Are Seafood Shrimp and Fish Safer Than Freshwater Ones? Not at All!
In the dietary restrictions I give my patients, seafood ranks first. Many patients and their families ask in puzzlement: isn't seafood supposed to be safer? Aren't marine fish and shrimp safer than freshwater fish and shrimp? The answer is no. Sea fish are not safer than freshwater fish; marine products also have serious pollution problems. The belief that seafood is safer is merely an illusion.
Quite apart from the fact that all seafood is a common allergen, human pollution of the oceans is staggering. The huge amounts of garbage humans produce on land ultimately flow through streams and rivers into the sea.
Each year about 8 million tons of plastic waste enter the oceans. Plastic is not decomposed by microbes, but under sunlight it breaks down into tiny plastic particles. Most marine plastic particles are under 5 millimeters in diameter; in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch there are 334,000 plastic particles per square kilometer. It is estimated that the ocean holds 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic waste, 98% of which are plastic film, fishing line, and unrecognizable fragments. By 2050, the total mass of ocean garbage is projected to exceed that of fish.
Eighty percent of ocean garbage originates on land. The household waste we produce in daily life ultimately drifts on wind and rivers into the sea. Of the earth's 7 billion people, about one-third live near the coast and discharge waste directly into the ocean; tourists visiting beaches also produce large amounts of garbage.
After this garbage enters the sea, it is churned by waves, reacts chemically with seawater, and under ultraviolet sunlight degrades into even more toxic microplastics.
These plastics are not only absorbed by marine plants but also eaten by marine animals. The marine food chain has thus been severely damaged. Almost no marine plant or animal has failed to ingest plastic particles whose surfaces are coated with toxins—and these toxin-laden particles are classified by the World Health Organization as Group 1 carcinogens.
Scientists predict that by 2050, about 99% of seabirds will have, to some degree, ingested all kinds of oddly shaped plastic debris. Many sea creatures eat plastic directly: sea turtles mistake plastic bags for jellyfish, and seabirds mistake plastic pellets for eggs. They feed these ocean scraps to their chicks, completely unaware.
Marine krill and zooplankton normally feed on microbes, but with so many microplastics in the water they cannot tell microbes from plastic particles, and they swallow the toxic particles as food.
The somewhat larger fish and other marine animals mostly feed on krill and zooplankton, so in feeding they not only directly ingest much plastic but also indirectly absorb large amounts of toxin accumulated in the krill and zooplankton.
As for the ocean's top consumers—the largest marine animals, which prey on smaller fish and animals—this means their bodies likewise carry large amounts of the toxins borne by plastic particles.
When we humans eat marine animals, we are indirectly ingesting the ocean's microplastics. So seafood is not safe; there is no such thing as healthy deep-sea seafood marketed under a "deep-sea fish" label. Seafood, without doubt, is also a carcinogen produced by our own era.
I have always opposed cancer patients using sea cucumber (haichen shen) for nourishment, because sea cucumbers likewise contain large amounts of toxic microplastics. Patients who stubbornly insist on taking sea cucumber are in fact chronically ingesting the ocean's plastic particles.
Reducing, even eliminating, the use of plastic products and protecting our planet's already fragile ecology is everyone's responsibility. Each of us is doing something, large or small, to damage our own living environment. Cancer, one might say, is self-inflicted.
Most sadly, in barely two hundred years we humans have wrecked our own environment to a shocking degree. We have ourselves tolled the death knell for humankind.