Trying to get a straight answer: mercury and fish

[RPG Advocate]

A few days ago, one of my relatives warned me that I could be poisoning myself because I eat a high-seafood diet (i.e. seafood once, sometimes twice a day). So I check online, and sure enough, I apparently consume around 15 times the EPA's reference dose of mercury each week.

Even so, the claim that mercury in fish could be poisoning me set off my skeptic sense. A lot of these scares just seem to give hypochrondriacs something else to complain about and a new way for the sCAMmers to rake in the dough. I did what I usually do with these types of things and checked it out online, looking for red flags associated with junk science.

What's surprising is that with the fish-mercury thing, there really weren't any like there were with the mercury-amalgam scare. The government and mainstream medicine seem to be giving the fish-mercury association some credibility. That said, I can't find a documented case of mercury poisoning from fish in the USA.

I'm not sick, but is there really a rational basis for the idea that I could become mercury-toxic by eating a lot of fish?

 

[vexed]

http://www.fda.gov/fdac/reprints/mercury.html

This might help you out.

 

[casebro]

So from http://www.fda.gov/fdac/reprints/mercury.html we see that hair has 250 times as much mercury as blood. From this we know that the human body does get rid of mercury. Now we need to figure out how many nano grams per day that the body does that to.

My read from some other government site told me it would take 43 pounds of canned tuna per DAY to build up toxic amounts.

And you are right, there have been no reported cases of actaul mercury poisoning caused by sea food in America.