Good Fish, Bad Fish

  • Some grocery stores are training their staff on the benefits and risks of eating some kinds of fish. Nels Carson (pictured) answers customers' concerns about fish contamination. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Fish advisories are confusing. Their guidelines change depending on your gender and age,
and on the type of fish you’re eating. Reporter Kyle Norris boils down
some of the information in advisories and comes up with a few things to think about
when you eat fish:

Transcript

Fish advisories are confusing. Their guidelines change depending on your gender and age,
and on the type of fish you’re eating. Reporter Kyle Norris boils down
some of the information in advisories and comes up with a few things to think about
when you eat fish:


So I did a little informal survey the other day where I asked my friends what they knew about
eating fish. Some of my friends said, “Hey, isn’t eating fish good for you?” Well, turns out they’re right. Fish are
great sources of protein. They’re low in “bad” fats and high in “good” fats, or omega-3
fatty acids, which help your heart stay healthy.


And some of my other friends knew that fish were bad for you. Turns out they’re also right. Fish
take in pollutants through their food and water. Toxins such as mercury, PCBs, and
dioxins. If humans eat enough contaminated fish, those contaminants can build up in our
bodies and cause serious health problems. Contaminants are especially threatening for
small children and women of childbearing age because they can affect children’s
developing nervous systems.


Governments put out advisories so we know which fish are safe to eat. But advisories aren’t
the easiest thing to understand. And anyway, what do you do if you’re in a restaurant, or
cruising through the grocery store and you just want some fish?


“Uh we’re standing in front of the seafood counter at Whole Foods and we’re looking at
our fresh case…”


That’s Nels Carlson. He heads up the seafood department at my local Whole Foods
Market. He says people ask him about fish safety everyday:


“It can be kind of a daunting topic, I think, because there is such a variety. It’s not just a
gross generalization. So it really, it takes a lot of dialogue between customers and team
members and having a very knowledgeable team member base here really helps that.”


They’ll ask him about mercury in the fish, a highly toxic metal that occurs naturally but is a lot more prevalent
mostly because of coal burning power plants. Mercury shows up in higher concentrations
in certain kinds of fish. It’s nice to have a knowledgeable guy like Nels to talk with. Good fish vendors, such as
Whole Foods, go through special training on fish safety. But what if there’s no seafood
expert hanging out next to the fish sticks in the freezer section, if you know what I mean?


Anita Sandretto teaches in the Environmental Health Sciences department at the
University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, and she said that my friends are right.
Okay, well, she didn’t really say that, but she said there are good things about fish and there are bad things about fish:


“If you want to have the benefit of the fat and the omega-3 fatty acids, eat fish with more
fat, but the fat will also be where you will see the contaminants such as PCBs, dioxin.
The flesh will also be where you might have the mercury contamination.”


See, that’s the thing about eating fish: it gets complicated and there are no hard and fast
rules. Sandretto says eating fish is all about treading a line between the advantages and
the risks. So, if there is a risk, you want to reduce it as much as possible:


“…Because if you have any risk in a particular type of food, if you only consume once in
while, you have a less risk of anything bad happening.”


So think in terms of moderation and variety. Sandretto says it’s cool if you want to eat fish once or
twice a week, and to try and vary the kinds of fish that you eat. She says moderation and
variety are actually great rules of thumb to apply to your entire diet. So you could eat a
turkey sandwich on white one day, tuna on whole wheat the next, and a veggie burger the day
after that.


If you eat fish caught from local waters, check with your regional or state health
departments for their fish advisories. Just because a waterway looks clean or is in a
picturesque setting does not mean that its fish are harmless. Contaminants enter the
water in all kinds of ways.


One last thought: imagine a little fish with a little bit of contamination in its body.
Now imagine a medium-sized fish, who swims along and eats that fish and 99 of its closest small
fish friends. That medium guy now has 100 times more contamination than the small fish.
And now let’s say a big fish swims up and gulps down ten medium fish. That big fish has a
concentration that’s 1000 times higher than what that origianal small fish had.


So the moral of that story is, eat smaller fish when possible, also called pan fish. And
at the end of the day, keep in mind that the majority of research, including a recent study
from Harvard’s School of Public Health, say that the benefits of eating fish in moderation
outweigh the risks.


For The Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

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Highway Debate Dividing Communities

  • Landowners who are opposed to the beltway say no matter which route it follows, it'll be cutting through prime farmland. Proponents of the beltway say the highway is needed to support the already fast-growing suburbs. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)

As suburbs grow, politicians and city planners often promote new highways as a way to ease congestion and encourage more economic growth. Rebecca Williams reports on the struggle between local officials who want to encourage that growth and people who worry a new highway will fuel more sprawl:

Transcript

As suburbs grow, politicians and city planners often promote new highways as
a way to ease congestion and encourage more economic growth. Rebecca
Williams reports on the struggle between local officials who want to
encourage that growth and people who worry a new highway will fuel more
sprawl:


The Census Bureau says commutes to work are getting longer in the nation’s
biggest cities. Demographers say that’s because people are moving
out farther and farther from their jobs in search of more house for the
money or a quieter way of life. More people moving out to the fringes of the suburbs
means more pressure on two-lane roads and more congestion.


New highways are one of the tools local officials reach for when traffic
gets worse. People living in the fast-growing suburbs west of Chicago have
been debating a proposed new highway nicknamed the Prairie Parkway. The
four-lane beltway would connect these outer suburbs.


Jan Carlson is the Transportation Commissioner for Kane County, about 40
miles from downtown Chicago. He’s been looking forward to the beltway since
plans were unveiled five years ago:


“If you listen to the complaints, as I do, of people stuck in traffic and if
you consider the many economic advantages that moving that traffic brings to
us, it appears to me that the greater good is to move forward with the
project.”


Carlson says he knows new highways can rapidly speed up development in an
area, but he points to census data that show his county and others nearby
are already among the fastest-growing in the nation without a new highway:


“I am not one of those who subscribes to the theory that if you don’t build
it, they will not come.”


Jan Carlson says the new highway will make the local economy stronger,
bringing in much needed jobs to the suburbs, but many people are strongly opposed to the
beltway. Marvel Davis lives on a farm that’s been in her family for 170 years. Some of
her farmland lies within a corridor that the state has set aside for the proposed beltway.


“I tell people that’s the way sprawl happens. You think, well I’ve lost
that field to the farm, so the first guy that comes along and offers you
$50,000 an acre, your temptation is going to be pretty great, isn’t it?”


Davis says even though construction on the beltway isn’t expected to begin
until 2009, she’s seen a lot of new buildings spring up. She says it’s true
the area’s already growing, but she thinks the prospect of a new highway
might be encouraging more growth:


“So which comes first, the chicken or the egg? If word goes forth this
road’s going to happen and you come in with all kinds of developers, it’s
almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”


And urban planners agree it really is a chicken and egg relationship. It’s
hard to say which comes first. Highways speed up the pace of growth. And
growth causes a need for more highways.


Bill Klein is the director of research with the American Planning
Association. He says new highways do ease traffic congestion, but only for
a short time, before those highways get packed with people driving out to
their new homes in the suburbs.


“It’s very difficult to build your way out of sprawl. The more highways you
build, the more sprawl you get. Intellectually we’ve known this stuff for a
good long time but sometimes the political will to do anything about it is
the bigger problem.”


In the case of the Prairie Parkway, there is a political heavyweight in the
parkway’s corner. US House Speaker Dennis Hastert has been promoting the
concept of an outer beltway in his district since he went to Congress in the
late 1980’s. Just last year, Speaker Hastert earmarked 207 million dollars
for the beltway in the federal transportation bill.


Landowner Marvel Davis suspects the beltway might not go forward if it
weren’t for the Speaker’s support. She says if someone could show her the
beltway was in the country’s best interest, she’d support it.


“But if I’m going to lose my farm and my community to make a few people
multimillionaires then I’m not willing to do it.”


Marvel Davis says she knows she could make a lot of money if she sold her
land to developers, and she did actually sell more than 100 acres recently.
But she sold it to her county’s forest preserve for half of what she could
get from a developer.


Even though it’s years away, the promise of a new highway is sharply
dividing these communities. Whether or not they see growth as a good thing,
almost everyone agrees a new highway will speed up the pace of that growth.


For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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