A Fish Story: How To Improve Your Health While Protecting The Oceans with Paul Greenberg

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.

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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 fake news, yeah, let's try. 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 Frontline 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 growing down there. Well, don't alert, you know, 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, grape vine. Sometimes too it depends. I call the wine Chateau Neul, you know, Neul being zero. In French, if you want to call somebody a loser, you say they're a Neul. So the wine- Neul, 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 at the top of the food chain. and then we are also seeing problems now with microplastics, which are invisible plastics that come often from washing our 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 damned 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, in 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... Well.

First of all, I mean, that preamble is very sad.

I'm so depressed.

And it doesn't actually have to be that sad. It's something of a point of perspective that you're bringing 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, you know, 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.

So. How many humans live in China?

That'S the weight of the billion.

If you weighed all the billion plus.

People, it would be that much fish.

That's what we're taking out of the sea. So, you said that before, and I.

Show was like, what do you mean?

He weighed China?

You got China on a scale? Yeah, I have a lot of assistance.

No, no, no. But to back up a second, all right, 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, 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 billion 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 are da-da-da-da-da, 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 rapping 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 you 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, 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 to know that the oceans are still extremely vital. We're certainly kicking it around, and we're certainly kicking fish. 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. Your dad's or your own?

So when I was three years old, my parents divorced and I started going on these divorced dad weekends. And my dad, who is just like a 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. Like, that's the norm.

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, he got, 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 the 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, so- Not throwing up.

No, no, no, no, no. He was inside playing poker. And I was- I gotta tell you a quick story. I had the same divorce dad weekends.

Yeah.

And I was five when my parents split. And we would go somewhere off Long Island on these giant boats. And we'd go at night and there'd be people barfing off the side of the boat all night.

That can happen.

We'd catch a couple of flounder and my dad was like, It's okay, 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, it 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 fresh water, you know, in the woods of Greenwich, Connecticut. And on the weekends, I'd do the big game with my dad. in the salt water. 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 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 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 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. You know, 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 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 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 just didn't know what to do with all the fish.

Yep.

Yep. And then, well, you mentioned 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 had to make fish sandwiches.

Well, I mean, so the-- 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, 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, you know, this huge body of fish, these cod fish 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 of fish sandwich that 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 this community. So he went to Ray Kroc, and he said, Ray, I have this idea for a sandwich. What's the idea? It's a fish sandwich and it'll be on a bun and it'll be called the Filet of Fish. And Ray CrocK was like, Nah, nah, I got another burger. I'm more-- Maui Burger. Than 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 gonna 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 Ray CrocK said, well, let's go.

Head to head and we'll see who wins. The fish one.

The fish one.

Okay, so we're in the situation where we still harvest enormous amount of fish. But the fish populations around the world are declining, right?

Declining or if not overfishing.

Or overfishing.

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. It ain't, we ain't gonna 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 see what I'm saying. And is there anybody who has sense.

Of how much fish is out there? I mean.

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 or 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 that.

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 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, 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 bucks a year. But if your principal went down to like 5,000 $10,000. 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 there's a, you know, if you just say cod fish, right? There are cod fish all over the world. There are Pacific cod, which is a slightly different species. There are cod in the North Atlantic, off of Norway and 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, 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- But you say.

There'S overfishing, so what are you talking about? Well, so I would say 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 stop, 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, 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, these are, 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 fish and rice.

No, it's interesting. And 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, etc., etc., 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 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 in 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 they're hungry for food. Everyone's hungry for food, particularly hungry for protein. And the horrible thing, which I'm sure I know that you've written about, is that there's this idea that historical American levels of animal food consumption 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 feed itself.

And what's also more frightening is that the, that the coastal areas where a lot of the fish are are being decimated through not only pollution, but nitrogen pollution, which is runoff from the fertilizer on the farms in the Midwest that go into the Gulf of Mexico and literally trade 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, 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 or 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, think aquaculture and farm fish, well that solves the problem, but not so fast, right? And what's interesting is most people don't realize is that there's a 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'd 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.

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, 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 like 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 farmed fish? You're buying farmed 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 or agricultural system would do.

And just to be clear, most aquaculture is penned areas in oceans. that are on this 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. 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- Farm fish. 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 the, 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 gone, 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, you know, and to your point about nutrition, has changed the nutritional profile of some 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. It's the balance, right? 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.

That's right. Omega-6 to Omega-3s in some people who don't process food. That's right. Right, and as you were saying, you'd eat fish all the time in part because, right, It's one way of locking in that good balance, right? If you made wild oily fish, 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. 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 farmed 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 farmed salmon was something called the Heights study that came out in 2002. I believe it was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. And that study looked at farmed salmon from around the world and looked at PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, which 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 Heinz 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, in parentheses within many parentheses, the northern hemisphere generally speaking is much polluted than the southern hemisphere. So in the course of, since the Heitz report was published in 2002, to the present time, A, a lot of farmed 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 agricultural, industrial pesticides, which might bring pesticides. You know, what I keep saying, and 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.

Study. We got to do it now. 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. And because, you know, it's the ocean's dynamic. We're dynamic. I would, before I go out and say all, you know, farm fish are laced with antibiotic or with PCBs, I want to see it.

They're also growing in the ocean, so do they have more mercury too?

Well, but so do wild fish.

I mean- Right, I'm just saying, has there been data on the difference in mercury content?

The heights were- Wild or versus- so far as I understand, heights did not look at mercury, and I should say that generally speaking, 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 issue- 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 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, 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. It's hard to say.

I mean, I know with wild salmon, it's certainly less than, let's say, tuna. 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.

But how often are they eating it?

Frequently, but it's not a zero. And, I think that's disturbing to me as well. And, so I think sort of, 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 and 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 screwed. 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 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...

How far are we from that?

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 gonna see it on an ocean level, on an ocean life level before we start to see it on a kind of human scale.

I mean, the core reefs are critical to all our fisheries and to... 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 a incredible display of color and coral and fish. And, 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.

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 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... You were eating lower mercury fish. 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, well, you said-- Nothing. Exactly. That's pretty high. I know it was pretty high. I remember-- How do you know what.

Your blood test was?

The blood test actually, I did do the blood test. Blood test showed pretty much normal. And that's what's interesting. 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 they're mercury, because your hair isn't the hair the true record of what you've been eating.

So the, the, the, 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, you know, six months or so. Yeah. 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. Interesting. 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 with the hair stuff was interesting. I was actually at the same time working on a story for Audubon Magazine about mercury and birds. And so I became friendly with a guy named Dan Cristol 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. But Dan 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, at William & 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 guy from the office, it's like, well, 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 high for even for an Alaska native. 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. 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 gonna have lake or river fish. I mean, that's incredible. So I grew up going to the Adirondacks, you know, and my 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, they're, thanks very.

Much, President Administration, removing their... 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 globally has driven up the levels of lead and mercury in the environment and in the oceans.

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.

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...

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 might eat. But just like some random, like low rate supermarket that says product of China, not so into it.

They usually don't say where it's from.

And they don't usually say where it's from. But when it comes to farm salmon, on the other hand, from a health perspective, Would I eat Norwegian farmed salmon?

Yes. Are there organic aquaculture farms, right? 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 agriculture, 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, you know, sustainable fisheries. There's something called 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? But that's a whole... And are there.

Better forms of aquaculture that are land-based or that can be done differently that are integrated into regenerative farms? I mean what is the future of 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 phosphorus. On the other hand, take a bunch of fish, put them in a tank, you got to heat that tank, you got to run filters. And so there's a huge energy cost in pretty much every single, what's called, you know, recirculating aquaculture, I'll call recirc facilities. 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, I like you have a huge email backlog. By the time I get to that PR thing, it's 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. Precisely because they have this whole added cost. 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, they're right.

The ecosystem services are not accounted for in the price.

The ecosystem services are not accounted for in the price.

So as long as we allow 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've followed the whole debate around genetically modified salmon at all. Yes. So we can get to that too. But, you know, 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, you know, 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. 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 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, inlay, 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 US. So hence the eggs in Canada and the fish in Panna. That might have changed since I last looked at it, but that was the way it was 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, what's the one, you know, 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, is very high in mercury. And the pink and the sockeye salmon is going to be much lower. The pink and the sockeye is also going to be higher in omega-3 fatty acids. 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, have you ever been to an Alaskan cannery before? I mean, literally what they do is they take this fish and they go, bump, bump, bump, 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, you know, Americans are so squeamish. I mean, you lived in 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 if we could just get past that, we would just have this A, much healthier for us, B, just much more sustainable product. I think.

But I mean, is there enough wild.

Salmon to go around? That's what worries me. If we all eat as much wild salmon as we do salmon, 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 we're importing nearly all the farm salmon is coming in.

When do we do that? Can we 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 at like, you know, 15, $20 a pound for the smoked variety. So 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 farmed salmon, 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 know, you can put a lot of stuff on a super tanker, you know, and it's floating. It's not, you know, it's, you're just sort of pushing it along. The bigger concern I think is like, 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 the possibility of pathogens being introduced to it. in the miracle of the industrial food world, they have figured out a way to more or less 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 freeze it again and then defrost it again. and the cell membranes are different. It's going to get more and more rubbery. Again, qualifier, 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 Right? And you consider that all that is actually perfectly good human food. Yeah, it's the best. How can you- Low in mercury. Low in mercury.

Full of omega-3 fats.

Full of omega-3s. Yes, low in mercury. Generally speaking, lower you are in the food chain, the lower your mercury. I like them. I do this sauce at home I call 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.

Yeah, yeah.

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 great 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, you- 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 Hazan and all the Italian cooks will say, oh, two filets of anchovies. Nah!

The whole freaking can!

You! know, it's a dollar fifty 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-cans 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 gonna tell her next time. I'm just gonna 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 was like, oh, I'm sorry.

I'm not.

I love them in the cupboard and they went bad, so I threw them out. I hope you don't mind. I'm like, yeah, I mind.

Oh, man. But does she like any fish? Yeah, she likes fish, but she's not.

A big, she's an interesting lady. She's incredibly cultured, but she grew up on the ocean, on the beach, 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. Yes, yes, yes, yes. 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, that 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 say, I would qualify that saying in a perfect world, yes. Right, but in a world of factory farm meat, and pristine fish 100% 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. The average American is having feedlot meat. And if they have a choice between say like cheapish wild fish that they could pick up in the market versus feedlot beef, I think they're ahead. So there's that. The Omega-3 question, I think, has a lot to do with what people have called the threshold effect. You know, if you, 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, but for the last...

So, you have no Omega-3s, but no mercury now.

Right, exactly. Exactly. And so, you know, I went to OmegaQuant, which is one of the tests. Yeah. And you can just like a fingerprint trick 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 eating fish every day, meanwhile, for three meals a day, my omega-3 blood lipid levels were 11-12%.

Yeah.

You know, somebody said to me when they saw that probably similar to those of a Sicilian fisherman, sir, 1890. Yeah, exactly. and then probably what we should have had maybe in the Paleolithic 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 of fat.

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 of fat. 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 fish eater, 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.

Yeah, there have been other studies that have shown benefits for people who've had a heart attack, preventing second heart attacks like the JUPITER 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 official supplements got better.

Right, because they crossed the threshold. Right. Because 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, 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 it 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 population. A benefit. 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. You know, if they're eating fish, they're probably eating like, you know, frankly, it's the economically lower, you know, 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. Lower levels of Omega-3. So they're not getting The other thing is, I think that like generally speaking, the 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 null 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 and aspirin doesn't do anything, right?

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, when I went and ate fish every single meal for a year.

You banked your omega-3s.

Well, 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, and none of the typical things that are often associated with omega-3 supplementation.

It depends on what else you're eating.

Right, right.

So 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. 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.

Pescatarian?

Pescatarian.

Pescatarian. Yeah.

So, pescatarian, 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. And I've been spending the last few weeks at the Rockefeller Archive in Sleepy Hollow looking at the results of the original all-ou 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 really good choices. that that would give you everything you needed. You know, you wouldn't have to take a B12 supplement. Like, there's, 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, no, you know what happened is, I just, you know, I turned, I'm 52 now, so like all those mid-life crap that you start to see showing up in your blood numbers bothered me, right? So my, my cholesterol was high, my blood pressure was borderline, and then I had a calcium score.

Yes, of course.

So, 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 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 through 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. Deep 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 how can.

A freaking diet be good if I have to take a B12 supplement and.

I have to take- Dr. And vitamin D and iron and omega-3 fats and many other things. Exactly. So that's why I thought a pescetarian diet where basically vegan, but having a couple of portions each week might be the best.

That makes sense. I mean, I call it the Pegan diet, which is sort of paleo vegan. But, you know, I think the, you know, 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. 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 there's been massive large reviews of the data. And when you look at it objectively, there may be some signal of harm for some studies, not for other studies. And it's not a robust signal. In other words, with smoking, it was a 20 to 1 effect. Well, this is a point 2 or 0.3 or 0.4, which is, you know, doesn't mean anything in an observational study. Probably not that much. And I think that, 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, that I think that makes sense.

That were your numbers?

Yes.

I shared mine. What are you?

I mean, my blood pressure is like 100 over 70 or 60.

Amazing.

And my lipids, my HDL is very good, my triglycerides are low. I think I'm one of those people that's called lean mass hyperresponder. So if I eat too much saturated fat, my LDL goes up. But I think it really is very individual. Some people I put on a 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 I came from a concentration camp. So, I need, so I had a big sweet potato last night. I have some starch, but I think it's really individual. And I think the last question I want to ask you is, and I think the take home for me is check. Check your Omega-3 levels. See what your ratios are. See 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.

I would throw mussels in there. Mussels, I love mussels. High in Omega-3 is super cheap, by the way. 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- well, mussels are high levels of toxins.

I mean, you know, mussel, there are, it depends, you know, you know, there's the old Yiddish expression, don't s**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, and of course nobody wants to eat something disgusting, right? But it's a constant reminder that we need to keep our waters clean. And there are clean waters out there. Mussels are grown in suspension on ropes, so they're not sitting in the sediment. So they have the potential to be super clean and good.

Has anybody measured?

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 setting 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, these are, 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. I was on Dr. Oz the other day and then Dr. Oz you talked about microplastics. We did a bit and then the seafood, the like seafood lobby like said, you know, Greenberg says, you know, horrible, you know, 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? It must get...

I mean, it's a question of like how large are these products, you know, 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, again, I'm not a journalist, I'm a scientist, but to me is more apt to pass through cell membranes than an actual 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. But 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. 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, I'm joking. But I would like to end on an optimistic note. this 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. It's the source of life. It's where we came from. And if we can't, you know, enter into a respectful, balanced, healthy relationship with the ocean, then we're.

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...

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 antibiotics, that farm fish are antibiotic free. So look for those. Maybe I'll give those names to you for your website. 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.

So, great.

Thank you, Paul, for your work 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 gonna 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 your 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.

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