Fearing Fish in Pregnancy?
Despite your OB’s concerns on one hand about mercury in fish – while somehow blithely injecting thimerosol-containing (ethylmercury) flu shots, on the other – many women remain confused about the role of seafood in a pregnancy diet. Mercury is a neurotoxin, and Minamata Disease in Japan was enough of a population-wide experiment to demonstrate the toxicity of seafood polluted with methylmercury. Lesser known and more persistent contaminants such as PCBs are also known to have deleterious effects on neurocognitive and endocrine outcomes in babies. Does eliminating fish during pregnancy actually safeguard against these?
- A study published December 2013 identified a threshold of 5 years for reduction in PCBs, stating that: “The lack of substantial impact for short- term compliance (1 year) suggests that current advisories based predominantly on long-lived POPs are likely to be ineffective in reducing human exposure to many chemical groups for which they are designed.”
- This state of environmental pollution is the tragic and unacceptable result of chemical lobbies, negligent regulation, and abandonment of the precautionary principle.
- We may have arrived at a place where distilled fish oil capsules are a safer source of nutrition than the food itself.
- The moral of the story may be to eat now for a future pregnancy by consuming low contaminant fish such as sardines and anchovies.
Read the entire study, Evaluating the Effectiveness of Fish Consumption Advisories: Modeling Prenatal, Postnatal, and Childhood Exposures to Persistent Organic Pollutants.
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