Personally, I hate fish - I do, however ingest a great deal of fish OIL, much like the rest of you. What kind of stance do you guys take on the potential mercury levels of that? I would imagine it would be contingent upon the source of the fish that the oil is derived from. Thoughts?? This is the one area where I am not very informed, as it’s never really caught my attention…thanks for the thread.
Jason, sorry to break this one to you, but most fish oils are contamined with heavy metals. The ones which go trough a molecular destilation purification process are, acording to Dr Mercola, clean. you’ll have to look around and do some research till you find one. Most good quality ones are ok i think.
I meant contaminated. The problem with second languages is that you allways end up mixing things up. Sorry.
Pharmaceutical fish oils…
Read Dr. Sears “Omega Rx Zone” He talks non stop about the benefits of fish oils BUT they
have to be pharmaceutical grade to prevent any heavy metal contaminantion. Low and behold he sells his own line. But these are very expensive…actually to expensive to be sold anywhere but his site. I believe that mercury
contaminantion is a concern with the amounts of caps you have to take to see benefits. I just wish the pharma stuff was cheaper.
Personally I use Twinlab Dale Alexander. The label on the bottle says the screen for heavy metals.
random – Saw his updated warnings. All I can say is bummer. Time to do more research.
Ko -- totally agree with you that variety is critical and acute mercury poisoning is rare, and maybe Mercola is raising alarm on the side of long-term caution (which is not necessarily a bad thing), but I should point out that massive amounts of mercury have been introduced to the enviroment since at least the 18th century. Mercury is a by-product of several types of mining, most notably coal mining -- coal mining and burning almost inevitably releases mercury. Plus, gold mining throughout the 19th century has involved dumping plenty of mercury directly into rivers as part of the panning process. It's still done today in some more remote parts of the world -- you'll find some otherwise untouched rain forests where some gold panners trying to make enough money to buy some shoes and a bag of flour will still use the old mercury gold-panning method, causing remote water basins and rivers that may remain contaminated for decades. And all that river water flows to the sea eventually...
Restless - thanks for the response - I’ve been taking the ‘sam’s club’ brand…so I’ll have to investigate! - thanks for the usefull info everyone.
Clearly polluting food source areas is a bad
thing. Especially with mercury. Certainly
some types of fish are higher risk for mercury
poisening than others. I do respect Dr.
Mercola. However I thing he is blowing this
issue WAY out of proportion. A major part
of his argument is based on hair sample
analysis. Isn’t hair sample analysis just
about useless? Yes, avoid fish that are more
likely to have higher mercury levels like
tuna, swordfish and bottom dwelling fish (eg
flounder and halibut) and keep fish intake
to a reasonable level and I think you’ll be
fine. (Note: mercury is a heavy metal and
sinks to the bottom of the ocean, hence bottom
dwelling fish are higher risk.) I eat salmon
every day, and personally I have no worries
about developing mercury poisoning.
I recently researched this for a friend. See: San Francisco Marin Medical Society > Home sfm301d.htm [remove any spaces from link]. From this article: “To give an example, salmon has a mercury level on average of 0.035 mcg/g. A 60 Kg person could eat 42 mcg Hg/ week and stay within the current EPA guidelines. This would be about 2 lbs per week of salmon. For swordfish at 1 mcg/g this would be less than 2 ounces per week. For canned tuna at 0.206 mcg/g, a child should not eat more than 1 ounce per 20 lbs. body wt./week”. If you are eating more then this, and my friend was you may have an elevated mecury level. The way to find out is to get a BLOOD test.
The way to check this out is to get a BLOOD test. A friend who eats salmon every day (although I think he did it it more then once on some days) had a blood tests which came back…30 (I forget the units) and wanted me to check out what it meant. I found an article on the web written by an MD in …think it was San Francisco who researched this topic. It seems that even salmon (alas) has enough mercury in it and if you eat it every day you might be at risk. Can’t find the article now but you want to blood test to come back under 10. IF I can find the articel again, I will post it.
Sardines are also high in EFAs, and contain less mercury.
I believe Mercola said that the Member’s Mark fish oils were good.
I’ve basically decided that I will never eat in an ‘optimum’ way. I don’t make enough money. Hell, even if I made enough money, I wouldn’t want to spend it on making sure that all my food sources were ‘pure.’ Somehow I really don’t think it’ll affect my life expectancy, or even the quality of my life. If I develop an illness or see strong scientific evidence that something I am doing or eating is harmful, I’ll consider changing my ways, but one guy with an MD and some hair samples isn’t enough for me.
Heres the paper I read:
http://seafood.ucdavis.edu/ pubs/mercury.htm
One thing I missed is that the woman who was developed mercury poisoning, returned to the diet after a few weeks off. After going off the diet her symptoms disappeared after five monthes. I realize that mercury was used in the late 1800's, but the point is that the levels in these fish have not changed. One would think that they would either increase or decrease.
hmm… discussed this with a holistic nutritionist/professor the other day. According to her, one of the big problems with both mercury and fluoride is that it doesn’t just flush out of our systems like a lot of toxins - the cumulative effect is what can cause problems in the long term. She also suggested that ‘tainted’ sources of fish oils might be slightly worse since a lot of toxicity stores itself in fatty tissues. Norwegian Cod Liver oil was a source she identified as relatively pure, particularly as an alternative to flax seed oil if you have any prostate issues (don’t ask me… she just mentioned that).
She also recommended if you can't get organic cottage cheese, buy the lowfat stuff and add healthy fats to it since the chemicals in the non organic stuff can be a bitch to especially sensitive people.
It seems that nothing is safe to eat anymore? Considering the volume of food required by bodybuilders, I’m guessing the cumulative negative effects could possibly manifest themselves relatively quickly in a person that routinely eats 3-4 tins of tuna a day as I used to do.
Haven't read much in regards to the fluroide issue. Here in Australia all our water is fluronated, so don't tell me this is bad for me, because I drink about a gallon of it a day. (Filtered of course.)
What was strange regarding Mercola's recommendatons for Omega 3's is that he touts Cod Liver oil as a good source. I've always read the opposite simply because the amount of cod liver oil needed would prove quite toxic- particularly in Australia's sunny climes.
I think I will just take my chances with sardines for now and the odd salmon fillet once or twice a week (yummy!) Later on though I think I will have a mercury test done to see where I'm at.
Random - sorry, but more and more evidence points to fluoridated water just being a way to profitably get rid of industrial waste. It probably won’t kill you or anything, but it isn’t going to improve your health either.
BTW: The fluoride used in fluoridation is the toxic sodium fluoride, not the relatively benign calcium fluoride.
Another problem is, they do not necessarily accomplish a great job at keeping the fluoride-water ratios at the stated level of something like 1:1000000000… usually there is more fluoride in the water than we’d like to know.
I’m not sure about the filtering… problem is, the ADA and other vested interest groups really have made fluoride sound like such a great thing when its extremely toxic… so thus you can buy fluoride water as opposed to the pure water… and some water filtration systems brag about how they let the fluoride in while filtering out the other stuff.
I’m not an expert on it, so I’m loathe to say a lot more on the subject, but I know that so far there has been no evidence indicating that fluoridation of water has any true benefits to the human condition.
As far as I know, fluoride has a very protective effect on the rate of decay of teeth.
And I have never heard of any literature that suggests there is any other effect of high fluoride rather than getting the relatively benign condition of fluoridated teeth
Lazyeye - actually, and I’m speaking from memory… comparison studies have shown no difference in tooth decay between fluoridated and non-fluoridated water… Its not really a big deal considering they already fluoridate nearly all toothpastes and in general our standards of dental hygiene are pretty high.
Fluoride is most definitely a toxic thing however… you can look this up yourself. I suggest the topic 'fluoride poisoning"
Wow! Were have you been the past few years? Even the sientific community has already admited that fluoride was one of the biggest mistakes doctors made. It’s highly toxic. In Europe some contries have already pulled it out of the market.
They pulled certain flouride rich products off the shelfs, because of risk of toxicity from it, as they were getting cases of children drinking it, as well as numerous adults swallowing all the flouride rich mouth washes.
Most european countries still flouridate water.