Relax

Published June 29th, 2008

 
There’s an old Three Stooges line in which Curley says to Moe: “I hear that fish is brain food.”

To which Moe replies: “Then you should eat a whale.”

And future Boca Raton mothers should in fact be eating fish, says the Center for Consumer Freedom. More to the point, limiting fish intake appears to result in less intelligent children.

Pregnant women here and everywhere can breathe a little easier following release of a report which says flatly that various environmental groups should “cease their long-standing campaigns aimed at scaring women of childbearing age about trace levels of mercury in fish.”

The nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom called on environmental groups including Oceana, the Mercury Policy Project, the Environmental Working Group, and the Sea Turtle Restoration Project (along with Consumer Reports magazine) to cease “their long-standing campaigns.”

In a landmark scientific study appearing in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, researchers found “no evidence to lend support to the warnings … that pregnant women should limit their seafood consumption.”

Among the 11,875 women in this study, those who consumed the least seafood during pregnancy had children who scored the worst on IQ and other developmental tests. Mothers-to-be who ate the most fish had children who scored the highest.

National Institutes of Health researcher Dr. Joseph Hibbeln and his team concluded, “The harm [from mercury in fish] is unlikely to be greater than the overall benefits of nutrients at the concentrations usually found in seafood.”

 In response to Dr. Hibbeln’s groundbreaking research, Center for Consumer Freedom Director of Research David Martosko said: “There’s a growing scientific consensus that fish is brain food. Our mothers were right. But some environmental activists want to give fish the skull-and-crossbones treatment. As more research is done, this is looking more and more irresponsible.”

For more information about trace levels of mercury in fish -- and why those levels are largely irrelevant to human health -- visit www.MercuryFacts.org <http://www.MercuryFacts.org>.

The facts founds in this new report represent the exposure of yet another in a long line of presumptive conclusions not supported by science.