HEALTHY AT 100 (22 page)

For the Hunzans, it’s occasional goat or sheep milk, and on rare feast days goat or sheep meat. For the Vilcabambans, it’s a few free-range eggs, and once in a great while, some wild game. For the Abkhasians, it’s regular helpings of a fermented dairy drink called
matzoni
, and occasional grass-fed beef. And for the Okinawan elders, it’s regular consumption of wild fish.

In this way these cultures, which of course have evolved without the benefit of vitamin pills or other supplements, obtain nutrients that might be lacking or deficient on an exclusively vegan diet, such as vitamin B
₁₂
. And they have also helped to assure themselves of an adequate supply of another nutrient that we all need for health and healing: omega-3 fatty acids.

The benefits of getting an adequate supply of omega-3s are many and vast. Getting enough omega-3s is crucial to optimum physical and mental health in all stages of life. They have been shown to help reverse heart disease, boost immune function, fight degenerative disease, enhance fertility, improve mental health, and promote healthy skin. An adequate supply makes you less vulnerable to inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, less likely to have asthma, and less prone to many mental and emotional disorders including depression and Alzheimer’s disease.

In times past, people got ample omega-3s from eating a variety of wild plants or from wild game. But today, people eat few wild plants, and modern meats, dairy products, and eggs contain greatly reduced levels. As a result, most people in the modern industrialized world are woefully deficient in these critical nutrients. The dietary availability of omega-3 fatty acids has declined in the United States today to only 20 percent of the level found in American diets a century ago.

Where, then, can you get them? Omega-3s are plentiful in flax-seeds and in flaxseed oil and in fatty wild fish such as salmon, herring,
mackerel, and sardines, and can be found in lesser amounts in walnuts, hemp seeds, green leafy vegetables, and canola and soy oil.

Flaxseeds have long been a staple part of the diet in Hunza and Abkhasia and are widely eaten in Europe, though they have only recently started to become popular in the United States. As a source of omega-3s, they have some distinct advantages over fish. Unlike fish, they are packed with nutrients called
lignans
that lower cholesterol, reduce the risk of heart disease, and lower the risk of breast cancer, colon cancer, and prostate cancer. Thanks to their high lignan content, flaxseeds have also been shown to be tremendously valuable both in reducing PMS in premenopausal women and in reducing unpleasant symptoms of menopause. How high in lignans are flax-seeds? When researchers at the University of Toronto examined sixty-eight different foods, searching for those highest in lignans, they found that flaxseed contains between 75 and 800 times more lignans than any other food.
⁷

Moreover, flaxseeds contain none of the pollutants and heavy metals such as mercury that are unfortunately increasingly common in today’s fish.
⁸

On the other hand, wild fatty fish such as salmon have some advantages over flaxseeds and flaxseed oil. Most notably, they are far better sources of the long-chain omega-3s DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid), which are necessary for healthy functioning and development. Both DHA and EPA are important for the heart, and DHA is especially critical for the brain development of fetuses and newborns.
⁹
DHA makes up 15 to 20 percent of the cerebral cortex and 30 to 60 percent of the retina, so it is essential for the healthy development of the fetus and baby and all growing children. Plus, omega-3s from wild fish may help prevent prostate cancer, while the same apparently cannot be said of omega-3s from plants. The Okinawan elders, who have one of the lowest rates of prostate cancer in the world, get their abundant omega-3s from wild fish.

With the exception of single-celled ocean plants and some seaweeds, no plant, including flax, provides any significant long-chain fatty acids. While the human body can convert the shorter-chain omega-3s found in flaxseeds and flaxseed oil into DHA and EPA,
there seems to be a great deal of variation in how efficiently different people’s bodies can accomplish this conversion.

The widely touted value of fish as a health food is primarily due to the extremely high concentrations of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids found in wild salmon and other wild fatty fish. No salmon, or any other fish or animal for that matter, manufactures omega-3s, but wild salmon get them by eating certain algae that make these important nutrients, which are then concentrated and stored in the salmon’s body fat. Wild salmon are plentiful sources of omega-3s. Farmed fish, however, have far fewer of these essential nutrients.

The salmon and other fish that people are eating today are increasingly the product of fish farms. In 1990, only 6 percent of the salmon consumed in the world came from fish farms. Only eight years later, though, half were farmed, and the percentage has continued to rise since then.
¹¹
Today, virtually all the catfish and rainbow trout, and most of the shrimp and salmon, eaten in the United States are raised by fish farmers. Alaska salmon is always wild, but all the Atlantic salmon currently available in supermarkets or restaurants is farmed. Canned salmon may be either fresh or farmed (though if it’s Atlantic salmon, it’s farmed). If it doesn’t say whether it’s wild or farmed, it’s usually farmed.

Are there reasons to avoid farmed fish? Yes, and very good ones. Wild salmon have long captured the imaginations of human beings largely because they spend part of their lives in freshwater streams and part in the salty sea, using a sense of smell a thousand times more acute than that of dogs to migrate for thousands of miles and return to their birthplace to spawn. With farmed salmon, however, it’s a far drearier story. With up to fifty thousand salmon confined in each underwater cage, the water they breathe and drink rapidly becomes putrid with their accumulated wastes. They must, as a consequence, be routinely administered a plethora of drugs, hormones, antibiotics, and vaccines to keep them alive under these conditions.

Wild salmon develop their characteristic pinky-orange color from eating krill. The flesh of farmed salmon, on the other hand, is a dull
grayish color which would be unattractive to consumers, so chemically synthesized astaxanthin is added to their food to create the desired color.

Many studies have found farmed fish to be far higher than wild fish in toxic chemicals and other pollutants that affect the central nervous system and the immune system and can cause cancers and birth defects.
¹²
The farmed salmon industry insists that the studies have been too small to be significant. But in 2004, after two years and almost two million dollars, a study was released which contained an exhaustive analysis of salmon from around the world. The study was performed by some of the world’s leading experts on industrial pollution, from Cornell and elsewhere, and was published in the journal
Science.
¹³

The study found that the levels of PCBs, dioxins, and banned insecticides such as toxaphene in farmed fish were so high that, based on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) guidelines, no one should be eating farmed salmon more than once a month. Farmed fillets bought in supermarkets in Boston and San Francisco were so heavily contaminated that even half a serving a month might be too much. Since these recommendations take into account only the increased cancer risk, the researchers warned that women and girls should be eating even less than that, noting that pregnant women can pass these contaminants on to their fetuses, impairing mental development and immune system function.

The Association of Salmon and Trout Producers called the new study “dangerous, alarmist and a shot in the dark.” George Lucier, a former director of the U.S. Department of Health toxicological program and the author of more than two hundred studies on toxic chemicals, disagreed. Backed by other independent U.S. experts, he called the results “undeniable.”

Many of today’s fish are unfortunately contaminated with methyl mercury.
¹⁴
This is a serious problem, because methyl mercury attacks the brain and the entire nervous system and causes behavioral problems and loss of intelligence in children. Many recent studies link
mercury exposure to impairments of immune and reproductive systems and to cardiovascular disease. Chronic low-level exposure in utero or in the early years of life delays development and hampers performance in tests of attention, fine motor skills, language, visual spatial skills, and verbal memory. At high concentrations, mercury causes not only mental retardation but cerebral palsy, deafness, blindness, and death.

Humans are exposed to methyl mercury primarily through eating fish. So widespread has this problem become that one out of every six women of childbearing age in the United States today has blood mercury concentrations high enough to damage a developing fetus. This means that 630,000 of the four million babies born in the United States each year are likely to experience some level of neurological damage because of exposure to hazardous mercury levels in the womb.

In 2002, a study of affluent residents of the San Francisco Bay Area found that those eating swordfish, sea bass, halibut, and ahi tuna steaks had dangerous concentrations of mercury in their blood.
¹⁵
The study, the first to look at mercury levels among middle-and upper-income people who eat fish for their health, was conducted by Dr. Jane Hightower, a doctor of internal medicine at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. Dr. Hightower explained, “We found that when people eat fish, their mercury goes up. They stop eating the fish, their mercury goes down. It’s that sim-ple.”
¹⁶

One child in the study had a blood mercury level that was triple the level allowed by the EPA and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. She was lethargic, was losing verbal skills, and could no longer tie her shoes. She was eating two cans of tuna a week.

Dr. Hightower instructed her ill and high-mercury patients to give up fish for six months, or eat fish that doesn’t accumulate mercury, such as wild salmon, sardines, sole, tilapia, or small shellfish. When they followed her advice, their mercury levels fell dramatically, though sometimes it took many months for improvement to occur.

Unfortunately, mercury contamination of fish is far more widespread than is commonly recognized. In 2005, the
Chicago Tribune
conducted one of the most comprehensive studies of mercury in commercial
fish ever undertaken, and came to some disturbing conclusions. In a series of articles fully deserving of a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism, the newspaper described

a decades-long pattern of the U.S. government knowingly allowing millions of Americans to eat seafood with unsafe levels of mercury. Regulators have downplayed the hazards, failed to take basic steps to protect the public health and misled consumers about the true dangers.
¹⁷

For years, the U.S. government has been telling the public that canned light tuna is a safe low-mercury choice. But the
Chicago Tribune
investigation found that

U.S. tuna companies often package and sell a high-mercury tuna species as canned light tuna—a product the government specifically recommends as a low-mercury choice. The consequence is that eating canned tuna—one of the nation’s most popular foods—is far more hazardous than what the government and industry have led consumers to believe.
¹⁸

Fish are the most plentiful food source for the critical long-chain omega-3 fatty acids DHA and EPA, but they are also the most plentiful food source for PCBs, DDT, and dioxins, in addition to mercury and other heavy metals. And the extent to which overfishing is wreaking havoc on fish populations is hard to exaggerate. We have so depleted our oceans, lakes, and rivers that more than one-third of all fish species are now known to be vulnerable to, or in immediate threat of, extinction. In the past fifty years, the populations of every single species of large wild fish have fallen by 90 percent or more.
¹⁹

If you do eat fish, don’t make the mistake of going overboard, because this is one situation where more is not better. When researchers studied the eating habits and health outcomes of more than 23,000 postmenopausal women for five years, they found that those eating the most fish had a fifty percent greater risk of developing breast cancer
than those eating little or none. Publishing their results in the November 2003
Journal of Nutrition
, the researchers found the increased risk of breast cancer from high fish consumption held true even after controlling for a multitude of other risk factors, including alcohol, obesity, hormone use, and more.
²⁰
Another study, published in
Circulation
, a journal of the American Heart Association, found that the half of the population eating the most fish had over twice the risk of dying from a heart attack.
²¹

What explains the higher rates of breast cancer and heart disease in fish eaters? The problem seems to stem from the pollutants, particularly mercury. “Fish is not merely a source of omega-3 fatty acids,” the investigators warned, “but also of methyl mercury.”
²²

One option is to take fish oil capsules. According to Dr. Alexander Leaf, who in recent years has become one of the world’s leading experts on fish oils, three grams a day of fish oil provides one gram of DHA and EPA, which is all you need. More than that, he says, is just extra fat. Several brands (including Arctic Pure, Nordic Naturals, and Xtend-Life) use oil from fish caught in the cleanest and coldest waters, and their products have been molecularly distilled, removing any mercury or other heavy metals, dioxins, PCBs, and other contaminants.