What Types Of Fish Are Best For Human And Planetary Health

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

I want people to come to the fish conversation not feeling like all is lost. I want people to come to the fish conversation to know that the oceans are still extremely vital. We're certainly kicking it around and we're certainly kicking fish populations around, but there's.

Still a lot of abundance out there. Hi everyone, it's Dr. Mark. As a functional medicine doctor looking at hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and so many other other internal variables, it helps me find the most effective path to health and healing for my patients. But such extensive testing can be very complicated and time consuming for both the practitioner, somebody like me, and our patients. But lab ordering became very quick and painless since I started using Rupa Health. I can order, track, and get results from over 35 different lab companies within a few clicks in one lab portal. And this means one invoice for all labs paid online upfront. Plus, patients get practitioner pricing and receive full patient support through easier personalized collection instructions, automated follow up, super bills and answers to testing questions and so much more. And best of all, it's free for practitioners. So sign up free today. You can find out more information by going to RupaHealth.com that's R-U-P-A-Health.com Now the basis of any healing protocol should be whole, real food. But with all the GMO foods and long transportation, storage times and monoculture farming methods, depletion of our soils, foods not as nutritionally dense as it once was, even good stuff. And that's why I recommend supplementing a Whole Foods diet with a high quality multivitamin as a basis for any health oriented program. And the product I personally use comes from methylenic greens. Their ag1 supplement has 75 different nutrients that work together to fill out the gaps in our diet. I take ag1 every day and I've noticed that I consistently feel better and have more energy throughout the day. Plus, it works with any diet, keto, paleo, vegan, dairy free, even gluten free. Ag1 is a simple, easy way to optimize your health. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving away 10 free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com/hymen. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/hymen. And now let's get back to this.

Week'S episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Fein, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Seafood is an incredibly healthy source of protein and omega fatty acids. but finding safe fish that aren't full of toxins or in danger of being overfished can be a challenge. The key is to source sustainable seafood, whether it be wild, cod, or regeneratively raised. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the Doctor's Pharmacy on what we need to know about overfishing, how to choose the healthiest seafood, and why we should have hope for our oceans. Dr. Hyman speaks with Paul Greenberg about his decades of looking at ocean production over fishing and toxins in seafood, with Mariam Horn on the interconnectivity between fishing and farming, and with James Arthur Smith on how regenerative farmed fish can be a healthy and safe option. Let's dive in.

Every year we take between 80 and 90 million metric tons of fish out of the sea every year. That's the equivalent of the human weight of China taken out of the sea every year. every single year.

So.

All right.

How many humans live in China?

Yeah, that's the weight.

If you weigh all the billion plus people, it would be that much fish. That's what we're taking on the sea. So you said that before. I show I 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 But look at the perspective on that, right? On the one hand, you could say, oh my God, what a horrible raping of the ocean, 80 to 90 billion metric tons, the human way of trying to take it 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 raking 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. 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 don't, I want people to come to the fish conversation not feeling like all is lost. I want people to come to the fish conversation to know that the oceans are still extremely vital. We're certainly kicking it around and we're certainly kicking fish populations around. But there's still a lot of abundance out there. So to your earlier question, you know, how did I get into all this? So, I came, really what brought me to fish was divorce.

Okay. 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 was just like a Jewish psychiatrist from the Upper West side, who really didn't know anything about the outdoors or whatever thing, he had it in his mind that a father should take his son fishing.

No, he never fished in his life, right?

Not really. And in fact, he always wanted his father to take him fishing. But the one time he took him fishing, my grandfather got horribly seasick and they never went fishing again. So he took me fishing. And, you 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 outfish him. He's like, As soon as he has a bite, he 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. Yeah, yeah. And we'd go at night. And there'd be like people barfing off the side of the boat all night. That can happen. Catch a couple of flounder and my dad was like, it's okay, it's good chum 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 we really did it. And then as I grew up, when I was with my mom, we grew up in a series, or she moved us around a series of rental cottages in the backwoods of Greenwich, Connecticut. I would say, I lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, but we rented, we didn't own. And we would always, my mom just followed my lead and we always rented a cottage that was on a river or on a lake. And so during the week, I fished 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 getting older, 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, 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. Yeah. 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 Finland.

Yeah.

And it was a massive cod fisheries there.

Yep.

Massive. 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. 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, your Ted Talk that it was McDonald's fish. Fish sandwich. So it's 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 cod fish 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-O-Fish sandwich that McDonald's brought to us. And I should say that story is that when McDonald's was on its initial rise in the '60s, there was a franchise owner in Cleveland who found that On Fridays, nobody came into the shop to buy a burger, and the reason being they were mostly Catholics in his community. So he went to Ray Kroc, and he said, Ray, I have this idea for a sandwich. What's the idea? It's like, it's a fish sandwich, and it'll be on a bun, and it'll be called the Filet-O-Fish. And Ray Kroc was like, Nah, nah, I got another burger. I'm more-- the Maui Burger. Than the Hula Burger. The Hula Burger. The Hula Burger. It's like, because it was the time of the 60s and Mad Men and pineapples, and so he was like, She 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 Croc said, well, let's go.

Head to head and we'll see who wins. Well, the fish won. The fish won. 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. I mean, so the world catch has quadrupled since World War II. So we went from about 20 million metric tons to 80 million metric tons over the course of about 70 years. It has flatlined for the last 10 years. So we ain't 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.

Is there anybody who has a 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 there's all sorts of other kinds of fish that are either too small or too deep, too weird for us to eat. There's this whole layer in the ocean called the deep scattering layer that rises and falls, depending sort of in sync with diurnal, with day patterns. And that layer, which is normally below the level at which we fish, has a huge biomass of fish, but it's mostly little fish. weird fish, things that we're never going to catch. That's sort of a dog leg. The fish that we focus on, the sort of larger vertebrates that we're eating, that 80 to 90 million metric tons, that's what we're talking about when we're talking about what we take from the ocean. What is that as a proportion of the larger biomass that's out in the ocean?

I'm not sure anyone really quite knows.

I mean, are you worried about the oceans and fish? I am certainly worried about it. What are you worried about? I'm worried about, so when you think about fish, it's helpful to have metaphors. And I think one metaphor that really works is a bank account. So we, in a healthy fishing situation, we should really only be eating the interest that our bank account is generating. So imagine there's all these fish out there, large fish that are breeding, producing offspring, and Every year there is something of an amount that we can take without affecting that principle, that base population. Different fishery scientists have different ideas of how much that percentage is, but in that huge upsurge in fishing that happened from World War II to the present, we really started eating into our principle. And that's what happened, like for example, with codfish off of the Grand Banks. We have a situation with the Grand Banks where the overall biomass of codfish probably went down by 90 to 95%.

That's incredible.

So imagine if you had $100,000 in your bank account and say you were getting whatever 3% interest, you have 3,000 bucks a year. But if your principal went down to like $5,000, I mean, that's pennies, you know what I mean? So that's what I'm concerned about. And that is the case in probably You know, it depends.

What are the at-risk fish?

Sorry?

What are the fish that are at risk that we're over consuming?

Well, it's hard to identify by species name because fish are kind of like, if there's a, you know, if you just say codfish, right? There are codfish all over the world. There are Pacific cod, which is a slightly different species. They're caught 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 the Norway fishes and where Russia fishes, those populations, because they've actually radically reformed their fisheries management, are actually in pretty good shape. And if you notice now, if you go to a Whole Foods, you go to the supermarket to buy codfish, chances are it'll say product of Norway, product of Iceland. Because those fisheries are actually being managed pretty well. They are no longer dipping into their principal. 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 about, you know, the latest numbers I've seen is about 30% of the commercial fish stocks out there are overfished. In other words, we're dipping into the principal 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, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, technically there are ideas of quotas and things like that in place, but they are in various depleted areas, depending on the fishery. Many areas have been severely depleted.

I studied Chinese in college and In America, they talk about abundance being the land of milk and honey. In China, the same expression is the land of fish and rice. Interesting. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark here. Are you tired of constantly dealing with seasonal sinus symptoms, colds, sinus infections? Would you like a solution that's all natural and supports your immune system too? Well, if that's you, I want to tell you that Beekeeper's Naturals has you covered. Their Propolis Nasal and Throat Sprays harness the power of propolis, a bee product known for its immune boosting and antibacterial properties. This powerful duo helps to support your body's own defenses while soothing your throat, reducing congestion, and moisturizing your nasal passages. Plus, their compact and portable bottles make it easy to use on the go, and all their products are third party tested and contain no pesticides or nasty chemicals, just all natural ingredients that provide extra immune insurance to help you feel more resilient all year long. Right now, Beekeeper's Naturals is offering my listeners early access to their Memorial Day sale. Between now and May 30th, go to beekeepersnaturals.com/hymen and enter the code HYMAN and get 25% off your entire order. That's B-E-E-K-E-E-P-E-R-S-N-A-T-U-R-A-L-S.com slash HYMAN. And enter the code HYMAN. So get outside and breathe easy this season with Beekeeper's Naturals Propolis, Nasal and Throat Sprays. You guys know how seriously I take my health routine. And one of my non-negotiables is getting a daily dose of red light therapy. When red light is absorbed through the skin, our cells' potential to produce energy increases. Picture how our solar panel converts light light energy into usable electricity. Our bodies are designed to use healthy light in a similar way, which is quite amazing. But today's modern indoor lifestyle has made it really impossible, almost impossible, to get enough healthy red light exposure, which is why I've been using Juuve for years to promote healthy cellular function. Juuve's modular design allows for a variety of setup options. Plus, the treatments are super easy and can be done as little as 10 minutes. All I have to do is relax and let my body take in the light. Right now, Juuve is offering all my listeners an exclusive discount on their first order. Just go to Juuve J-O-O-V-V-E.com. www.joovv.com/pharmacy F-A-R-M-A-C-Y and apply my code pharmacy for your qualifying order. Again, that's joovv.com/pharmacy F-A-R-M-A-C-Y to get your discount. Now, there may be some exclusions, but I'd encourage you to check it out.

And now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. China, meanwhile, is the largest harvester of fish in the world and the largest grower of fish in the world. Why are they the largest harvester of wild fish in the world? 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.

Yeah.

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 that was 1986 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- Everyone's hungry for food, right?

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, then.

The world can't- and what's also more frightening is that the, 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 this whole concept of bycatch in order to, you know, produce, find the fish that we like, that we kill a lot of fish and also to get fish fed, we often use other fish. So we grind up other fish. So we use maybe 10 pounds of fish from the ocean that's ground up to feed the fish that we'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.

Sure.

So it can be a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. That said, I would be inconsistent if I just came out as some sort of huge anti-aquaculture person, because I'm not. Because I actually think there are many fixes we could do to get us to a point where Aqua culture 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.

Just to be clear, most aquaculture is pen areas.

Yes.

In oceans that are on this sort of shoreline.

Yes, these are 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.

First of all, they pack the fish in fairly tight, they throw in all this feed, and in some countries, you mentioned antibiotics, some countries don't permit antibiotics, some countries do. again, the 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. Well, there's most consumed fish in America right now. Salmon are coming to us, farm salmon are coming to us largely from Norway and from Chile. Norway has, as I said, improved their antibiotic situation, increasingly using less and less. Chile has recently made a pledge not to use antibiotics in their farm salmon. It's a work in progress, I would say, at this point. As I say, the feed has changed dramatically. used to be that it was almost all fish going into the feed and now it's a combination of soy and other kind of products going in. So that the amount of damage we're doing directly to these little fish from salmon farms has gone down to some degree. That though, you know, and to your point about nutrition, has changed the nutritional profile of farm salmon. So it used to be that farm salmon were primarily, you know, a vector for bringing omega-3 fatty acids into our bodies. But now that you have soy and all these other kinds of agricultural additives to the feed, you're going to have more omega-6s. And as I think you've probably explored, omega-6s and omega-3s actually compete for space on the same enzymes. So that can then, you know, impact our ability to lengthen short chain omega-3 fatty acids from vegetable sources. And it also possibly, and again, this is, you know, science that I think is very much on the edge, I'd be happy to hear your opinion on the whole thing. But there's some that say that omega-6 tends to lead us down the pathway.

Of inflammation, whereas omega-3 is least of all. 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? 'Cause you hear farm fish have more PCBs and more environmental toxins.

So, you know, this is emerging and changing. The thing that really got people in a twist about farm salmon was something called the Heights study that came out in 2002. I believe it was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. And that study looked at farm salmon from around the world and looked at PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, 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 farm salmon producers have switched to sourcing their little fish from the southern hemisphere, like the Peruvian anchoveta, which is the biggest fishery in the world, by the way, 99% of which goes to reduction. That has become a real driver of the salmon industry. And those fish are notably cleaner than the little tiny fish that they were harvesting in the northern hemisphere. So there's that. The other element is, as I said earlier, there's a lot of other stuff in salmon feed other than fish now. All the soy, the corn, all the other industrial agricultural, industrial products.

Pesticides and which might bring pesticides.

You know, what I keep saying and, and, you know, I've said this to the Ministry of Fisheries in Norway and so forth, it's like somebody's got to redo the heights study. Study. We got to do it now. We need. And that was a huge epic study. And when I wrote to Heights, at one point I said, Care to comment? He's like, no, I don't want to comment on this. That was the most, you know, like, media intense study I ever did. It was really unpleasant dealing with the whole thing because, you know, the industry got really angry. But I would just love to see somebody do this again. And because, you know, it's the ocean's dynamic. We're dynamic. I would, before I go out and say all, you know, farm fish are laced with antibiotic or with PCBs, I want to see it.

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

Well, but so do wild fish.

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 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. 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.

But do we really have the ability to keep fishing and feeding the planet the amount of fish we're feeding them? Because it seems like we are in trouble in the oceans and that there really isn't an unlimited supply and that they're being depleted and they're also being poisoned.

Yes, well, I mean, we need, these are all, everything we've been talking about is of course connected. So what Justin is doing on his farm, and that's another reason that I really wanted to use a river as my spine, because it makes so obvious this interconnectivity. What Justin does on his farm affects the fish that Wayne catches. If Justin overuses nitrogen and it runs off into his water supply and it expands the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, Wain suffers.

Which is already the size of New Jersey.

Right, where there's just no oxygen to sustain life.

Just to break that down for people, the reason that the nitrogen is bad is it fertilizes the algae in the rivers, which then overgrows and suffocates everything else. There's no oxygen for any other living species.

That's a very elegant way of putting it. So yes, so it is a critical. You need to be solving all of these problems all the way down the chain, but fisheries can really rebound. We're seeing it. Belize has now adopted this same approach to fisheries management. It's a little bit different in a developing country because you don't do it individually. You do it by the village. You give the village the secure right. But Belize is completely reversing turning its fisheries around and making its people more secure and its food supplies more secure. It, you know, there's not unlimited anything. So, and we, I mean, you know, we keep growing as though as a human population as though there is that we work very closely with UC Santa Barbara and there is a guy there who says, okay, we can bring wild fish back tremendously. And, you know, wild fishing is fantastic because it's like grazing animals. You can leave the ecosystem intact. You can hunt out of that ecosystem without altering that ecosystem.

System.

But there are people who are saying there also needs to be good aquaculture. Fish farming. Yes. And it can get a lot better than it is. And it can actually contribute hugely to the food supply if done well. So he showed us this analysis. I mean, one of the most promising parts of aquaculture is shellfish, which I know you champion as a great food supply, but is also great because it's a filter feeder. So it has all these co-benefits. If you're growing mussels and oysters, they clean the water, they also build physical protection for coastlines. So all these coastlines that are being menaced by rising seas and stronger hurricanes, if you start growing oysters and mussels, you actually can build natural infrastructure, natural protection for those coasts. He showed us this analysis that you could feed, you could provide enough protein for the entire world on the shelf around New Zealand. That's all the space it would take. There's no greenhouse gas emissions, there's no freshwater use, there's no displaced ecosystem.

And you don't have to feed them.

And you don't have to feed them. So it's, you know.

What about if they're filtering everything? People are probably wondering, is that why.

Would you want to eat something that's a garbage can? Well, I mean, the, you know, you do again, then you have to solve the upstream problem, so you're not putting garbage into the water that they're eating. But I think that if you can get it to that scale, the amount of garbage any single one would be getting, I think that the solution to pollution is dilution, that old saying. If you do this at a large enough scale, then you actually, and if you get the wetlands, the coastal mangroves and wetlands working again, then you do most of the filtering. in the wetlands before it ever gets to your shellfish.

So, in a sense, biology, not technology, is a solution to our problems.

That is absolutely the essential principle. If you can do it with biology first, it's always better.

Nature is much smarter than humans.

And we went through this, I mean, I love science, but we went through this period where we thought we could, I mean, in farming, we thought, okay, let's just get nature out of the way. Let's create a clean slate and then let's figure out the four nutrients that a plant needs and let's farm like a factory. Let's farm it like a factory. And we completely missed that there are literally trillions of microbes in a teaspoon of soil, most of which we don't know what they are, let alone understand what they do, that are doing things for us that we can never do for ourselves and that you gotta lean on them.

A friend of mine wrote a book called Pharmacology about how the microbiome of the soil and our microbiome are all interdependent. So sort of like eat dirt. Yeah. 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 shit, like that documentary Seaspiracy got so much 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, you know, at massive scale. you know, the largest fishing fleets in the world go out with multiple vessels and helicopters to identify where the schools are. They have small speed boats that encircle the school, wrap their net around and capture the entire thing. What is in that is not just the target species, because when you're targeting an entire school swimming alongside that school of tuna is going to be a myriad of other species that are cohabitating with them and you can't discriminate between those. And by the time all of those fish are suffocated and brought on board through a purse seining net, the compression on those fish is just going to kill everything. So bycatch is the turtles, the dolphins, the seals, the non-target species of fish that were either too small or too big that are going to just be offcast. And so bycatch is a huge issue. So that's one form of farming or, excuse me, fishing. Per seining, it's generally considered highly destructive. Some people try to argue that there's ways that you can target them, but on an industrial scale, it's very difficult to target and be discriminatory because there's times when there's efforts, there's a saying in fishing, 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. Yeah, 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 seafloor 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 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'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. I've 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 by certain vessels to broadcast through satellite where they are, the name of their 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.

Incredible. Okay, so, so regular industrial fishing is a problem. And aside from all the pollution, the oceans, it's over fishing fish stocks. But, you know, one of the problems is, is agriculture because, oh, well, let's, you know, Farm fish, that's better. But the truth is that a lot of the agriculture 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 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, 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. Soy. 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 have, they achieved the objective number one, which was reduce 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 you know, these organizations set a goal to reduce impact on the oceans. And, you know, it really was, it's the responsible responsibility of you and I now to say, hey, we want better nutrition, right? Because, you know, aquaculture demand on wild caught seafood, aquaculture is necessary and reducing impact on the oceans was necessary. Do we as consumers feel it's necessary to read, to reduce our intake of omega sixes and and get better quality, we have to voice that. Otherwise, the industry is just going to keep doing what they do because there's tons of subsidies for corn and soy.

So just like there's conventional feedlot beef and regular agriculture, there's also feedlot fish, industrially raised fish, which is in aquacultures. But there's also regenerative, which we'll talk about in a minute. But before we get to that, I kind of want to go into the dangers and the problems with feedlot fish and why we should be so concerned about it. What is the, 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. 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 sited using high concentrations high density, intensive farming practices are bad for the environment and they're feeding the fish really low quality diets and results in a quality of fish that in some cases is probably on par with what consumers are looking for at Ralph's or, I don't, you know, you know, when they're buying their, you know, their factory farm chicken, you know, but and in some cases it might even be healthier. 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 Mediterranean diets that result in blue zones.

Yeah. Incredible. 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, 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 going to.

Have these things absent from the fish, is that right? Yeah. PCBs are coming from the wild caught fish that are being turned into a fish meal. So, the strange karma of our human society is that we put all these PCBs into the environment, all of these, 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. There's ways to remove it. Even worse. Innovative farms are doing it now. But yeah, that's 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.

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 ago and I encountered this fish farm called Venta de la Palma. And what you're talking about in terms of most modern agriculture is intensive fish farming or feedlot fish. And Venta de la Palma is an extensive fish farm. And they essentially took 8,000 acres that was an estuary and they had it drained to become a cattle farm. That didn't work. so they kind of got it back and they hired an ecologist to restore the ecosystem. And they didn't really even have a hatchery. They just allowed the sort of natural processes that 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 all the toxins. There was high levels of Omega-3s there was incredible richness in the sea bream and the sea bass that they had in terms of the quality, the taste and 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 have the harvest enough to make it worthwhile. So they created this beautiful ecosystem. And essentially that's what regenerative agriculture is. It's restoring the natural ecosystem on 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 Lopam 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 Lopam and other players that are really endeavoring to be good partners with the ocean. And Vatel Lopam 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, it's going to.

Be a carbon sink in a way. It can be a carbon sink as well.

100%.

100%. So it filters and cleans the ocean. It creates a carbon sink. It creates healthy fish that are more nutrient dense.

It's like a win-win-win. The ocean is the largest carbon sink on the planet. And when we invest and help foster mechanisms that can scale ocean-based carbon sinks. It's some of the most powerful mechanisms for carbon sequestration on the planet for sure.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

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