This summer, the agencies made their first move in 10 years to update seafood recommendations, suggesting that women who are pregnant, nursing, or trying to become pregnant eat a minimum weekly quota of 8 to 12 ounces of low-mercury seafood. True, seafood has omega-3 fatty acids that benefit a baby’s development—something plant-based sources of omega-3s have not been shown to do. But setting a minimum intake quota is dangerous, says Consumer Reports, because all species of fish contain at least some mercury—and a few missteps toward higher-mercury fish at the seafood restaurant could lead to childbearing women easily ingesting unsafe levels of the toxin without knowing it. MORE: Why This Chef Serves Peanut Butter with Jellyfish All this leads to the publication’s next qualm: the FDA’s less-than-stellar efforts to educate the public on safe seafood. Add this to the fact that the EPA’s dietary safety limit for mercury was established in 2004—when Facebook still had “The” in front of its name and a Hoobastank single legitimately earned a spot in Billboard’s year-end top 10 chart—and you can see the watchdog group’s concern for how we eat fish. Luckily, Consumer Reports has come to the rescue with up-to-date rules of thumb for anyone (read: not just childbearing women) who loves seafood but doesn’t particularly like the idea of becoming a toxic dumping ground. Here are the top six tips. Eat these safely: shrimp, scallops, sardines, wild and Alaska salmon, oysters, domestic squid, and domestic tilapia. Species lower on the food chain, like these, have the lowest mercury contamination. Consumer Reports says a 132-pound adult can safely eat a combined 36 ounces, or 12 three-ounce servings, of these each week. Go for the JV team: haddock, pollock, flounder, Atlantic croaker, domestic crawfish, catfish, trout, Atlantic mackerel, crab, and mullet (the fish, not the haircut). Consumer Reports awards its second-best low-mercury classification to these varieties—just don’t eat more than 18 ounces per week. Avoid swordfish, shark, king mackerel, gulf tilefish, marlin, and orange roughy. Consumer Reports identifies these choices as the highest in mercury. Other high-mercury choices to limit: fresh tuna (like yellowfin and ahi), halibut, grouper, Chilean sea bass, bluefish, and sablefish. Scale back on canned tuna. Oh, tuna—so tasty, yet so potentially toxic. The FDA and EPA still maintain that pregnant women can eat 6 ounces of albacore tuna weekly, but Consumer Reports advises expecting mothers to avoid it altogether. Even if you’re not bearing children anytime soon, you might want to rethink your consumption. The publication recommends that a 132-pound person eat no more than 4 ounces of albacore and no more than 11 ounces of light tuna (which contains less mercury than albacore) in a week. (For reference: A single can contains about 5 ounces. See the full tuna-by-body-weight chart right here.) Make changes now: This is only going to get worse. A study from Harvard University and the U.S. Geological Survey predicts that mercury contamination in the Northern Pacific will rise by more than 50% by 2050. Make some waves. If you feel there are bigger, more ideological fish to fry, drop a note to the FDA and EPA—their proposed guideline revision is still open for public comment.
