 Are the ocean so polluted that it's no longer safe to eat fish? The question I get the most is about mercury, and certain larger fish, especially carnivorous, do accumulate mercury over time, but that's naturally occurring largely negated by selenium as it's antagonistic and pales in comparison to the other stuff that can be in fish. If you simply avoid those higher mercury fish, king mackerel, marlin, swordfish and certain tunas, mercury really is a distraction from the main issues. Now there are thousands and thousands of studies on different types of pollutants in fish, but the general answer is to avoid seafood if you can, it really is that bad. Get your nutrition from land-based sources, not that those aren't polluted, just not as poisonous. And so mega fatty acids, EPA and DHA do primarily come from fish. If you want to include it in your diet, Alaska and New Zealand are probably the least polluted, and of course those fish farms where the elite are raising their caviar. Even so, you want to keep it to smaller amounts of the more nutritional parts of the fish, such as that caviar, salmon roe, and fattier fish in minimal amounts, which is why we do have it on Frankie's free-range meat, as well as raw cod liver oil. If people want it, we might as well provide a high-quality version. In my research, I've come up with 11 categories for these pollutants. The first few fall under POPs, persistent organic pollutants, which were widely used during the boom in industrial production after World War II. These include the well-known ones, PCBs, DDT, and dioxins. PCBs are polychlorinated biphenyls, and they're highly toxic industrial compounds. They were present in electrical equipment, oil, insulation, paint, and plastics, starting in 1929 before they were banned 50 years later, 1979. And they're associated with various types of cancer. They have a fairly long half-life in the body, and can take over a year to be completely detoxed. And that really applies to most of the stuff here. You have to remove it from your diet and be clean, quality, organic for pretty long periods of time to recover. DDT, dichlorodifenyl trichlorothane, probably the longest word we've ever pronounced on this channel, is one of the most controversial pesticides ever made. An estimated 4 billion pounds have been used in the environment. And back in the 1960s, they studied certain birds that became so polluted, the birds were no longer able to produce offspring. Exposure to high doses result in vomiting, shakiness, and seizures. And a lot of these chemicals, you'll see, oh well, it causes problems during development. Yeah, well, that's because babies are less tolerant of toxins. They will simply die, whereas humans will just suffer, and it's harder to prove that a human is being poisoned as opposed to a baby. And I remember, you know, one time I ate a bunch of farmed salmon for two or three days straight carnivore style, and after I ate it, I was laying in bed, like, literally shaking. I felt dizzy. I threw up a few times. I was poisoning myself with probably DDT, and who knows what else. So then we have PPDDs and PPDFs, which are polychlorinated dibenzodioxins and polychlorinated dibenzofurans. And these are more commonly referred to as dioxins. They're products of industrial practices, majorly from incinerations such as burning waste and trash. Environmental exposure to dioxins results in developmental and reproductive toxicity in fish, birds, and mammals. The Great Lakes are an example of an aquatic ecosystem that has become greatly compromised by these types of pollutants, and as with most toxins, they're stored in the fat and liver, create oxidative stress, and as we said earlier, it can take years and years to be detoxed from the body. PPDEs, aka polybromated diphenylethers, are a group of compounds used as flame retardants. They're found in TVs, toaster ovens, mattresses, and drapes, banned in 2004, but still pollute our environment greatly. The level of these flame retardants was five times higher in the Baltic Sea than the Atlantic Ocean. The Baltic Sea being one of the most heavily polluted water sources, so much that fish there aren't deemed safe to eat in most markets. Over a dozen years after these products were banned, they're still poisoning people. And that's something to keep in mind, enclosed water sources take dozens and dozens of years to clean themselves out. Moving on to microplastics. As a result of widespread contamination from human activity, microplastics are ingested by many species of wildlife, including fish and shellfish. Because microplastics are associated with chemicals from manufacturing and they absorb from the surrounding environment, there is concern regarding both physical and chemical toxicity. Following consumption, nanoplastics are transported through the gut into the blood and can cause toxicity in organ cells. There's also chemical toxicity associated with the plastics, but has not been as significant as these other chemical pollutants found in fish. Corexit is a product line of oil dispersants used during oil spill response operations. And one thing we didn't put on here is the actual crude oil coming from those drilled holes into the ocean that is also very, very toxic to wildlife, possibly more toxic than these chemicals and the Corexit itself. I'm sure most of you remember back in 2010 we had that really bad BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico where hundreds and hundreds of millions of liters of crude oil were leaked into the ocean and then they put the Corexit in and these different types of coral larvae were dying, their survival rates decreased, same with all of the other wildlife. This is basically just another legal toxin they're allowed to dump in the ocean. Who knows if it's actually making things better. Next up, we have agrochemicals and this is something I speak more about in the context of raising cattle, pork and chicken in a conventional farming setting. And not to say that the farmer isn't irrigating from a water source that does contain this. I would imagine those farms in the Great Lakes area of New York might be irrigated with poisonous water. Therefore, the cattle, the pork, the chicken that's consuming that, it's still better off than the fish but still consuming chemicals outside of the pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides that they're spraying on the crops. Two agricultural runoff events involving the pesticide, as in Phosmethyl, occurred in July 2002 on the Womott River, Prince Edward Island in Canada. That resulted in the death of thousands of fish. Thousands, it literally killed the fish. That goes to show how much of this stuff they're allowed to dump in the ocean without repercussion. The water is so toxic the fish died, yet the next year people were eating fish out of the same river. Imagine if you went swimming in that water and took a gulp of it, would you have drowned? Who knows? Pharmaceuticals and antibiotics. Not only are farmed fish directly given antibiotics which are dumped into the ocean by the drum fill, except for the elite Sturgeon Caviar, I doubt they're giving those fish antibiotics. Our water supply is laden with urine and fecal waste from millions of people pumped full of various drugs from birth control to antidepressants. This can include all the estrogen in the water. The first priority is to stop drinking that water in your lifestyle, but it's still ending up in the ocean and therefore we're probably consuming metabolites by eating certain fish and shellfish. Heavy metals, zinc, iron, copper, chromium, cadmium and lead all accumulate in fish depending on environmental factors. There are actually nutritional databases where you can see over a 10 fold difference in the mineral content of certain shellfish grown in different waters. One clam has 80 milligrams of zinc, another has 800. Two clams, one's going to poison you with heavy metals. Absolutely crazy. Since many of these minerals are naturally occurring, the levels of pollution in the water correlate to the amount of metals in the seafood, interestingly. These other pollutants, when they're higher, equal more metals in the fish. These pollutants prevent the fish from being able to detox these metals from their organ systems, so they just accumulate in unrealistic amounts. If that ocean life is transferred to a cleaner water source, then the shellfish starts detoxing the majority of the metals in less than a week. I'm assuming that applies to fin fish as well. If you guys hear anyone repeat what I just said, that's a hypothesis. It's not something I've read anywhere. I looked at a few studies and I put some pieces together. I'm assuming that the chemicals are preventing the fish from detoxing the heavy metals. We can deduce that if fish are moved from one water source to another and the metals go away, then that's very likely a true hypothesis. The most gross one might be human waste. Sewage, whether it's urine or feces, it's going somewhere. This relates back to the antibiotics, chemicals, various metabolites that are poisoning us. These create unnatural strains of bacteria in our stomachs, which in turn are excreted in the fecal matter. Then if that fecal matter is consumed via some shellfish or fish that contained it, you can get very, very sick. Come to think of it, I bought some oysters like a year or two ago at a supermarket I probably shouldn't have. When I opened them up, they literally smelled like rotten sewage. They were probably in rotten sewage. I guess this would happen if you were to try to raise oysters near any major city, perhaps the East River of Manhattan, or really any water source near any type of pollution. Now, you could argue this entire topic has been swept under the rug, but nothing more so than the radiation pollution because this might be so bad it wipes all the other stuff out the window. The Fukushima stuff, this one aspect for some people is enough to never consume fish near Japan, certain sources, and that Pacific Ocean where we might find some decent seafood around Alaska and New Zealand might have actually become compromised because of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. These degenerates in charge have been polluting our food for dozens and dozens of years. The ocean is no exception. How have they allowed the dumping of these chemicals combined with the lack of acknowledgement is truly disgusting. If you understood how poisonous fish can be and that they're still even allowed to put it in the supermarket, it's crazy. If you understand the negatives in fish and you can translate that to the rest of your diet, you'll be worrying more about not poisoning yourself as opposed to consuming nutritious food. Personally, I have no issue eating certain things like the caviar, the salmon roe, and I still do on occasion. But I would certainly be wary of the majority of seafood as it is very likely not safe to consume. I had some wild caught shrimp that were kind of small a week or two back for some omega threes. But again, there's a reason we have lamb brains and animal brains and that type of stuff on Frankie Syrians meat. It's a much safer source of omega three nutrition. So thank you guys for joining me today. Let me know how you like this and if you know about any other really in-depth fish pollution stuff, definitely point that to me. I'd love to check it out and see how this compares. But outside of that, you can go to frank-defowner.com. You can see everything that's available from Frankie Syrians foods, Frankie's Naturals. Hopefully we have a couple other things going for you guys soon enough to make you as happy and healthy as possible. So thanks again for joining me today guys. If you could please like the video, leave a comment and please if you can share it on social media. We're very hard every day for about four years straight now trying to make it happen. I'll see you guys for tomorrow's video.