The Dr. Hyman Show - What Types Of Fish Are Best For Human And Planetary Health

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Athletic Greens, Beekeeper’s, and Joovv. Fish are an incredibly healthy source of protein and fats, especially omega-3 fatty acids. However, there are several important things to be considered in order to reap the health benefits of fish and act as good environmental stewards at the same time. In today’s episode, I talk with Paul Greenberg, Miriam Horn, and James Arthur Smith about the current state of our seafood population and the differences between wild-caught seafood, farmed fish, and regenerative farmed fish. 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 cowriter of the 2017 PBS Frontline documentary The Fish on My Plate, which, along with his TED talk, has reached millions of viewers. Miriam Horn works at the Environmental Defense Fund and is the New York Times bestselling author of Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman: Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland. In 2020, James Arthur Smith founded SEATOPIA, a gourmet seafood subscription box now delivering certified mercury-safe seafood, carbon neutrally, direct to homes nationwide. Through SEATOPIA, he is endeavoring to scale a truly regenerative seafood supply chain and empower health-conscious consumers to directly support innovative aquaculture projects producing some of the healthiest protein on the planet. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Athletic Greens, Beekeeper’s, and Joovv.  Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 35 labs. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com. Right now, Athletic Greens is offering 10 FREE travel packs with your first purchase by visiting athleticgreens.com/hyman. Right now, Beekeeper’s Naturals is offering my listeners early access to their Memorial Day sale. Between now and May 30, go to beekeepersnaturals.com/HYMAN and enter code “HYMAN” to get 25% off your entire order. For a limited time, you’ll get an exclusive discount on Joovv’s Generation 3.0 devices when you purchase one for the first time. Just go to Joovv.com/farmacy and use the code FARMACY. Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: Paul Greenberg Miriam Horn James Arthur Smith

Coming up on this 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. We're certainly kicking it around and we're certainly kicking fish populations around, but there's still a lot of abundance out there. Hi everyone, it's Dr. Mark. I was a functional medicine doctor looking at hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and so many other internal variables, it helps me find the most effective path to health and healing for my patients. But such extensive testing can be very complicated and time-consuming

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storage times, and monoculture farming methods, depletion of our soils, food's not as nutritionally dense as it once was, even good stuff. And that's why I recommend supplementing a whole foods diet with a high-quality multivitamin as a basis for any health-oriented program. And the product I personally use comes from Methylated Greens. Their AG1 supplement has 75 different nutrients that work together to fill out the gaps in our diet. I take AG1 every day, and I've noticed that I consistently feel better

and have more energy throughout the day. Plus, it works with any diet, keto, paleo, vegan, dairy-free, even gluten-free. AG1 is a simple, easy way to optimize your health. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving away 10 free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com forward slash hymen. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash hymen. And now, let's get back to this week's. Again, that's athletic greens.com forward slash hyman. And now let's get back to this week's episode of the doctor's pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Feehan, one of the producers of the doctor's pharmacy podcast. Seafood is an incredibly healthy source of protein and omega fatty acids, but finding safe fish that

aren't full of toxins or in danger of being overfished can be a challenge. The key is to source sustainable seafood, whether it be wild, caught, or regeneratively raised. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the doctor's pharmacy on what we need to know about overfishing, how to choose the healthiest seafood, and why we should have hoped for our oceans. Dr. Hyman speaks with Paul Greenberg about his decades of experience looking at ocean production, overfishing, and toxins in seafood, with Miriam Horn on the interconnectivity between fishing and farming, and with James Arthur Smith on how regenerative farmed fish can be a healthy and safe option. Let's dive in. 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 of the sea. You said that before the show. I was like, what do you mean?

He weighed China? He got China on his head? Yeah, I have a lot of assistance. No. 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... I mean, those numbers are from... I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Go ahead. But like, 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 people who come to this conversation just on hearsay and just, I've heard all the oceans,

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. So 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, no.

So I mean, I just I to me, that's just an overarching thing. I don't 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, you know, how did I get into all this? So I came, really what brought me to fish was divorce. Okay, so your dad's or your own? No, my dad's. So when I was three years old, my parents divorced, and I started going on these

divorced dad weekends. And my dad, who was just like the Jewish psychiatrist from the Upper West Side, who 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 fishing like that 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 uh he got hard my grandfather got horribly seasick and they never went fishing again so he took me fishing and i don't you know you have probably had this experience with your kids that when your kids really take to something the parents could 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 out fish 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, of Brooklyn in the front playing poker, whereas I went out to the rail to fish. Anyway, so not throwing up. No, no, no, no, no. He was inside playing poker. And I was like, quick story. My I had the same divorce 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 go at night. Yep. And there'd be like people barfing off the side of the boat all night that can happen catch a couple of flounder and my dad was like it's okay it's good chump for the fish well so you know there are certainly people who kind of do that every once in a while but like for me every single divorce dad weekend was like we're going fishing and and that's and we really did it and then you And then as I grew up, when I was with my mom, we grew up in a series, she moved us around a series of 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 in the woods of Greenwich, Connecticut. And on 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, 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. 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, you know, the great tradition of Jewish athletes. I was not a particularly 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, all these different creatures that came into Long Island Sound every single year, gone or 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 in 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 i and i we went to the fish dock and there's a couple of little fishing boats bringing a few tiny small little cod and they used to bring in like these massive cod and yeah just didn't know what to do with all the fish yep yep uh and then well you mentioned your your uh ted talk that it was uh mcdonald's fish fish sandwich because so it's the Catholics' fault because they wouldn't eat burgers on Friday, so the fish, they had to make fish sandwich. No offense to Catholics. 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, 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. Like, what's the idea? He'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, 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. The Maui burger. The Hula burger. The Hula burger. The Hula burger. 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 going to be the solution to that no meat on Friday solution.

And Ray Kroc said, well, let's go head to head 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 on the wall are declining right declining or if not or overfishing I mean so The world catch has quadrupled since World War two So we went from about 20 million metric tons to 80 million metric tons over the course about 70 years 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 dogleg. 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. 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 principle.

And that's what happened, like, for example, with codfish off of the Grand Banks. We have a situation with the Grand Banks where the overall biomass of codfish probably went down by 90% to 95%. That's incredible. So imagine if you had $100,000 in your bank account and say you were getting whatever 3% interest, you have $3,000 a year. But if your principal went down to like five thousand dollars 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 name species name because fish are kind of like if there's a you know 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 mmm but codfish off of Alaska for example Pacific cod are in relatively good shape off the Barents Sea where the Norway fishes and

where Russia fishes those populations because they've actually radically reformed their fisheries management actually in pretty good shape And if you notice now 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. Yeah, because those fisheries actually being managed pretty well They are no longer dipping into their principle. They have gotten to the point where they're harvesting a hell, 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 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 enough to be a decent commercial harvest for us.

But 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.

In America, they talk about abundance being the land of milk and honey. In China, the same expression is the land of fish and rice. Interesting. Hey, everyone. It's Dr. Mark here. Are you tired of constantly dealing with seasonal sinus symptoms, colds, sinus infections? Would you like a solution that's all natural and supports your immune system too? Well, if that's you, I want to tell you that Beekeepers Naturals has you covered. Their propolis nasal and throat

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Again, that's juovb.com forward slash pharmacy, that's J-O-O-V-B.com forward slash pharmacy, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y to get your discount. Now, there may be some exclusions, but I'd encourage you to check it out. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. 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 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, um, you know, is, do you think we need better international regulation of our fisheries to, um, 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. 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, less, 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 you know, especially when you have developing countries, right? Well, there's hungry for food everyone's hungry for it particularly hungry 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.

Bad idea. 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. They go into the Gulf of Mexico and literally create a dead zone the size of New Jersey. And they kill 212,000 metric tons of fish a year. And there are 400 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, is you know, 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 or like Erie like Erie those out when the algae dies This 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, 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 that 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 right 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. Yeah, they're feeding them soy and corn. Soy and corn. And we're basically turning salmon more or less into a farm animal just like, you know, anything you would farm. 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? What's the story with farm fish? You're buying farm salmon.

Is it healthy or not? What's the level of omega-3s? What's the level of toxins? What are the downstream consequences of these aquacultures on the environment? 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 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, farm 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 farmed salmon. It's a work in progress, I would say, at this point. As I say, the feed has changed dramatically. It 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, you know, 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 you know 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 the balance right we We need both, but it's really the balance. We used to have 20 to 1, I mean, 4 or 5 to 1 omega-3 to omega-6. Now we have 20 to 1 up to 21 omega-6 to omega-3s in some people who eat a lot of processed food. That's right. Right. And as you were saying, you'd eat fish all the time in part because it's one way of locking in that good balance, right? If you made wild oily fish, you know, your primary protein, you'd probably have a pretty good balance. 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 polychlorinated by phenols and um which as you know are a byproduct of a lot of different industrial manufacturing processes anyway after they compared farm salmon samples around the world, from Norway to Chile and all everywhere in between, they found, generally speaking, that farm 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 more polluted than the southern hemisphere. So in the course of, since the Heights Report was published in 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, 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 soy, the corn, all the other industrial, agricultural, industrial products. Probably pesticides and phytocells. Which might bring pesticides.

You know, what I keep saying, and, you know, I've said this to the Ministry of Fisheries in Norway and so forth. It's like, somebody's got to redo the heights 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 do it now. We need him 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 was the most you know, like Media intense study 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. Because, you know, the ocean's dynamic. We're dynamic. Before I go out and say all, you know, farm fish are laced with PCBs, I want to see it. They're also growing 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 or 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— I'm sorry, when we have concerns about mercury, we're not really talking about salmon. So the mercury issues— About wild fish or any fish? Wild or farmed 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 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 farms yeah i mean i 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 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. 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 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

to absorb the excess carbon. And when the ocean gets too carbon saturated, that's when it starts to become more acidic. But do we really have the ability to keep fishing and feeding the planet the amount of fish we're feeding them? Because it seems like we are in trouble in the oceans and that there really isn't an unlimited supply and that they're being depleted and they're also being poisoned. Yes. Well, I mean, everything we've been talking about is, of course, connected.

So what Justin is doing on his farm, and that's another reason that I really wanted to use a river as my spine, because it makes so obvious this interconnectivity. What Justin does on his farm affects the fish that Wayne catches. If Justin overuses nitrogen, and it runs off into his water supply, and it expands the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, Wayne suffers. Which is already the size of New Jersey. Right, right, where there's just no oxygen to sustain life. And so... Just to break that down for people, the reason that the nitrogen is bad

is it fertilizes the algae in the rivers, which then overgrows and suffocates everything else. There's no oxygen for any other living species. That's a very elegant way of putting it. So yes, so it is a critical. So you need to be solving all of these problems all the way down the chain. But fisheries can really rebound. We're seeing it.

Belize has now adopted this same approach to fisheries management. It's a little bit different in a developing country because you don't do it individually. You do it by the village. You give the village the secure right. But Belize is completely reversing, turning its fisheries around and making its people more secure and its food supplies more secure. By doing what? There's not unlimited anything. So, and we, I mean, you know, we keep growing as though as a human population, as though there is.

We work very closely with UC Santa Barbara. And there is a guy there who says, OK, wild fish, we can bring wild fish back tremendously. And, you know, wild fishing is fantastic because it's like grazing animals. You can leave the ecosystem intact. You can hunt out of that ecosystem without altering that ecosystem. But there are people who are saying there also needs to be good aquaculture. Yeah. the ecosystem intact. You can hunt out of that ecosystem without altering that ecosystem. But there are people who are saying there also needs to be good aquaculture. Yeah. Fish farming. Yes. And it can get a lot better than it is. And it can actually contribute hugely to the food supply if done well. So he showed us this analysis. I mean,

one of the most promising parts of aquaculture is shellfish, which I know you champion as a great food supply, but is also great because it's a filter feeder. So it has all these co-benefits. If you're growing mussels and oysters, they clean the water. They also build physical protection for coastlines. So all these coastlines that are being menaced by rising seas and stronger hurricanes if you start growing oysters and mussels you actually can build natural infrastructure natural protection for those coasts he showed us this analysis that you could feed you can provide enough protein for the entire world on the shelf around New Zealand that's all the space it would take there's no greenhouse gas emissions.

There's no fresh water use. There's no displaced ecosystem. So you don't have to feed them. And you don't have to feed them. So it's, you know, what about if they're filtering everything or people are probably wondering, is that, why would you want to eat something as a garbage can? Well, I mean, you know, you do again, then you have to solve the upstream problem, so you're not putting garbage into the water that they're eating. But I think that, you know, at that, if you can get it to that scale, the amount of garbage any single one would be getting, I think that, you know, the solution to pollution is dilution, that old saying that, you know, if you do this at a large enough scale,

then you actually, and if you get the wetlands, if you do this at a large enough scale, then you actually. And if you get the wetlands, the coastal mangroves and wetlands working again, then you do most of the filtering in the wetlands before it ever gets to your shellfish. So in a sense, biology, not technology, is a solution to our problem. That is absolutely the essential principle. If you can do it with biology first, it's always better. Because nature is much smarter than humans. And, you know, we went through this, I mean, I love science, but we went through this period where we thought we could,

I mean, in farming, we thought, okay, let's just get nature out of the way. Let's create a clean slate. And then let's figure out the four nutrients that a plant needs. And let's farm like a factory. Right. Let's farm it like a factory. And we completely missed that there are literally trillions of microbes in a teaspoon of soil, most of which we don't know what they are, let alone understand what they do,

that are doing things for us that we can never do for ourselves. And that you got to,'ve got to lean on them. There's a friend of mine who wrote a book called Pharmacology about how the microbiome of the soil and our microbiome are all interdependent. Oh, that's so interesting. Let's talk about, one, the issues of what bycatch is, what industrial fishing is doing to the planet and to our fish stocks and just kind of educate people briefly about that and then I want to get into this whole idea of like the bad way of doing

aquaculture and the right way yeah yeah yeah yeah well if it if it bleeds it leads right so like like that documentary Seaspiracy got so much attention those are really great storytellers really great filmmakers they told a really great filmmakers. They told a story that needed to be told. There's a lot of truth to what they're saying. I think what they missed was identifying any of the solutions, right? So let's talk first about the bleeding part. The bleeding part, technology developed in war, like radar, is now being, you know, implemented to identify where fish are underwater, you know, at massive scale. You know, the largest fishing fleets in the world go out with multiple vessels and helicopters to identify where the schools are. They have small speedboats that encircle the the school wrap their net around and capture the entire thing what is in that is not just the target species because when you're

targeting an entire school swimming alongside that school of tuna is going to be a myriad of other species that are cohabitating with them and you can't discriminate between those and by the time all of those fish are suffocated and brought on board through a purse seining net, the compression on those fish is just going to kill everything. So bycatch is the turtles, the dolphins, the seals, the non-target species of fish that were either too small or too big, um, that are going to just be offcast. And so bycatch is a huge issue. So that's one form of farming or, excuse me, fishing per se. It's generally considered highly destructive.

Some people will try to argue that there's ways that you can target them, but it, you know, on an industrial scale, it's very difficult to target and be discriminatory because, you know, there's times when we, you know, there's efforts, there's a saying in fishing, if the fish that are slow to grow, let them go because the largest ones, the ones that grew really slowly and got there, if we just target those, we can wipe out the ones that are breeding and spawning at the highest rates. Oftentimes it's those largest ones. You take them out and you can really disrupt an entire population. So long lining is another form of fishing. So a line caught fish could be, you know,

what you're familiar with when you romanticize the story of fishing with one line and one hook. But in industrial scale fishing, long lining means a line that could be a mile or multiple miles long with literally thousands of hooks. And each one of those hooks is baited and set in the water for 24 plus hours. Anything that comes along, it takes that bait, is stuck on that hook, and suffocates to death. Because by the time they come back and pull in that multiple mile long net, every hook that was baited has something on it. And invariably, it's difficult to identify what species that you're trying to target.

They have things called circle hooks where they endeavor to make it easier for some species to get off. But again, it's, it's really difficult to target certain species. You know, bottom trawling is another type of fishing, you know, where, you know, a basically a rake goes along the bottom of the ocean, just catches everything that, you know, scrapes it up and disrupts the entire ecosystem. You know, these vital parts of the seafloor are being completely disrupted and upended. It's akin to slashing and burning in the rainforest.

It's super disruptive. And, you know, there's efforts to say, like, what is the maximum sustainable yield? And they stopped doing bottom fishing in certain areas. And then it comes back a couple of years later just to deplete it as soon as possible. Because the reality is with industrial scale fishing, there's not enough fish in the ocean. And you have all of these boats and this established industry that, frankly, is subsidized. And they're going to go out there and get as much as they can because they haven't been hitting their quotas in the past and they

just they're depleting those those quotas time and time again every year we're seeing shorter and shorter runs on on you know the copper river salmon and all these different species they're simply not enough to feed growing demand. And industrial scale fishing is terrible. And this is just in local waters. When I sailed to the Galapagos, we're sailing along in a small sailboat and you come across a huge industrial scale fishing vessel with no AIS. So AIS is like a broadcasting system. Well, essentially there's a requirement by certain vessels to broadcast through satellite

where they are, the name of the vessel, the direction they're going. But when they're doing things illegally, they just turn that off. Yeah, they literally, they're pirating. They're in areas that are protected. They're not supposed to be fishing but there they are incredible okay so so regular industrial fishing is a problem and aside from all the pollution the oceans it's overfishing fish stocks but you know one of the problems is is is aquaculture

because oh well let's you know farm fish that's better but the truth is that a lot of the problems is aquaculture because, oh, well, let's farm fish. That's better. But the truth is that a lot of the aquaculture fish are fed fish from the ocean, fish that we wouldn't eat, right? But they catch those fish, they grind them up into pellets, and then they feed them to the fish. And it takes about 10 pounds of this bycatch and these other fish to create one pound of fish that we want to eat sometimes yeah yeah it depends on the species the feed conversion ratio but yeah absolutely it's crazy yeah yeah it is a known issue with the industry and there's been a lot of support for a transition and a lot of progress has been made in that regard for example uh you know there was an fao mandate i think it was like five years ago to reduce dependency on wild stock fish in aquaculture and for the most part that has happened very rapidly almost all of the largest aquaculture projects have transitioned to reducing their fish oil and

fish meal use and they've done that in a way that doesn't necessarily benefit humans no health and nutrition you know they've said okay corn and grains exactly the oils from canola and soy are a lot you know are similar you know they're achieving some similar growth rates and whatnot but um they they they achieved the objective number one which was reduced dependency on the bait fish. And absolutely that happened. And well, you are what you eat, but you're also whatever you're eating, right? So if these fish are eating crab, it's crap for you, right? Yeah. That's so important to acknowledge. Yeah. And, but I do have to at least acknowledge that, you know, these organizations set a goal to reduce impact on the oceans and you know it really was it's the

responsible responsibility of you and i now to say hey we want better nutrition right because you know aquaculture demand on wild-caught seafood aquaculture is necessary and reducing impact on the oceans was necessary do we as consumers feel it's necessary to reduce our intake of omega-6s and get better quality? We have to voice that. Otherwise, the industry is just going to keep doing what they do because there's tons of subsidies for corn and soy. So just like there's conventional feedlot beef and regular agriculture, there's also feedlot fish, industrially raised fish, which is in aquacultures. But there's also regenerative, which we'll talk about in a minute. But before we get to that, I kind of want to go into the

dangers and the problems with feedlot fish and why we should be so concerned about it. What is the conditions they're growing in? What are the challenges they face? What does it do to the environment? What does it do to our health? What are the contaminants in there? So take us through that story of the dangers of feedlot fish for us and the planet. Oh, well, you don't want to eat stress, toxins, and bad karma. So, I mean, feedlot fish, you know, factory raised fish are similar to factory raised

animals and factory raised, you know, terrestrial farms. You know, they're putting a lot of living creatures into a confined space and feeding them low quality diets that result in inflammation in their systems and reduced immune systems and higher likelihood of disease outbreak spreading through an entire population. And that is not cool to the fish. You have all of these living creatures living, you know, really uncomfortable lives, you know, high mortality rates. And, uh, also in high concentration, when you have an open ocean, uh, you have a, a, an aquaculture site in shallow water, as you indicated there in, in the Adiatic Sea, I'm assuming, um, those, those fish, you know, they're effluent. You have just like a cattle farm with all of these cattle confined in one small space, their poop is, it becomes toxic. And in, in, uh, a cattle farm with all of these cattle confined in one small space, their poop becomes toxic. And in a fish farm, the poop falling directly underneath in a shallow environment

without enough current is this high concentration of nitrogen that can completely kill the seafloor. And there's so many organisms that are integral to the biodiversity of these ecosystems that are being destroyed because of poorly cited highly concentrated living creatures you know also what's going into the feed you know are you feeding them you know it's one thing to feed them the fish meal the fish oil that's relatively natural for the environment even though it's an overabundance of concentration. But if you're feeding them antibiotics and hormones, that stuff then is in the effluent as well and going right back into the environment. So, yeah, fish farms that are poorly sited using high concentrations, high density, intensive farming practices are bad for the environment and they're

feeding the fish really low quality diets and results in a quality of fish that, um, in, in some cases is probably on par with what consumers are looking for in at Ralph's or I don't, you know, you know, when they're buying their you know their factory farm chicken you know but in in some cases it might even be healthier you know it might have a better profile it'd be more digestible but is it really health food is it a superfood is it the potential of what seafood should be it's definitely not the you know in line with the kind of Mediterranean diets that result in blue zones. Yeah, incredible. So you're talking about these sort of intensive, almost like feedlot fish farms,

which the animals are fed weird food. Their poop is polluting the environment. They're maybe exposed to more drugs. This is part of dealing with growing these foods, antibiotics, hormones, but they're also exposed to PCBs and toxins and heavy metals and other things that are in the ocean. So it doesn't mean because it's farm doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to have these things absent from the fish. Is that right? Yeah. PCBs are coming from the wild caught fish that are being turned into a fish meal. So the strange karma of our human society is that we put all these PCBs into the environment,

all of these fire retardants and whatnot, these chemicals that last forever are going into the food system. It's now, these chemicals are being consumed by the zooplankton and the plankton, the phytoplankton and the anchovies. And then when a fishing vessel goes out and catches all of those and turns it into a fish meal and feeds it to a fish, they're getting a concentration of that. There's ways to remove it. Even worse.

Innovative farms are doing it now. But yeah, the PCBbs are a thing um it's it's in wild caught fish too but it can be concentrated in in in a fish feed if you're not filtering it there are technologies centrifuges to to pull you mean to get out but heavy metals and to get out of the pesticides and the doxin and the microplastics yeah absolutely um you know reflecting on this conversation i remember i traveled to spain years ago and I encountered this fish farm called Vela La Palma. And what you're talking about in terms of most modern aquaculture is intensive fish farming or feedlot fish. Yeah.

And Vela La Palma is an extensive fish farm. Exactly. And they essentially took 8,000 acres that was an estuary And they had it drained to become a cattle farm. That didn't work. So they kind of got it back. And they hired an ecologist to restore the ecosystem. And they didn't really even have a hatchery. They just allowed the sort of natural processes

to start to bring back the natural fish and the shrimp. And it was amazing because of this natural ecosystem they developed. They produced thousands of tons of fish in a much larger area, obviously, but the fish filtered, the estuary filtered out all the toxins. There was high levels of omega-3s. There was incredible richness in the sea bream and the sea bass that they had

in terms of the quality, the taste of the fish. Really amazing. Dan Barber did a TED talk on it, the shrimp. And it was interesting. They said they measure the quality of the ecosystem and the fish farm based on the health of the predators. And these flamingos would fly for like 150 miles just to go eat the shrimp. Yes. And they eat about half the shrimp and about 20% of the fish.

But they still have the harvest enough to make it worthwhile. So they created this beautiful ecosystem. And essentially, that's what regenerative agriculture is. It's restoring the natural ecosystem on land. But you're saying you can do that in the water too so how do we how do we move towards the the sort of natural uh sort of logical kind of conclusion here which is how do we create regenerative agriculture that doesn't pollute the oceans that creates healthy fish that doesn't create fish with toxins that is is helpful to the environment, that's not creating more destruction. How can you take us through, what does that look like? Where is it being done? What have you learned on your journeys?

I'm so glad that you brought up Betelapalma because it's such a wonderful example. And I hope that there's more, you know, I feel like there's a film called The Biggest Little Farm that was shot here in LA about this small farm. I feel like we need a story like that about Betelapalma and other players that are really endeavoring to be good partners with the ocean. And Betelapalma not only is producing fish that are for human consumption and those flamingos are coming. And they didn't just regenerate that estuary. Estuaries are key habitats and breeding grounds for a lot of fish that go out back out to the ocean. So there's a lot of, you know, species like, you know, halibut and various other species, they come up into these estuaries, that's where they breed, that's where they spawn, and then those species go back out

into the ocean. So just creating that habitat and having the right symbiotic partnership between those plants, between the algae, between the bacteria that are in those estuaries, they're able to bioremediate to rebuild that habitat and create healthy biodiverse ecosystem for other species that are going back out into the ocean. So it is a great example. And absolutely the same theories are being applied in open ocean aquaculture as well. The symbiotic partnerships, the players that are involved in that permaculture operation in the ocean are a little bit different. You don't necessarily have the estuary plants in the ocean, but there's other plants and organisms that will filter the dissolved particles and the nitrogens and the particulate.

So in the ocean, you're going to be partnering kelp and shellfish and sea cucumbers with fish and those sort of partnerships create a balance of nutrients filter feeding photosynthesis um that that can create a healthy balanced ecosystem so that's kind of uh that's amazing in in the scientific it's going to be a carbon sink in a way it can be a carbon sink as well 100 it filters and cleans the ocean it creates a carbon sink as well. 100%. It filters and cleans the ocean. It creates a carbon sink. It creates healthy fish that are more nutrient dense. It's like a win-win-win. The ocean is the largest carbon sink

on the planet. And when we invest and help foster mechanisms that can scale ocean-based carbon sinks, it's some of the most powerful mechanisms for carbon sequestration on the planet for sure. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

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