How Do I Eat Regeneratively Raised Farmed Fish? With James Arthur Smith

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

The nuance is where is that seafood coming from? Simply because it's wild caught doesn't necessarily mean that it was caught A in a sustainable manner and B in a clean environment.

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Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's Pharmacy. I have a place for conversations that matter. And if you've ever been concerned or confused about the fish you're eating, you're not alone. I am, too. And we are today going to get deep into what is problem with fish today in the world, what fish we should be eating, everything from Mercury to PCBs to microplastics to farm rays to wild fish. and all the things in between. And we have one of the world's experts in this topic, James Arthur, who began his journey with regenerative aquaculture. That's a new one. Regenerative aquaculture. As a teenager, volunteering at the Nature Interpretive Center in Southern California, he got firsthand experience with steelhead trout breeding and hatchery. I actually was a steelhead hatchery in Idaho, where I lived on the Clearwater River in Orofino. And it was great to see what was going on there. It's pretty interesting. For the past 10 years, he's lived aboard and sailed around the Pacific. That sounds like a great life. From San Francisco to Ecuador to Galapagos. And through that time, he's been on a mission visiting ocean aquaculture farms, vetting claims, because a lot of people say this is healthy, but it's not. And I have a great story about that. Lab testing seafood to actually measure what's really going on. And connecting the best in class aquaculture projects with farm-to-table restaurants in California. In 2020, he founded a company called Sea Topia, S-E-A-T-O-P-I-A, like Utopia, but from the sea, I think, I guess. A gourmet seafood subscription box now delivering certified mercury-free safety, carbon neutral food, seafood direct to your home nationwide through Seafood to Go. He is endeavoring to scale a truly regenerative aquaculture and seafood supply chain and empower health conscious consumers to directly support innovative aquaculture projects producing some of the healthiest protein on the planet. Amazing. So welcome, James.

Thank you so much. That's quite an intro. Appreciate that.

Here's the thing, I would eat way more fish if I knew it wasn't polluted because fish is among the healthiest food. And even among those people who believe that meat is bad for your health, universally scientists, doctors, all the research shows that fish is good for our health. But I'm terrified to eat fish because I got mercury poisoning when I was 36 and it just about knocked me flat. And it was led to me discovering functional medicine, but It was terrible. And I grew up on tuna fish sandwiches. I ate swordfish. I had Chilean sea bass. I ate orange roughy all the time because it was cheap. I got it from Costco. And it really knocked me down. So, you know, I'm so excited about what you're doing. I think it's such an important thing to bring awareness around what is healthy aquaculture? What is regenerative aquaculture? You know, we're raping the oceans. Many people have seen that show Seaspiracy on Netflix, which talks about the, you know, the horrific conditions of fishing around the world, the overfishing, the illegal fishing. the bycatch, which we'll talk about. So there's this kind of movement where now people are starting to care about what meat they're eating, what chicken they're eating, where their food comes from, talking about regenerative agriculture, grass-fed meat. And there's this new movement really around regenerative aquaculture. Why isn't wild fish necessarily better for us than the planet, right? It's not just us and the planet than farm fish? Because most people think that wild fish is better. You're kind of going, wait a minute, there's some maybe some issues with that. And let's talk about it.

Yeah, it's one of those things that just has so much nuance to it, right? But if we want to address first the better for the planet, we have to think about the supply and demand. And the data is really clear that there's simply more demand than there is supply. The gross production of wild caught seafood has not been increasing It has actually plateaued and even started to descend since 2002. There's not like a new source of wild-caught seafood that we're gonna find. Meanwhile, population is growing, more middle class kind of affluence looking for healthier alternatives of protein and seafood is that generally. So there's just not enough seafood. But then the nuance is where is that seafood coming from simply because it's wild caught doesn't necessarily mean that it was caught A in a sustainable manner and B in a clean environment. So unfortunately all rivers lead to the ocean and everything that ends up in the ocean is a lot and that includes industrial pollutants and toxins from glyphosate. There's just a myriad of things that are now affecting the oceans. So, coal fire plants, fertilizers, and auto break dust. All of these things are showing up in plastics. Microplastics are a huge issue. So, we can now test fish and see these elements in the food chain. And so, While there are beautiful places in the ocean, we have to be really conscientious of where it's coming from. And in general, you know, the reason CTOPI exists right now is to try to define create a new supply chain that is that is, you know, bringing better products. But I'm not saying that all wild caught fish is bad by by any means. It's just that we have to, you know, looking at it a lot more mindfully, you know, not all, you know, wild pigeon is necessarily something that you want to consume the same thing in the ocean.

Yeah, right. Yeah, I know it's so true. I mean, I've been to the Antarctica, I've been to the Arctic and you think, oh, these are pristine environments, but when those populations of fish and penguins are measured in their whales, they're so toxic even in these pristine environments. So we really polluted the oceans in ways that we've just begun to understand. And like you said, from coal effluent, from the microplastics, from the nitrogen fertilizers to the PCBs, all the things that just kind of pour into our rivers, lakes, streams and oceans. In America, the EPA said there's not lakes. I mean, I had a patient with severe mercury poisoning because he fished out of his lake in rural, I think Alabama or something. And I'm thinking, wow. But everywhere is polluted. And, you can't get away from it.

Lakes are higher than the ocean in many cases.

Yeah, absolutely. I would never eat a lake fish or most river fish. In fact, the EPA says not to ever eat a river fish in America because it's full of mercury. So the environment is hugely impacted by what we're doing industrially and the planet. and a lot of fishing practices are problematic. And we think, oh, aquaculture is great. We can grow fish in a way that we don't have to rip the original stocks out of the ocean. But a lot of aquaculture practices are really bad. And even things we think are good, I was in Turkey and I was in Bodrum, which is sort of on the coast of Turkey. It's beautiful between, right off all the Greek islands. And out in the ocean there, you could see these big aquacultures. tuna? No, it wasn't tuna. It was like sea bass. And they sell this stuff to Whole Foods as, quote, healthy, you know, safe fish. But I knew the people who were involved with it and, and, and had looked at it very carefully. And these fish were, were grown in horrible conditions, pumpful antibiotics, and were, you know, grown in highly concentrated ways in very shallow water. I mean, it was really bad. And, and yet they were sold as, quote, healthy options in Whole Foods. I was like, whoa. And, and then they were talking about other forms of agriculture. I forget the name of it, but the the concept was that you would keep the fish protected in a certain area and let them grow and grow and grow, but never fish. And then eventually the populations of fish would get so large in those areas, it would spill over outside of that protected area. And you could really harvest those fish and the original stock would keep going and keep spilling over the fish. So I'd love you to talk about the idea that we can do aquaculture as a way to fill the void from the increasingly diminishing fish stocks around the world. We're really raping the oceans and not only we're just fishing legally, but there's a lot of illegal fishing going on that's even making it worse. China and Japan and many other countries that are just don't care. So can you talk about that a little bit? How do we look at the pros and cons of aquaculture?

Well, there's so many pros and then there's a lot of cons. And as you pointed out, not all farms are doing it right. the concept of aquaculture as a commercial business is relatively new. While aquaculture has been around for a millennium, you know, the Chinese practiced aquaculture, the Hawaiians still practice aquaculture to a certain extent. It's being revived. You know, once upon a time, Pearl Harbor was one of the largest food production sites in the entire Pacific, you know, all fish ponds. What's happening with aquaculture now as it commercializes, is the first handful of aquaculture businesses that took outside investment essentially took money from big ag businesses. And that same business model was applied to aquaculture where they just figured out, well, how do we maximize our profits and get as little risk as possible and use the same tools, the, you know, the antibiotics, the steroids, the hormones, these are the things that allowed these fish to grow very rapidly, mitigate against disease, and get as much profit as possible. But it wasn't the objective was not necessarily to produce the best quality fish, the healthiest fish, the most regenerative. And so that really stemmed from the objectives of those investors in that business model. But what we're seeing now is more nuance and more types of farming catering to other types of consumers, consumers who are asking for something that is high in omega-3s, not omega-6s, that is not depleting the oceans with fish meal and fish oil raised in humane ways, harvested in humane ways. So the kind of maturity of the industry is starting to happen. And part of that, I think, is enabled because consumers are starting to ask more questions about the types of farming that is happening with their beef and their chicken and their tomatoes. Yeah. We, you know, there's a level of education with consumers now to where most consumers aren't just asking for USDA prime beef, they're asking for something that's grass-fed, grass finished, pasture raised, cage free. These are the things that weren't talked about. It wasn't common education lexicon of a consumer 20 years ago. We're starting to see that happen and our hope and vision through education around aquaculture and bringing people to the farms and showing them the different types of feeds and methodologies of farming is that terms like multi-trophic aquaculture and recirculating aquaculture systems and algae fed feed will become commonplace. That's kind of where we're going.

Amazing. So in a way, we're kind of maybe still have some wild fishing, but you're saying the future of fishing is really around sustainable regenerative is that what you're saying?

Yeah, I don't think that we need to stop fishing. I just don't think we should be condoning industrial scale extraction of the oceans. The evolution of our relationship with hunting evolving into cultivating and farming, that was civilization. We are still extracting massive quantities from the ocean, even though those numbers are depleting. And I think as we're now learning to work with the ocean, ocean, hopefully we'll see more regenerative practices. As you were talking about, you know, marine protected areas, when you protect one area, identifying key habitats where, you know, over a large swath of the ocean, some areas are more important than others. Some areas are key breeding habitats or migratory paths. We protect these key areas. The fish can come, they can spawn, they can breed, they can migrate, and then, yeah, it will spill over. We can maintain some. sustainable levels and even help regenerate. But we have to change things significantly. And quite frankly, the transition to aquaculture done right has the potential to more than feed the world's protein needs. It's and it's happening whether we want it or not simply because of the demand. What isn't for sure is if there's enough education and demand and desire to do it right to have and have, you know, specific types of aquaculture really create a net positive impact on the environment before just industrial scale commodification of factory farms, you know, proliferate?

I mean, I want to get back into the idea that doing regenerative agriculture can be truly regenerative. In other words, a net positive to the environment, a net positive to climate, because that's something new that I haven't really heard. But what I want to sort of of Explorer is this, is this idea that, and I think the wild fishing is a problem, problem for me in, in many ways, because of by catch, which I want you to explain in a minute, and because we polluted the ocean so much that even if we're hunting and harvesting wild fish in the proper ways, there's still a high likelihood that those fish are full of junk, like full of metals and, and petrochemicals and Plastics. And, and so I always tell people, like, eat the little fish. anchovies, sardines, herring, mackerel, you know, because I see in my practice when people don't, I measure their heavy metal levels, they just kind of start to rise. So, let's talk about one of 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 bleeds, it leads, right? So like that documentary C-Spiracy got so much attention. Those are really great storytellers, 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, you know, technology developed in war, like radar, is now being implemented to identify where fish are underwater at massive scale. The largest fishing fleets in the world go out with multiple vessels and helicopters to identify where the schools are. They have small speed boats that encircle the school, wrap or 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 that are going to just be off-cast. And so bycatch is a huge issue. So that's one form of farming or, excuse me, fishing, purse seining. It's generally considered highly destructive. Some people try to argue that there's ways that you can Target them, but it, you know, on an industrial scale, it's very difficult. target and be discriminatory because there's times when 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 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 gets 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 really difficult to target certain species. You know, bottom trawling is another type of fishing, you know, where, you know, 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 sea floor are being completely disrupted and upended. It's akin to, slashing and burning in the rainforest. It's super disruptive. And there's efforts to say, 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 in this established industry that 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 quotas time and time again. Every year we're seeing shorter and shorter runs on 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 no flag on it. Well, essentially, there's a requirement in certain, by certain vessels to broadcast through satellite where they are, the name of the vessel, the direction they're going. But when they're under the, when they're, you know, doing things. Yeah, they literally pirate ships. They're pirating. They're in areas that are protected. They're not supposed to be fishing, but there they are.

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So regular industrial fishing is a problem. And aside from all the pollution in 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 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 the fish. And it takes about 10 pounds of what this bycatch and these other fish to create one pound of fish that we want to eat.

Sometimes, yeah. 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, 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 they, they, they achieved the objective number one, which was reduced dependency on the Bait fish. And, yeah, absolutely. That happened. And, well, you are what you eat, but you're also whatever you're eating. Eight. Right.

So if these fish are eating, that's so important. 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. that these organizations set a goal to reduce impact on the oceans. And it really was, it's the responsibility of you and I now to say, hey, we want better nutrition, right? Because 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 gonna 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 wanna go into the dangers and the problems feedlot fish and why we should be so concerned about it. What is the, the conditions are 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, wow. 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 terrestrial farms. 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 also in high concentration, when you have an open ocean, you have an aquaculture site in shallow water, as you indicated there in the Adriatic Sea, I'm assuming. Those fish, you know, they're effluent. You have just like a cattle farm with all of these cattle confined in a small space. Their poop is it becomes toxic. and in a fish farm, the poop falling directly underneath in a shallow environment without enough current and is this high concentration of nitrogen that can completely kill the sea floor. 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. Also, what's going into the feed? Are you feeding them you know, it's one thing to feed them the fish meal and 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 cited 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 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, where, 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 and 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 in line with the kind of Mediterranean diets that result in blue zones.

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 as part of dealing with growing these foods, antibiotics, hormones, but they're also exposed to PCBs and dioxins and heavy metals and other things that are in the ocean. So it doesn't mean because it's farmed.

Doesn'T mean that you're necessarily gonna 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've put all these PCBs into the environment all of these, you know, fire retardants and whatnot, these chemicals that last forever are going into the food system. It's now, you know, 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. that there's ways to remove it. Even worse, innovative farms are doing it now. But yeah, the PCBs are a thing. It's in wild-caught fish too, but it can be concentrated in a fish feed if you're not filtering it. There are technologies with centrifuges to pull it out.

You mean to get out heavy metals and to get out the pesticides and the dioxin and the microplastics? Yeah, absolutely. You know, reflecting on this conversation, I remember I traveled to Spain years go, and I encountered this fish farm called Veta La Palma. And what you're talking about in terms of most modern agriculture is intensive fish farming or feedlot fish.

Yeah.

And Veta La Palma is an extensive fish farm. And they essentially took 8, 000 acres. That was an estuary, and they had it, 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, you know, thousands of tons of fish in a much larger area, obviously. But the fish filter with all 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 the quality of 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. And they eat about half the shrimp, about 20% of the fish, but they still able to 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 the land. but you're saying you can do that in the water too. So, how do we move towards the sort of natural, 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 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 journey?

I'm so glad that you brought up Vatel Lopuma 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 Vatel Lopuma and other players that are really endeavoring to be good partners with the ocean. And Vatel Lopuma not only is, you know, 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 back out to the ocean. So there's a lot of species like 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 the balance of nutrients, filter feeding, photosynthesis that can create a healthy balanced ecosystem. So that's kind of, that's amazing. In the scientific community, so 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, 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.

That's pretty amazing.

And.

The regenerative agriculture is sort of a new idea, really. It's sort of emerging from this kind of mess of fish farming and harvesting fish in ways that are destructive to the environment and to the fish populations and getting away from this sort of commodity production. So the question is, is it possible to scale this up? I mean, maybe Veta la Palma is a cute little sort of hobby fish farm in Spain and it creates delicious fish, but it's kind of like, you know, is that really going to meet the demands of billions of people on the planet for seafood? And how do we take this idea and can it scale?

Yeah, absolutely. People ask the same questions of regenerative cattle farms, is it scalable? And I think it absolutely is. It's just we have to have a different distribution model and a different incentive model and a relationship to where our farms are. It's very difficult to scale a massive industrial scale monoculture. and do it in a truly sustainable regenerative manner. But those systems were built for our current distribution platform. It's kind of an economic vehicle that will move massive quantities of commodity products quickly through these kind of distribution channels. If we're going to these centralized distribution channels, in order to transition to to supporting lots of small regenerative farms, artisan farms, a distributed network needs to establish. So how do we plug in these sort of distributed networks to support these farms or have enable these farms to support their local ecosystems, their local communities? And that I think absolutely is scalable. I mean, it happens in nature. Nature is absolutely abundant. The abundance in nature when done, when allowed to, you know, have these sort of symbiotic relationships produces biomass that could easily feed the world if done correctly. So yeah, scalable, yes. Easy to plug into the existing distribution channels, no, very difficult. So that's why it's kind of this hiccup, right? Like aquaculture farms have grown to sell their products into existing systems. Those systems were really asking for or commodity products that were cheap and available in large quantities in order to fulfill demand and current format spec.

So, are you saying we need to eat different kinds of fish than we're used to eating and get used to different kinds of seafood?

I'm saying that it's difficult to buy, it's difficult for Whole Foods, for example, to support lots of small farms. If you go to Whole Foods, it's really hard to know what farm the fish came from because their distribution model makes it difficult for them to support individual farms by name because they're constantly buying from different farms and different suppliers and so it's this commoditized system. If you go to your farmer's market, you can ask specific questions because they're not this this, you know, they're not commoditizing their products. Yeah.

I mean, you can't, it's a traceability and transparency is the problem, right? We don't know where our food comes from. And, you know, it could come from some horrible, you know, Vietnam fish farm where they're growing shrimp and it's full of crap and, oh, like, oh, this.

Is shrimp, it's healthy, but actually, maybe it's not. Yeah. I would like to say there are in Vietnam some fair trade farms that are doing it right, that are doing extensive farming where they're preserving mangroves. so we have these, the traceability even in those places is absolutely cornerstone because we need to support those farms in Vietnam as well that are doing it right.

Yeah, amazing. So I want to kind of veer off a little bit on a topic that always is sort of in the conversation these days. We know about heavy metals, we know about mercury and fish PCBs, but microplastics is a little bit of a new concept. And there was a UC Davis study that found one in four fish have microplastics in them. I think it might be even more than that. So can you talk about what are microplastics? Where do they come from? How do they get in fish? And what are the health consequences of us consuming fish with microplastics? I, I mean, I've had some people say, some dietitians and nutrition, they don't eat any fish because it's full of microplastics. And even the benefits of the fish.

Are going to be outweighed by the harms of the microplastics. So what do you think about that? Well, I, I'll address how it gets into the fish, and I'd be more than happy to talk about that study. I think really important. We need more studies on this. But then I might turn it back to you because I, you know, your opinion on, on the health benefits and how it outweighs, I think, you know, that's an interesting question. You know, there are ways to mitigate exposures to microplastics, you know, where you raise the fish, what goes into the fish, kind of, you know, that's what aquaculture is all about. Controlled environments, controlled feed. But to address wild caught seafood, that study UC Davis went to fish markets all up and down the Pacific coast and bought wild caught local seafood. And then the study looked at the presence of microplastics both in the stomach and in the flesh. And they found that there was microplastics in 25% of those fish. Microplastics are not, you know, visible size pieces of plastic. It is what happens when plastic degrades over time. and it starts decomposing, it turns into these small particles that are mistaken by the zooplankton and other small creatures as food because oftentimes they're attracting other algae and what might be growing on it and it gets consumed and it's not digested and it's bioaccumulating just like mercury into the food system. It's going from one fish up into the next and it's now in our food system. Yeah, it's really difficult to remove as well. There's wonderful projects out there right now, like the ocean cleanup project that is taking all of the plastics out of the Pacific Gyre. There's so much plastic in the ocean now. There's reports that we're on track to have more plastic in the ocean than fish. All of that plastic is breaking down into these micro particles. It's sort of possible to clean up the large particles, but once it breaks down into these small particles, it's almost impossible.

It just- yeah, we're gonna put your whole ocean through a water filter.

Yeah, and it's already in a lot of the food systems, right? So it's essentially laying down this new layer of petroleum products that'll be mined at some point in the future. Yeah, it's a shame. We have to these plastics producers responsible. It's a really, you know, we can't keep putting plastics in the ocean. Plastics are going into the oceans through myriad ways. It's, you know, sometimes it's just large pieces of plastics, sometimes it's, you know, the micro particles in makeup or things that are going into the storm drain, but it's really difficult to remove it once it's in there. And now it's, yeah, it's absolutely in the food system and it's not just near rivers, it's in the open ocean, it's in the bottom of the Himalaya, you know, it's the top of the Himalayas and it's the bottom of the Marianas Trench. So, yeah, how does it affect humans? You know, it's definitely, there's some studies about that and I'd be curious to hear what your doctor friend said, but it's definitely not good for us, especially somebody who's, you know, trying to avoid exposure to petrochemicals and and their effects on hormones, things of that nature.

Yeah. I don't think most people understand that plastic comes from petrochemicals. It's like an oil-based product, right?

Yeah. And then how is that affecting our hormones and our thyroid and all these other things? There's some studies that are really alarming. I try to be an optimist. I have friends who still, I used to spearfish. Now I go and I shoot photos of fish because I've kind of transitioned to not wanting to partake in that. But I do have friends who still, you know, catch fish in the ocean and, and consume it. And I, I still believe, I try to be optimistic that there, that there's a healthy consumption and some of the benefits, like the Omega-3s and the selenium outweigh some of the, the challenges with, with mercury and, and Plastics. But it, it's not the same as when you and I were kids or our grandparents or our ancestors that, that the, the the accumulation of toxins from the industrialization of humankind is now all in our food system, unfortunately.

No, it's terrible. Yeah. You know, what's really exciting to me is that, you know, you're not just sort of bringing to light the challenges of conventional industrial fishing or the dangers of conventional agriculture and feedlot fishing, fish farming, and the potential benefits, but you've actually helped us because, you know, you found other if we do aquaculture right, that we can produce seafood that's measurably better through high omega-3s, lower heavy metals, PCBs, than 99% of wild caught fish, and also provide a lot of benefits to the environment and be sustainable to eat and scale and make more protein, which is amazing. And you created this company called SeaTopia, which is, I love the name, it's like the opposite of SeaSpa, right? or C-Apocalypse, which is kind of we're in now. And, you know, I love to hear sort of how the idea came about. You sort of, you how you test food and what you found in this journey of yours and how we begin to sort of shift our consumption to, you know, support places around the world that are doing it right.

Yeah. Cetopia was an evolution from this need to create that economic feedback that directly supports farms. So I was working with a farm that was producing some of the best quality yellowtail in the world, and their distribution, like every other farm, was through a distributor who just commoditized the product and wasn't telling the story of that farm. And so even though they're producing the best quality product in the world, using the best quality feeds, and harvesting in a very humane way, their product was literally put into a bucket with other farms that were doing it in inferior quality. And then the restaurants at the end wouldn't actually know which farm it came from or why it was inconsistent in quality. So we started importing, bringing these whole fresh fish direct to restaurants, some of the best farm-to-table restaurants in Southern California. And then we started bringing the chefs to visit the farms. And the chefs got to eat the feed and swim with the fish. And then we started working with other farms. this direct connection to the best farmed fish in the world was just such a beautiful, true, authentic relationship. And at the same time, we had consumers, friends in the community and our network who were aware that this quality of fish was just so much better than anything else that they were buying that, you know, these restaurants, these high-end restaurants like Spago and Hotel Bel-Air and And consumer people would stop our delivery van and be like, I want that fish for my lunch.

They've hijacked it and it was going to the restaurant.

Literally, I had people like, can I just buy a fish? But that's a, it's not really scalable to send whole fresh fish, you know, to your door. And so the idea of how do we get a, with integrity, how do we bring truly sustainable regenerative seafood to people's doors so that you don't have to go to those fancy restaurants that you can actually eat it as part of your daily meal planning. And so Cetopia was really evolved from that, but it didn't kick off really until COVID because during prior to COVID, there just wasn't an appetite or enough appetite or enough conviction from the market or from our investors that people would buy seafood online. But during COVID this opportunity to continue to support these farms that at the moment didn't have any of their food service sales channels. They still had all these living animals that needed to be fed. How do we keep these businesses alive? Well, Cetopia is during COVID created that continued that cycle and was able to grow and build a sales channel that directly supports small farms. is providing a layer of traceability on the mercury testing and other testing. So we take a sample of every lot that comes in. It goes to a third-party laboratory, FDA approved and quantifies the presence of heavy metals and things of that nature. Everything is vacuum sealed so that it's freezer safe and packaged in totally eco-friendly packaging. and shipped to the consumer with dry ice. And it's all sushi grade. And the idea is that doing this short distribution, short supply chain between the farms, not a bunch of middlemen, having full traceability and transparency allows consumers to say, I liked this fish. I want to buy more of this particular farm. I want to support this farm. and I want to go visit it as well. And if there's an opportunity to do a dinner at that farm next year, I'm going to put it on my calendar and we're going to, you know, make a vacation to go visit Vat De La Palma or this farm in Norway or Hawaii or Costa Rica. We're working with some of these beautiful farms here in the United States as well. But this connection to where your food comes from, knowing who the producer is and saying with your dollar every month, I want to support that business, that particular farm, because I understand their farming practices. They're using algae-based feeds. They're doing recirculating aquaculture. They're using low-density farming. They're harvesting in a humane way. I understand that and I want to vote for that. And that's kind of the idea of C2O is that we can create this distributed network that will support lots of small farms and connect them to consumers. Yeah, it's like a CSA of sorts. But yeah.

FSA, right? Fish supported. Something like that. It's quite amazing actually. I've been lucky enough to get a box of this fish and it's just phenomenal. I mean, it's really good and it's unusually good compared to the fish you normally would get. Even what you think is like, okay, I'm gonna eat this farm in Norway or whatever. It's just next level and I'm very impressed. I'm worried about seafood and I kind of can relax a little bit when I have this fish. and I, and I want to talk about some of the fish farms, you know, you know, tuna is a big thing, but I tell my patients never to eat tuna. Will I eat it occasionally? Maybe if I, like, one piece of, like, Toro tuna sushi, like, once a year, and I'll take a detox pill after, you know, but, but there, there's fish like kampachi, which can be raised with little or no mercury and, and without Plastics and. you know, how does that happen? How do you do and create this sort of, you don't think like tuna is big fish. How do you, how do you do that in a way that doesn't create these problems?

We were thinking about putting a page on our, on our website that said like, you know, click here for tuna and then you'd get there and it'd be like, sorry, tuna is not part of our system. Yeah. Because unfortunately it's simply not that a species of fish that has a metabolism that is sustainable to farm. They just have these high blood pressure, warm blooded creatures with tons of energy that are used to just gobbling up massive quantities of fish and never stop swimming and they just burn through calories nonstop. It's not a good model for raising fish. A camanche absolutely is a model. So not all fish are good models of sustainable businesses or sustainable aquaculture. There are people who farm and ranch tuna, but the feed conversion ratio, the amount of fish that goes in to produce one pound of fish with a tuna is generally around 20 to 1. And then conversion which was just such a waste.

Not sustainable, yeah.

Yeah, and the dynamic of the way the fish grow and live and expend energy, how active are they has a direct relation to that. So, kampachi, for example, convert fish feed closer to one to one. So, they produce still a meat that's comparable to tuna, especially comparable to a yellowfin. It has that meatiness. It's Yellow Tail. If you go to, if you ate sushi, Hamachi, Hidemasa, Kampachi are all in the Yellow Tail family. And, it's a delicious, hearty, but fatty, luscious piece of butter.

Amazing.

And, it can be raised in a sustainable manner and they can be adapted to unique diets. So, a diet based on an algae is something that happy to consume, have great health on. Tuna are so finicky it's difficult to get them to eat anything other than whole sardines and that's just not a sustainable way to raise an animal. So we're working with farms that are identifying the most efficient types of fish and shellfish and kelps and algae in order to create this food system that is sustainable to feed them with ingredients that are sustainable, that are healthy for us, that are not using antibiotics or hormones or GMOs. And that process is something worth celebrating. There are farms that are worth celebrating and that's what we're trying to do. I'm not saying that all farm fish is great. I'm just saying that there are farms that are doing it right, that that are sustainable, that are implementing regenerative practices, that we should be celebrating those individual farms.

Yeah, I mean, tell us about that because I got a package and I got this kingfish, which I'd never really eaten before, and it was so delicious. Tell us about some of the farms that you've found that are great and just give a flavor of what you've learned and a couple of examples. And then I want to talk about a couple of other key issues before we close.

Well, let's start with the kampachi, for example, which is similar to a kingfish. So you have in the Jack family, Serrano, Candy, Cerial de Reveliana, Cerial de Quinta, something. These jacks are all cousins. They can be raised in very similar conditions generally so that there's a campachi farm that I spent eight years working with in the Sea of Cortez. They started by capturing a couple of wild caught fish, this wild Almaco Campachi in Mexico, they call it pez virela. they catch these wild fish. They put them into a land-based pool about 15 at a time into these pools. The pool is in an indoor building where they regulate the amount of light and the temperature of the water to trick them into thinking it's spawning season. When they spawn, the fertilized eggs float up to the top. The fertilized eggs are set aside. their rays cultivated on rotifers, sea monkeys, and a super healthy diet until the fingerlings are large enough to be put back in the ocean. So with 15 fish at a time in these land-based pools over the last, let's call it five years, a hundred wild caught fish have been taken out of the ocean and they've produced a million fish or more from each fish producing hundreds of thousands of offspring. So the model is totally regenerative.

Like Genghis Khan, a wild caught fish.

Yes, he spread his seed everywhere, far and wide. Exactly. And fish in the wild have this survival mechanism. They are producing sometimes hundreds of thousands, if not a million seed offspring, and in nature only 1% will survive. But in aquaculture, you can create survival rates as much as, you know, 90% or even higher, 99%. And as long as those fish are being fed a GMO free, antibiotic free, hormone free diet raised in deep water, open ocean pens, low density, lots of current, it's a beautiful way to raise fish. You pair it then with some algae, like the kelps and the shellfish in proximity. They're cleaning the water, they're sequestering the carbon. and it's a synergistic way to work in the ocean. We're working with a farm in Peru that's raising these beautiful scallops that are raised from the ocean.

I just got some. I'm going to have them tonight for dinner, by the way.

You're going to love them. They're sweet, they're sushi grade. They come in the half shell. You literally can just thaw them out, hit them with a little bit of olive oil, salt, citrus, and just have them raw like that Peruvian style. you can cook them. I would recommend not overcooking them. If anything, you just kind of want to sear the outer edge for textural contrast. But you want to capture the raw Omega threes because these are literally taking, they're just, they're just filtering the water. They're just taking nutrients from the mid-water column, filtering it and, and turning it into this beautiful, luscious Omega Rich, you know, piece of protein. And they're so when they're creating those shells, they are sequestering carbon from the ocean, from the atmosphere, mitigating against ocean acidification, you know, sequestering carbon. They're hanging lanterns. So they're hanging in the mid-water column in these lantern baskets. They're not on the ocean floor. So they're actually creating a really rich ecosystem that creates a little habitat for a myriad of other little species. fish and shrimp and all these other organs be living around there. So these types of farms are part of the solution. You know, if we go back to the C-Spiracy story, you know, they talked about aquaculture as like this bad thing. They didn't, their objective was not to highlight any solutions. Their objective, just like they did with cowspiracy, was to just, you know, have.

People all around solutions.

Right? Yeah, yeah. But there are solutions. And what we're trying to do with Zootopia is not say that, you know, that everything is bad. We're just saying vote for your dollar for food systems that are in line with your values and help support a transition to a blue economy to, because we're on the blue planet. There's a lot of blue space. If we can use that to efficiently build a relationship with this planet that is symbiotic and help regenerate those systems, those ecosystems, and turn on those carbon sinks. It can be a utopia on this planet. We can do it right. It starts with people just caring enough to vote with their dollars because every single day, three times a day, we're spending money on all these food systems that are just canola and soy and we can do better. So how do we buy foods that are one step better. I'm not saying it has to be perfect today, but like take little steps, vote for the better ones and care.

It's incredible. I mean, it's really quite incredible because you're sort of mapping out a vision, which is kind of a more utopian idea of how do we live in harmony with the oceans, how do we generate food for us in ways that are good for us and good for the planet. And I honestly, before I kind of came upon you, I sort of seen it done in bits and pieces, but to really really have the scope and vision that you have is quite refreshing and hopeful. A couple of things I want to talk about, one was policy issues and are obstructing this and what we need to do to fix that. And two is the issue around the supply chain of food that you need to feed these fish. Because that's a problematic area. I mean, it's great to do it properly, but it matters what you're feeding them. Feeding them soy and corn and canola and all this stuff, that's really bad news. so how do we create a sort of sustainable and healthy supply chain for these farm fish to eat? Because we're not only what we're eating, we're eating whatever we are eating ate.

100.

Right?

Absolutely. Absolutely. So should we address policy? Policy is a big one because, you know, we have these organizations like Noah that is trying to create sustainable oceans and economies that are healthy waterfronts. And NOAA for years has been trying to get aquaculture permitted concessions in the continental United States. And frankly, they've been blocked for the last 20 years. If we look at California, for example, there's no aquaculture permit for Finfish that have been approved. Policy has been blocked, even though this is a government organization, by environmental groups. And I think that it's, you know, it's this black and white perspective that Seaspiracy and these and films like that put out there that it's all bad. Well, you know, we have examples of mussel farms and scallop farms and oyster farms creating these resilient habitats. And we have examples of kelp farms. But what are people eating? Every day people are buying salmon, right? So how do we marry and support policy that says if you want a concession for a finfish aquaculture, it has to have a symbiotic partnership in a kelp and a shellfish farm and have the right controls in place to monitor for and improve the environment. And that's absolutely possible and there's examples of it happening in other parts of the world. Let's get it local. There are examples of US-based aquaculture projects on land that are doing a great job recirculating aquaculture systems and large hydroponic systems. We're working with some people in the Midwest that have a huge aquaculture system that the effluent then feeds all of their hydroponic lettuces and the whole thing is tied together. It's really beautiful. It's also still relatively expensive to do that sort of farming. The oceans are, in theory, a great way to raise fish because the the fish are floating. They're not, you know, holding up their body weight, so they're efficiently creating protein. They're not using any land resources, not using any fresh water. So if done right, we can build very robust, healthy food systems in the ocean. So I think we need policy that supports a resilient food system where we're not importing all of our resources from around the world where we can cite it locally, have farms in each geographic region that supports those economies and those communities. So yeah, policy is a big one.

Yeah.

It's been a roadblock. It's been a roadblock to the scalability. If you look at a macro level in the world, the United States rates 17th in the world for aquaculture production. We're still importing massive quantities of seafood from around the world. So because of this deficit, in some regards, you could say that it's a, it's, it's, you know, builds, you know, resiliency for our economy and for our food systems to have our own dependency. It also just makes sense to, you know, to, you know, have these foods being produced closer to the, to the, to the markets. And then there's, the future is bringing a lot of it into vertical land-based Farms as well. There, there's a lot of progress happening there. So, but again, the cost of producing it by, by, by from day one, aquaculture in the ocean was already a vertical farming and working in three dimensions. You have this massive biomass potential, then replicating that on land, still you're using the water and the land resources. But that's the thing.

Well, your work is really tremendous. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about feed, and I want to kind of tell people about how to get this because it's so great.

So, the transition of feed in aquaculture really went from, as we talked about before, for fish meal and fish oil produced from anchovies and sardines being ground up and then extracted for oil and whatnot. And then the FTO and a couple other organizations said, let's reduce our dependence on wild feed, wild fish, and produce those oils and proteins with something else. And the most affordable things were these GMO corn and soy who are already being in industrial scale quantities and subsidized. And so those components started making their way into feed and you started seeing actually in aquaculture studies and lab tests, the omega-3, omega-6 ratio starting to change because when you start reducing fish oil and fish meal and replacing it with canola and soy, you know, the fish, you can't go too far because of the Digestion, just like you and I, gets inflamed and it has the same exact responses and it started to go down. But they're doing it to address a certain need. What we're seeing now is more and.

More.

Support for the base level organisms. So microalgae is where fish originally got their omega-3s.

Yeah, right.

Sardines and anchovies don't produce Omega-3s. They're produced through microalgae, these little tiny beautiful incredible creatures. So these tiny little creatures are producing the Omega-3s. Now what's happening is there's enough demand to support the commercialization, the economies of scale to make it affordable for feeds to actually be produced with algae-based feeds and other novel things like insect-based feeds. seeds. And it's not just the traditional chlorellas and spirulinas, which are still relatively expensive, there's really unique ones like Schizochytrium is this species of algae that grows in mangrove estuary environments that breaks down plant matter and in its original form, ecosystem, you would have like a flood tide and then there would be an abundance of plant material and then the tide would ebb back out and then it had nothing to consume. So it evolved to quickly metabolize a bunch of this plant matter and then store it as omega-3s. And this particular algae produces both EPA and DHA. DHA is beautiful because now you can grow and ferment these in industrial scale productions and have a concentration of omega-3s in the form of EPA and DHA and specifically formulate feeds that are going to boost omega-3 levels in fish so that you can quantifiably in a lab test show a salmon raised on this algae-based feed can have a higher level of omega-3 than the average wild caught salmon. And you can do it in a way where it doesn't have any PCBs or any other heavy metals and this model is happening now, it's just a matter of whether or not consumers are going to demand it. They're going to put up their hands and vote for it because it's still a financial thing. It's a return on investment. A farm that is currently selling 99% of its supply into a market like a Costco or Whole Foods where those things aren't being valued, they're not going to invest in that. So consumers need to stand up and say, I want the algae-based feeds. I don't want soy and corn. I want no GMOs. I don't want antibiotics. I want the superfoods, right? So how do we produce the superfoods? And I think we're starting to see that, right? That's what we're trying to do with Cetopia, is support the best farms in the world that are actually making those innovations that every year have changed the ratios and what they're feeding their fish and improving it every single with every cohort.

It's quite an amazing story and your story is fantastic and thank God you created this company. You know, I think, you know, people can learn more about it, they go to seatopia.fish, that's yes, that's a domain name, seatopia.fish. Yeah, fish, right? And it's just a direct to consumer way to get really healthy seafood. It's really delicious, right to your door. I'm a huge fan. Honestly, I had you on the podcast because I got a box of this stuff and I'm like, wow, this is a game changer. It's what I've been looking for for the last 30 years, but haven't seen little pockets here and there. But you made it really accessible and friendly. The website's fantastic. People should check it out and you can learn about the whole story of everything there more than you want to know probably, but it's really fantastic. And I'm just so happy that you're doing this work and have created what you've created. So thank you for doing it. Thank you for being on the podcast.

Thank you, Mark. for creating the platform for people to learn about these things. You know, it's a consumer demand education thing for sure.

It's exciting. It's really exciting. And by the way, anybody listening who liked to hear what they heard and are interested in learning more, go to the website, Cetopia.fish, share this podcast with your friends and family everywhere, because I think everybody needs to know about this. And the more people doing this, the more this industry will grow, the more it'll be available, the lower the cost, and it'll all be a virtuous cycle, which will be good for you and good for the planet. And thank you. And if you love this, just make sure you just keep sharing and sharing and sharing, because I think this is a really important podcast. And hopefully we'll see you next time on the doctor's Pharmacy. Dr. Hyman, thanks for tuning into the doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this. podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week. on Fridays, nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to DrHyman.com/picks to sign up. That's DrHyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer.

Hi everyone, I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only.

Family.

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