Fishy Science
by Sandy Szwarc

With increasing urgency over the past few years, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, and environmental groups have issued alarming consumer warnings about the dangers of eating fish.

Allegedly, fish consumption has become dangerous due to the presence of methylmercury, an organic compound produced when certain bacteria in soil or water ingest inorganic mercury. These warnings have been specifically targeted at expectant mothers with scary claims that eating fish could jeopardize the health and neurological development of their babies unless they follow complicated fish-eating advisories to “reduce their exposure to the harmful effects of mercury.”

However, there is no evidence that the levels of methylmercury in the fish that Americans consume are cause for any health concern. In fact, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found that all American women of childbearing age are many times below exposure levels even theorized as posing a risk of detrimental effects for either themselves or their babies.

Agencies and activist groups have issued these unfounded advisories based on tenuous risk portrayals. In today’s pursuit of absolute assurances of safety, exceedingly precautionary and arbitrary safety cushions have been set at levels many times higher than those where any actual risk has been detected. But the public is being misled into believing that exposure to mercury levels at or near those extreme precautionary safety thresholds represents actual danger.

The fear mongering needlessly frightens consumers, especially women of childbearing age, deterring them from eating fish. With the health benefits of a diet rich in fish and seafood well recognized, these advisories have actually jeopardized hundreds of thousands of adults and four million expectant mothers and their babies.

The sad fact is that terrorizing the public about a perfectly safe and nourishing food isn’t about public health. Nor is it driven by scientific evidence. It’s about politics. Fish—especially canned tuna, America’s most popular variety—has become a symbol in the well-organized scare campaign by environmental groups seeking stricter mercury emissions regulations. Activists claim that fish is so contaminated with mercury, that it is unsafe for women and children to eat, making harsher restrictions on mercury emissions imperative.

The problem is, methylmercury in fish is not the same as mercury in emissions, and evidence indicates that further reductions in mercury emissions would not have an appreciable effect on mercury exposure for Americans or improve public health. However, the profoundly expensive regulations will have serious human costs, endangering the lives and health of millions of Americans, with the hardship falling disproportionately on the poor, elderly, disabled, and minorities.

Nevertheless, governments have seized upon these groundless fears and enacted pernicious regulations to address a nonexistent problem. When politics usurps science and sound risk assessments, consumers lose.

This originally appeared as an Issue Analysis from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

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