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Originally Posted by mynameisjim
Those videos can be quite shocking. I wish they would treat animals more humanely, it would add less than a penny to each pound of meat.
I've been a vegetarian for years (no fish) but be careful eating lots of tuna, it is so filled with mercury it's bad to eat more than once a week. Pregnant women are told not to eat it ever because it contains so many heavy metals.
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WASHINGTON, D.C. ? November 5, 2004 ? The U.S. Tuna Foundation (USTF) today stated that by finding that mercury levels in women and young children are very low and "not of concern," a new study from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should reassure all Americans that eating fish, such as canned tuna, is safe and should be encouraged because of the many health benefits associated with seafood consumption.
Published in the November 5 issue of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the CDC's new study confirms that mercury levels from fish consumption for women and young children in the U.S. are well below any level of concern. Specifically, CDC researchers used the ongoing National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to analyze the amount of mercury in the blood of more than 3,600 women of childbearing age and 1,500 children aged one to five years and found that all had mercury levels significantly below the threshold for any known risk.
Of added significance, the new CDC study updated previous estimates of mercury levels in women and young children and found that concentrations in the blood of American women have actually declined over a four-year period (1999-2002). While CDC estimated that 8 percent of U.S. women had mercury levels at or slightly above the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) "reference dose" in 1999, this number has dropped to only 6 percent. What makes this finding even more significant is the CDC's conclusion that women with mercury concentrations at this slightly higher level are not at risk because EPA built in a ten-fold safety factor when it established its reference dose.
At the same time, the new CDC report confirms previous findings that no child in the U.S. has mercury levels that are even close to the EPA's reference dose and are not at risk from consuming seafood.