I used to eat tuna more than I ate Chipotle. Surprising, right?
I would open up the can, drain the juices and add only a bit of mayonnaise so that I wouldn't lose that fishy flavor that I cherished so much. Then, I would warm a pan on the stove and throw the tuna on for a few minutes and let a slice of Swiss cheese melt on top.
One night about a year ago, as I was surfing the net, I came across www.gotmercury.org, a Web site that shows mercury ratings in our friendly sea creatures.
I was curious to see how much mercury was in my can of albacore; so, I typed in my information.
At my current weight, about 110 pounds (ladies never reveal their weight, right?) if I were to eat eight ounces of tuna this week, I would be at 230 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency's recommended limit for mercury exposure. The amount of tuna that I ate far exceeded eight ounces a week, and I had no idea what it meant. As far as I was concerned, I could be used as a thermometer.
I decided to investigate the effects of my mercury consumption further and discovered some alarming facts.
The thing that grinds my gears
as Peter Griffin would say, is the negative results it has on a fetus. One that struck me in particular was a CNN story about a woman who ate tuna during one of her pregnancies and had an autistic child. Although the story did not directly link autism to tuna, the woman stopped eating tuna during her second pregnancy and had a healthy baby.
But where does this mercury come from, and what has the U.S. Food and Drug Administration done to combat this contamination?
Mercury is an element found naturally in the environment, according to www.kidshealth.org, but industrial pollution causes methylmercury, an organic compound, to build up in our oceans and get absorbed by your friends Flounder and Sebastian.
The FDA has only cautioned women against eating large amounts of tuna during pregnancy, and it says that up to six ounces can be eaten.
That's funny since it strongly cautions pregnant women against eating shark, tilefish, swordfish and king mackerel. I can't remember the last time I had a tilefish sandwich with Swiss cheese.
So here I am almost a year later, and I still haven't put my can opener to a can of Chicken of the Sea (insert funny Jessica Simpson joke here). I have opened my mouth to a couple new loves: tilapia and salmon, which have little or no mercury whether canned or fresh.
' Stefanie Toth is a second-year journalism major. Feed her some comments at st135906@ohiou.edu.
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Stefanie Toth
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