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Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

No, please don't.

Commercial fishing is not good. Do some research to find the many reasons.

Plastic is not something you want to eat, and fish have increasing amounts of plastic in them.

Same goes for Mercury. Sardines (and probably anchovies) don't have much, but other larger fish do.

Were it not for these problems, then I too would advocate good canned sardines for health. They have higher calcium per weight than any other food or drink. They have a good amount of protein, and of course they have the omega oils.

But the current state of things is such that it would be wise to reduce consumption, not increase it.

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We all (should) know what happens when overfishing occurs. [0]

There's a balance between doing what's optimal for individual health and what can be sustained. Unfortunately, I don't know of any better or equal omega-3 source because plant-based and fish oil capsules are demonstrably inferior. Canned, sustainable-quotaed, wild-caught, extremely fresh sardines and anchovies caught around South America are precisely what were recommended by the documentary The Fish on My Plate. The amount of bioavailable omega-3 content in them is significantly higher than fish oil pills, and was confirmed with blood tests. The thing is, in order to have a clinical impact requires consuming several servings per week or everyday would be a minimum amount.

I think it's pointless diet-shaming and nibbling around the edges to demand everyone become strictly vegan when better alternatives and mixes exist that can improve health.

0. Monterery Sardine Story Richard H. Parrish (2000)

https://swfsc.noaa.gov/publications/CR/2000/2000ParrR2.pdf

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/fish/

> they calculated that if 100,000 people ate farmed salmon twice a week for 70 years, the extra PCB intake could potentially cause 24 extra deaths from cancer—but would prevent at least 7,000 deaths from heart disease

Interesting tidbit from the article.

> twice a week

That's the important part. I was eating tuna it pretty much every day for about a year until I found out that it was dangerous. They don't even have warnings on the can. Tony Robbins fried his brain doing that[0]. Still just hoping that I didn't do any damage to myself.

The fishing industry lobbies have sued the FDA and other health organisations around the world to prevent then from requiring warnings on the label, and to get them to change the maximum PPM levels:

> However, the fishing industry sued FDA, arguing that the economic impacts of the standard were likely to be too severe. A court agreed, and FDA had to revise the Action Level, raising it to 1.0 ppm, the current level.[1]

> Scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimate that as many as 600,000 babies are born each year at risk of neurological and developmental problems because their mothers have high blood mercury levels from fish consumption.[2]

[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/are-there-toxic-heavy-metals-...

[1] http://mercuryfactsandfish.org/mercury-facts/the-fda-action-...

[2] https://e360.yale.edu/features/a_call_for_tougher_standards_...

Tony Robbins says lots of tuna and swordfish. Swordfish is a no-no

If people are going to eat meat (a couple of times a week), then fish is probably the way to go. Small fish, that is. But microalgal omega-3 EPA/DHA has all the benefits and none of the mercury/microplastics/environmental/ethical concerns. Less than a dollar a day[0], and the price continues to fall.

[0] https://www.vegetology.com/shop/opti3-omega-3-epa-dha

But has it been double-blinded clinically verified to be as bioavailable as the omega-3 compounds from consuming very fresh canned sardine/anchovies? And, supplements aren't regulated in the US, you really have no idea what's in them and no idea about proper dosage. Supplements in the US are generally a popular, expensive scam with little or zero evidence to back them up.

You also might want to watch The Fish on My Plate, a Michael Pollan-like documentary, because the evidence points to taking fish oil pills in sufficient quantities to have a clinically-significant effect would risk cardiovascular dysfunction and metabolic issues long beforehand, and how, anecdotally, eating small, wild-caught, heavy-metals-free fish on a near-daily basis seems like the best approach without more data. They also go into detail about the horrors of fish farming, pros/cons of wild-caught.

Sardines seem consistently not to fall into your objections. Because they are low on the food chain, they don't have the same mercury and plastic issues as larger fish. I also have not seen strong evidence that they're in any danger from current fishing practices or that it is significantly impacting its predators. Sardines are pretty great

So what’s the alternative? Beef? Chicken? Pork? Vegetarian?

Every one of these has significant downsides to them (for you vegetarians out there, the phosphorous that leeches into the runoff is huge, affecting the ecosystem in ways we still don’t understand).

I get every point you make, but honestly, what is the real alternative?

Most vegetables are grown for lifestock food, so I don't think that's valid concern about vegetarianism.

If you eat a lot of meat, then you have all the vegetarian concerns you can come up with plus all the concerns directly tied to meat plus the rest of the indirect concerns.

If you remove all the meat from the world’s food supply, you’re going to have to make up for a lot of bulk as well as protein. So you will still be growing lots of plants. And those plants will be fertilized.

most plants grown for animal consumption are not human quality. And human food can’t be grown everywhere animal food is.

For example grazing livestock using hilly land that only grows small grasses.

> the phosphorous that leeches into the runoff is huge

Can you please expand on this? Animal agriculture is the primary cause of ocean dead-zones (due to fertilizer + manure run-off).[0] Because you're still eating plants - it's just that you're filtering them through another animal, and thus removing the vast majority of the calories, protein, and other nutrients that you would have got if you'd directly consumed the plants.

I don't think there's any debate on the relative environmental impact of a plant-based diet versus one that includes meat and dairy. It wins in terms of pollution, land usage, water usage, and basically every other metric.[1][2][3]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/01/meat-ind...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...

[2] https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49238749

I just eat the plastic instead of throwing it out. It's better for the fish and, in the end, I'm going to eat it anyways.

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