Mercury Contamination in Tuna

Nutrition
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[quote]Kelly Baggett wrote:
I wouldn’t put too much stock in that report or any other safety report sponsored by any other organization simply because they’re trying to save their own ass and are only concerned with averages. For example, it is now abundantly clear their were numerous cover-ups with thimerosol containing vaccines and autism. The FDA never came out and said “alright this shit is causing autism so you need to get it the hell out of your vaccines”. They did however say “we recommend based on potential probability that you guys quit selling this thimerosol vaccine”. Hmmm…what is th eprobablility that they would recommend the stuf be pulled if they didn’t know it was dangerous? The difference in the wording is the difference between 0 and billions of dollars in lawsuits.

Now with amalgams…imagine the lawsuits if some organization did admit there were problems? What’s more all these reports use averages. Individuals aren’t averages. The difference in biochemical indivuality between people is simply amazing. There is little doubt that amalgams increase body mercury levels. The problems occur with sensitivity issues. One example of this is autism…autistics appear to have problems with the elimination of mercury. So you might have individual A who is exposed to 5 times as much mercury as individual B but individual B may have 5 times the mercury levels of individual A. Now what if you’re a “sensitive” person and you’re eating 15 cans of tuna per week, getting jacked up on flue shots and other vaccines each year, AND have a whole mouthful of meta?? [/quote]

So what you are saying is that ADA is protecting the dental industry by releasing false reports like this?

[quote]
So you might have individual A who is exposed to 5 times as much mercury as individual B but individual B may have 5 times the mercury levels of individual A. Now what if you’re a “sensitive” person and you’re eating 15 cans of tuna per week, getting jacked up on flue shots and other vaccines each year, AND have a whole mouthful of meta?? [/quote]

I wasnt being condescending when I said that Charles must have been a bad filling. I should have been more clear and stated that he must be one of the few that this actually occurs in compared to the amount of people in the US that have an amalgam filling and do not have these issues. I think you said it best above where you said that you could have a more “sensitive” person. Well isn’t this true with anything medical? I have a hard time believing that the ADA has pulled the wool over so many dental professionals eyes. And if the risks are so high then when don’t they start using gold or platinum fillings. Why would they continue to take this risk?

TR

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When you examine the evidence it wouldn’t surprise me any. It happened with vaccines:

It also goes on in the agriculture industry with corn, wheat etc.

If problems are minor I have a hard time thinking they’d make it public simply because everybody and their brother would be filing lawsuits. People would have to be dieing left and right. People get mercury levels tested, then have their amalgams removed, then mercury levels go down. It’s obvious these fillings are raising the levels. Some organizations says that the rise in mercury levels from amalgams is perfectly safe for people…and i’m sure they are…if you’re one of the 999 out of 1000 people who have normal mercury metabolism or whatever. It should also be noted that dentists have an extremely high rate of suicide which some have attributed to mercury exposure. I don’t know about that but that does sound odd.

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Most of these questions have been answered in the literature. Several studies have illustrated no correlation between amalgam fillings and mercury levels. one such study

Conclusion from study:
“Regardless of professional status, consumption of tuna and saltwater fish were the primary exposure factors that were positively associated with toenail mercury levels. CONCLUSIONS: As shown by the associations with dental profession and fish consumption, the mercury content of toenails is a stable biomarker of cumulative long-term mercury exposure. The lack of association between nail mercury levels and number of amalgam restorations suggests that avoidance of mercury amalgam restorative materials cannot be justified by the presence of mercury released from dental amalgams.”

No one has proven conclusively what mildly elevated levels of mercury do to an adult. Difficult to design a study that would test for it, since adults are more resistant to mild levels. If your eating tuna twice per week, wouldnt worry. If your eating it 3 times per day, maybe you will be one of the ones that helps answer the toxicity in adults question. When you become 50, enter into a study like the first one done on adults at Johns Hopkins that tried to answer this (these people werent bodybuilders eating 3 cans tuna per day)

Reason they limit in children and pregnancy is that there is animal studies and medical evidence suggesting toxicity, such as:

http://www.springerlink.com/app/home/contribution.asp?wasp=db7e59a153314841baf8cddfe7a7638b&referrer=parent&backto=issue,8,10;journal,254,363;linkingpublicationresults,1:400394,1

In case link doesnt work study above concludes:“Summary Young kittens of both sexes were fed daily with mercury contaminated tuna (containing about 0.5 ppm mercury). Neurological disturbances similar to those in Minamata disease or in experimental mercury intoxication (ataxia, weakness and incoordination of movements) were observed after 7?11 months of the experimental course. Microscopic examination revealed degenerations of the granular layer and some Purkinje neurons in the cerebellum. Neuronal necrosis was also observed in the cerebral cortex. The present investigation suggests that fish containing 0.5 ppm mercury (U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved level) may still be potentially hazardous to health when consumed in excessive amounts for prolonged periods of time.”

And this

Personally I eat canned white chicken and wild salmon as mainstay and only occasional light tuna. As for my fillings, I am not the paranoid type that worries about what multiple studies by multiple researchers at multiple institutions have disproven.

FDA has on their site measured amounts in different canned food, if you want.

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There are also some studies demonstrating the opposite:

Dental Mercury is Source of Two-Thirds of Mercury in Population

Aposhian, H.V., D.C. Bruce, W. Alter, R.C. Dart, K.M. Hurlbut, M.M. Aposhian, “Urinary Mercury after Administration of 2, 3-dimercaptopropane-1-sulfonic acid: Correlation with Dental Amalgam Score” FASEB J. 6: 2472-2476; (1992).

ABSTRACT: There is a considerable controversy as to whether dental amalgams may cause systemic health effects in humans because they liberate elemental mercury. Most such amalgams contain as much as 50% metallic mercury. To determine the influence of dental amalgams on the mercury body burden of humans, we have given volunteers, with and without amalgams in their mouth, the sodium salt of 2, 3-dimercaptopropane-1-sulfonic acid (DMPS), a chelating agent safely used in the Soviet Union and West Germany for a number of years. The diameters of dental amalgams of the subjects were determined to obtain the amalgam score. Administration of 300 mg DMPS by mouth increased the mean urinary mercury excretion of the amalgam group from 0.70 to 17.2 ug and that of the non amalgam group from 0.27 to 5.1 ug over a 9 hour period. Two-thirds of the mercury excreted in the urine of those with dental amalgams appears to be derived originally from the mercury vapor released from their amalgams. Linear regression analysis indicated a highly significant positive correlation between the mercury excreted in the urine 2 hours after DMPS administration and the dental amalgam scores. DMPS can be used to increase the urinary excretion of mercury and thus increase the significance and reliability of this measure of mercury exposure or burden, especially in cases of micromercurialism.

Review

Lorscheider, F.L., Vimy, M.J., and Summers, A.O. “Mercury Exposure from Silver Tooth Fillings: Emerging Evidence Questions a Traditional Dental Paradigm.” FASEB Journal (April 1995).

SUMMARY: This document reviews results of animal and human studies of pathophysiologic effects related to mercury leaking from amalgam restorations. Some pertinent points presented include:

every amalgam daily releases on the order of 10 micrograms of mercury into the body (i.e. 3,000,000,000,000,000 mercury atoms per day),
more than 2/3 of the excretable mercury in humans is derived from amalgams,
mercury crosses the maternal placenta into the tissue of a developing fetus,
mercury is capable of inducing auto immunity,
mercury immediately and continually challenges the kidney’s functioning,
mercury can enhance the prevalence of multiple antibiotic resistant intestinal bacteria, and
people exposed to mercury on a sustained basis are at risk to lowered fertility.

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[quote]Al168 wrote:
wow, thanks guys, i can see this is still a contraversial topic!

“I’m going to have to look into donating to groups that are fighting polution/polluters.”
hehe that would be PETA then?

seriously, moving to the countryside isnt such a bad idea, i was looking at cadavers’ lungs the other day and even healthy non-smokers’ lungs had ALL the lymph nodes readily identifiable as big black blobs of tar. it was a bit scary :/[/quote]

This is VERY disturing, though not unexpected.

Flying into Los Angeles makes me feel like other residents I’ve discussed it with: As you see that big brown cloud extending for so many miles past the coast and past L.A. proper, and see how thick it is, and the plane starts to dip into it, you get a lousy feeling realizing, “Hey, I’m going to LIVE in that crap!” It’s like submerging into a fishbowl to breathe water for the rest of your life, for all its relation to air, the stuff you’re really meant to breathe. I’ve read living a day in Los Angeles is like smoking a pack of cigarettes, and I believe it.

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I wouldn’t rely on the FDA for a definition of safety, or any governmental organization. The history isn’t good.

I work for a law firm that deals with asbestos. Britain did a large, thorough study regarding the affect of asbestos on the lungs and other internal organs of asbestos workers at the very beginning of the last century. As a result, asbestos use was sharply curtailed in that country.

American regulators, aware of the study, chose to ignore it. Generations of Americans were subsequently exposed to asbestos, and when the truth finally couldn’t be gotten around any longer, the American public not only had to face the massive amount of death and disease caused by asbestos on a personal basis, but start to pay ever greater amounts in compensation once the courts and American science admitted that the people dropping off weren’t all just imagining things.

The asbestos problem is far from over, but it will have cost many, many billions by the time it was over. And it never had to become a deep-rooted problem in the first place. You can thank your government that it did.

Don’t rely on politicians and businessmen to advise you on health matters.

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unless your eatin about 85 cans of tuna a day, i wouldnt worry about it

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Mercury is ubiquitous. Its in your water supply, its in the soil, and its in the food you eat. If you want to avoid mercury, do not eat, do not drink, and yes remove all your fillings.

If you’re willing to accept a level of mercury, then you need to ask what level. And more importantly what elevates that level the most.

Researches have learned a little since 1992 and 1995. Its methymercury that is the concern, not the lowlevel ubiquitous mercury in the environment that is excretable and unavoidable.

From Hopkins study published in April 2005.
“Mercury released into the air via coal-fired generating plants and other pollution sources eventually finds its way into rivers, lakes and oceans. Once there, bacteria convert the toxin into methylmercury. Methylmercury then makes its way up the aquatic food chain, concentrating at high levels in the flesh of large, relatively long-lived fish species. Once inside the brain, methylmercury changes its chemical composition so it cannot exit the organ. This means people experience a gradual buildup of the toxin over their lifespan. As the brain ages, it grows less able to deal with this toxic insult. The main finding was that at the levels of mercury that we found – about average for the general population – there were no cognitive effects”

But if you want to spend your time going after the miniscule proportion of mercury, not even the methylmercury, then you will need to do a few studies…

  1. Find the concentration and form of mercury that is toxic in an adult.

  2. Prove its effects.

  3. Demonstrate Amalgam significantly elevates that form of mercury above what is normally found in the body, and show that elevated level to be toxic.

  4. Repeat and verify all studies by an independent researcher that finds same results.

Otherwise everyone is going to point to the fact that amalgam has been used for years and years, and no one can find evidence of mercury poisoning from these low levels in studies. In fact they can not even verify in repeatable studies that amalgam influences those low levels. And they can not show any effect on the known toxin, methylmercury.

If I were going to worry, I would pick the slow buildup of methylmercury, which cannot exit the brain, in those consuming large amounts of seafood that is high in methylmercury, and whether that will contribute to cognitive dysfuntion when they get to be 80. More interesting study to me.

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Just curious what’s an average asbestos settlement normally?? My dad worked in a refinery for 35 years and after retiring a few years ago recently found out he has a spot in his lungs from asbestos exposure. He’s already had a firm contact him about the settlement etc. but I just want to make sure he’s not getting screwed.