of cans of wild sardines, a couple of cans of wild salmon. I think we'll probably hit

that threshold effect. Now, where it gets sticky with the omega-3 supplements is when they start to do some of these randomized control trials around omega-3 supplements, I think a lot of times they don't necessarily take into account who's eating fish and who's not eating fish. And they throw the supplement on top of everything. So like most recently, there was the VITAL study, which came out of Brigham and Women's Hospital. So, you know, in that case, they actually did keep track of who was a fishery and who wasn't. But across the whole spectrum, they showed pretty much a null effect when it came to coronary heart disease, right? From five years of taking a gram of omega-3 every single day for five years.

So pretty significant null result. I should qualify that by saying that when they took out strokes, they did show something of a degree of effect on heart attacks overall. That was my reading of this study. And other studies that have shown benefits for people who've had a heart attack, preventing second heart attacks, like the JISI study and others. But yeah. Yeah.

But so anyway, when though you start looking, when they started separating out people who had a couple of portions of fish a week from those who didn't, the people who didn't did show significant effect on cardiovascular disease. And most of the ones who didn't eat fish and took the fish oil supplements got better because they crossed the threshold. Right. Because that, that omega-3 and what's really interesting was, did you look at that? That didn't come out in the headlines. Didn't come out. Well, you know, do we have to talk about headlines? I don't know. You're the journalist. Well,

I don't write the, you know, I don't get to write the headlines. All I do is write the stuff and they stick the headline on top. But then I thought was really interesting. And I'm surprised that there wasn't more agitation in the African-American community where they showed a huge effect was in the African-American community. A benefit. A benefit of omega-3 supplementation. And I think there are two reasons for that. One, I think that that population

is probably not eating oily fish. If they're eating fish, they're probably eating, frankly, it's an economically lower income strata, so they're going to be eating things like tilapia. They're going to be eating things like catfish that have lower levels of omega-3, so they're not getting it.

The other thing is, I think that generally speaking, the African African American community doesn't get adequate attention from the medical community. So just the mere fact of having regular contact with the medical community, I think had a calming effect. I think it did something. But nevertheless, I think that those two results, that the non-fish eaters and the African-American community both showed more than a nil result, to me doesn't necessarily mean that the whole thing was a waste of time. It shows that there is this threshold effect. Well, that's why I say if you don't have a headache, an aspirin doesn't do anything, right? Correct.

Correct. It's like, well, if you have plenty of levels, high levels of omega-3 fats in your blood, you're not going to see an incremental benefit. That's right. If you have zero, you're going to see a significant benefit. That's right. And that's why like my own personal experience, you know, when I went and ate fish every single meal for a year. You banked your omega-3s. Well, and then you, for the... No, but prior to that, I was a fisherman and I ate fish twice a week. Just that was part of my thing. So the rise in omega-3 blood levels that I achieved as a result of that diet, in the end, I saw no change in cholesterol. I saw no change in blood pressure. None of the typical things that are often associated with an omega-3 supplementation. It depends on what

else you're eating. Right, right. So I mean, that's the other thing with these studies. It's like, okay, well, if everybody's eating the standard American diet and you throw in a bit of fish oil pill, it ain't gonna do anything. If you're eating processed food and sugar and starch, and yeah, you're not gonna have a reduction in any disease. Which brings me to what I think is the ideal diet.

Okay. I'm gonna roll it out for you. All right, let's go. Which is that, so I'm going to roll it out for you. All right. Let's go. Which is that, so I've been on a vegan diet for the last eight months, and I have seen my LDL cholesterol plummet. I've seen my blood pressure go down. I've seen my weight go down. All these different things.

I did see my omega-3 levels drop significantly to the point of actually, I actually did start an algal oil omega-3 supplement to bring my levels up. I believe that the ideal diet would be mostly vegan with a couple of portions of oily fish per week. And I even have a name for it. Pescatorian? Pescatorian. Pescatorian. Yeah. So Pescatorian because when you think about it, like I'm actually writing an article right now for Eating Well magazine where I went to Crete this summer, I took 15 students from Northeastern to Crete, and we sort of retraced the steps of the Mediterranean diet. Yeah. And I've been spending the last few weeks at the Rockefeller archive in Sleepy Hollow, looking at the results of the original

all-Bao numbers out of Crete. You look at their diet, right? It's mostly legumes, mostly, well, first of all, it's mostly soluble fiber, barley, whole grains in their bread. Then you have a lot of legumes, a lot of nuts, and a little bit of animal protein. So what I would suggest, given the state of our industrial meat sector, if you had that little bit of protein, two portions a week that was really well-sourced fish or shellfish, things like mussels, for example, which are a really good choice, that that would give you everything you needed. You wouldn't have to take a B12 supplement.

I mean, I've been struggling with veganism all year because I feel like— Why did you do it? Well, partially because— Writing another book? No, well, you know what happened is I'm 52 now. So all those midlife crap that you start to see showing up in your blood numbers bothered me. So my cholesterol was high. My blood pressure was borderline. And then I had a calcium score.

Yes, of course. And my calcium score was like 90. So I don't know how you would. It's not terrible, but it's not great. It's not great, right? So they immediately wanted to put me on statins, and they wanted to put me on blood pressure medication. My blood pressure was varying between, say, 130 over 80 and 140 over 90.

So, again, you know, da-da-da. So I was like, I don't want to go on blood pressure medication. I don't want to go on statins. I've heard good things about a vegan diet. I want to see, can I address these things for a vegan diet? So I did, and largely my cholesterol went from total cholesterol of like 260 to about 185. My blood pressure more or less normalized around 130 over 80. You know, the blood pressure goes all over the place.

Calcium score is obviously probably not going to change, although the Ornish studies say that, right, maybe it will relax my veins and arteries and blah, blah, blah. I don't know. But my one struggle that I had with a vegan diet is like, how can a freaking diet be good if I have to take a B12 supplement and I have to take… And vitamin D and iron and omega-3 fats and many other things. Exactly. So that's why I thought a pescatarian diet where I'm basically vegan, but having a couple of portions each week

might be the way to go. That makes sense. I mean, I call it the pegan diet, which is sort of paleo vegan. But I think there's something called the vegan honeymoon. When people go from eating a traditional American diet to eating a whole foods plant-based diet. Because, you know, Coke and chips are vegan, right? Absolutely. So, you know, you could be eating pizza and pasta all day. You know, if it's a fake cheese, you could certainly be vegan. And that is not healthy. Right. vegan and that is not healthy. But when you get over this vegan honeymoon, over time, I see these

massive nutritional deficiencies, B12, iron, zinc, vitamin D, omega-3 fats, and it has serious health consequences. And I think that, you know, I've written a lot about this. I think the question is, you know, is grass-finished regenerative beef harmful to your health? And I think the evidence just really isn't there. I think, you know, there's been, you know, massive large reviews of the data. Yeah. And when you look at it objectively, there may be some, you know, signal of harm for some studies, not for other studies. Yeah.

And it's not a, it's not a robust signal. In other words, you know, with smoking, it was a 20 to one effect. You know, well, this is a 0.2 or 0.3 or 0.4, which is, you know, doesn't mean anything in an observational study, probably not that much. Um, and I think that, uh, you know, it's the quality of the food we're eating that matters. For sure. And I think if you're eating a little bit of grass-fed meat in the context of a plant-rich, mostly plant-based diet, which is what I do, I think that makes sense. How are your numbers?

Yes. I shared mine. What are yours? I mean, my blood pressure is like 100 over 70 or 60. Wow, amazing. And my lipids, you know, my hdl is very good my triglycerides are low um i i think i'm i i'm one of those people it's called lean mass hyper responder so if i eat too much saturated fat my ldl goes up yep but i think it really is is very individual some people i put on a you know butter and coconut oil diet and their lipids drop like a stone.

Really? Interesting. Yes. I think there's a lot of heterogeneity and variation genetically in the population. How people respond to different foods and diets. So there's no like one perfect diet for everybody. Some people need more carbohydrates.

If I eat no carbohydrates, like I'll end up like looking like a came from a concentration camp. So I need, no, so I had a came from a concentration camp so I need no I had a big sweet potato last night I have some starch but I think it's really individual yeah and I think the the the last question I want to ask you is and I think the take-home for me is check check your omega-3 levels yeah see what your ratios are yeah see you know if you have trans fat in your blood if your omega-6s are high.

Look at what's going on with your levels and then do something about it. Eat anchovies, mackerel. I call it the smash fish. Wild salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines, and herring. Yep. I would throw mussels in there. Mussels. I love mussels.

High in omega-3s. Super cheap, by the way. Yes. And also, did you know mussels have a carbon footprint lower than lentils? And what about the whole idea of these being filter feeders and getting high levels of toxins? I mean, you know, there are, it depends, you know, there's the old Yiddish expression, don't where you eat, right? Right. To me, mussels and all the shellfish that are out there are kind of a reminder to us that the ocean should be a food system and not a waste disposal system. And, you know, of course we know nobody wants to

eat something disgusting, right? But it's a constant reminder that we need to keep our waters clean. And I, and there are clean waters out there. Um, muscles are grown on in suspension on ropes. Um, so they're not sitting in the sediment. So they have the potential to be super clean and good. Does anybody measure? They do measure. There have been some heavy metal issues coming out of the Pacific Northwest, actually not cadmium, which is not actually, it just has to do with what's naturally in the sediment

out there. But it just, different water is in different ways. So to end on a happy note. Yes, yes, yes. What about microplastics? I love microplastics. Now, for those people who don't know, tell us what these are

and why we should worry about them. Yeah. So microplastics are everywhere in the ocean at this point. They're coming to us from when you wash your fleece. When the water goes out the other side of the washing machine, all those little microfibers are going into the ocean.

And yes, it's getting implicated and involved in the marine food web. They can get ingested by little fish. It may be having... I was just talking to a marine scientist. Might be having a really damaging effect on larval fish because microplastics are buoyant, right? When you're a larval fish that's sort of swimming in suspension, there's only a very small zone which is safe for you. But if suddenly you have this buoyant object in your body and you float out of that zone, boom, we could lose a lot of larval fish. That was really interesting to me.

From a human health standpoint, oh boy, this is like very controversial stuff. Like I was on Dr. Oz the other day and then like- Dr. Oz, you talked about microplastics. We did a bit. And then the seafood lobby said, Greenberg says horrible, he's totally wrong about microplastics because we've never found any plastics poisoning anyone ever anywhere. Well, the fact of the matter is, I think the jury is out. We don't really know what the human health effect is going to be.

We do know that plastic is sticky from a chemical point of view. And so things like PCBs have the potential to stick to plastic microfibers. And so the plastic in and of itself may not necessarily be a health threat for us. I mean, it's petrochemicals. We eat it. What happens? I mean, it's a question of how large are these objects? Are they just passing through a fish's elementary canal and it's never passing into the flesh?

More concerning to me is that if these microplastics are chemically sticky, right, and they're getting PCBs stuck to them, that on a chemical level to me is, I mean, and again, I'm not, you know, I'm a journalist, not a scientist, but to me is more apt to pass through cell membranes than an actual, you know, chunk of the petrochemical degrading and passing into the fish. I mean, I read that birds, fish-eating, big fish-eating birds can have up to a third of their body weight being microplastics. Yeah, and that's in their gut, and that's hurting, and that's killing them. Clearly, it's a real, real threat.

Unfortunately, I was just talking to this really great ocean plastic specialist in Chile about this, and he was like, why is it that people are just like, well, if it doesn't hurt me, it's okay. Meanwhile, it could be having huge, huge ecosystem effects. The fact of the matter is when it comes to human health, we don't know yet. Do we take the risk? I mean. Would you feed it to your kid?

I would feed the list of fish that we've discussed, I would feed to my child, yes. Because I also think that there's research out there We're getting microplastics through the air. You know, we're getting we're, you know, we're just screwed. We are fairly, fairly screwed. But if I were to have to live in a world where I was just staying away from all fish all the time, I mean, I'm not sure that's the world I would want to live in. So I'm going to try in spite of you're trying to bait me, so to speak, with a pessimistic ending. No, no, no, I'm joking. But I would like to end on an optimistic note, which is that, you know, what have we learned here? Like, ocean is a food system, not a waste disposal system.

Going forward, we can't treat it like a place where we can put our nitrogen, our plastic, our human waste. We have to see, it's the source of life. It's where we can put our nitrogen, our plastic, our human waste. We have to see it's the source of life. It's where we came from. And if we can't enter into a respectful, balanced, healthy relationship with the ocean, then we're cooked. And so we can still eat fish, but eat small fish, eat mercury-free fish, eat fish from sustainable fisheries and aquacultures that are organic or i'm not if you're going to choose organic is not a bad choice if you can find the stuff that's grown in containment out of the ocean that's an interesting and not

a bad choice at the very least look for marine stewardship council sorry the aquaculture stewardship council asc you'll see a label on aquacultured fish more and more. There are a few other certifying agencies out there that are making sure that farm fish are antibiotic free. So look for those. Maybe I'll give those names to you for your website. Yes, yes, for sure.

So look for those and just be careful and know what you're eating before you eat it. That's good advice. Well, I'm going to give you a copy of my book, Food, What the Heck Should I Eat?, where I do actually provide all the resources for exactly those references on how to find the best fish to eat. in educating us about fish and breaking through some of the controversies. I'm not sure whether to be optimistic or not, but I think I'm still going to eat fish. Yeah, yeah, me too. When I get done with the vegan year. And it's been really a pleasure talking to you. I encourage everybody to watch his TED Talk,

The Four Fish We're Overeating and What to Eat Instead. Check out his PBS Frontline special, The Fish on My Plate, and read The Omega Principle, Seafood and the Quest for a Long Life and a Healthier Planet, available on Amazon, wherever you get your books. It's been great having you. And if you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media, subscribe wherever you're podcast, leave us a comment. We would love to hear from you. And next time we'll see you on The Doctor's Pharmacy in about a week. Thank you, Mark. Thanks, Paul. Hey, it's Dr. Hyman. Do you have FLC? Well, it's a problem that so many people suffer from and often have no idea that it's not normal or that you can fix it. So what's FLC? Well, it's when you feel like crap.

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It's just something we fall into when life gets busy or when we indulge a little too much around the holidays or don't listen to our body's messages. It's our body out of balance. Now, everyone gets off track here and there. And the 10-day reset was designed to help you get back on track. Now, it's not a magic bullet. It's not a quick fix. It's a system

that works. If you want to learn more and get your health back on track, just visit GetPharmacy.com. That's Get Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y.com. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner.

If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their Find a Pract a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.