“WHAT’S the deal with fish oil?”
chatnoir
“WHAT’S the deal with fish oil?”
Stephen Savage
If you are someone who catches and eats a lot of fish, as I am, you
get adept at answering questions about which fish are safe, which are
sustainable and which should be avoided altogether. But when this fish
oil question arrived in my inbox recently, I was stumped. I knew that
concerns about overfishing had prompted many consumers to choose
supplements as a guilt-free way of getting their omega-3 fatty acids,
which studies show lower triglycerides and the risk of heart attack.
But I had never looked into the fish behind the oil and whether it was
fit, morally or environmentally speaking, to be consumed.
The deal with fish oil, I found out, is that a considerable portion of
it comes from a creature upon which the entire Atlantic coastal
ecosystem relies, a big-headed, smelly, foot-long member of the
herring family called menhaden, which a recent book identifies in its
title as “The Most Important Fish in the Sea.”
The book’s author, H. Bruce Franklin, compares menhaden to the
passenger pigeon and related to me recently how his research uncovered
that populations were once so large that “the vanguard of the fish’s
annual migration would reach Cape Cod while the rearguard was still in
Maine.” Menhaden filter-feed nearly exclusively on algae, the most
abundant forage in the world, and are prolifically good at converting
that algae into omega-3 fatty acids and other important proteins and
oils. They also form the basis of the Atlantic Coast’s marine food
chain.
Nearly every fish a fish eater likes to eat eats menhaden. Bluefin
tuna, striped bass, redfish and bluefish are just a few of the diners
at the menhaden buffet. All of these fish are high in omega-3 fatty
acids but are unable themselves to synthesize them. The omega-3s they
have come from menhaden.
But menhaden are entering the final losing phases of a century-and-a-
half fight for survival that began when humans started turning huge
schools into fertilizer and lamp oil. Once petroleum-based oils
replaced menhaden oil in lamps, trillions of menhaden were ground into
feed for hogs, chickens and pets. Today, hundreds of billions of
pounds of them are converted into lipstick, salmon feed, paint,
“buttery spread,” salad dressing and, yes, some of those omega-3
supplements you have been forcing on your children. All of these
products can be made with more environmentally benign substitutes, but
menhaden are still used in great (though declining) numbers because
they can be caught and processed cheaply.
For the last decade, one company, Omega Protein of Houston, has been
catching 90 percent of the nation’s menhaden. The perniciousness of
menhaden removals has been widely enough recognized that 13 of the 15
Atlantic states have banned Omega Protein’s boats from their waters.
But the company’s toehold in North Carolina and Virginia (where it has
its largest processing plant), and its continued right to fish in
federal waters, means a half-billion menhaden are still taken from the
ecosystem every year.
For fish guys like me, this egregious privatization of what is
essentially a public resource is shocking. But even if you are not
interested in fish, there is an important reason for concern about
menhaden’s decline.
Quite simply, menhaden keep the water clean. The muddy brown color of
the Long Island Sound and the growing dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay
are the direct result of inadequate water filtration — a job that was
once carried out by menhaden. An adult menhaden can rid four to six
gallons of water of algae in a minute. Imagine then the water-cleaning
capacity of the half-billion menhaden we “reduce” into oil every
year.
So what is the seeker of omega-3 supplements to do? Bruce Franklin
points out that there are 75 commercial products — including fish-oil
pills made from fish discards — that don’t contribute directly to the
depletion of a fishery. Flax oil also fits the bill and uses no fish
at all.
But I’ve come to realize that, as with many issues surrounding fish,
more powerful fulcrums than consumer choice need to be put in motion
to fix things. President Obama and the Congressional leadership have
repeatedly stressed their commitment to wresting the wealth of the
nation from the hands of a few. A demonstration of this commitment
would be to ban the fishing of menhaden in federal waters. The
Virginia Legislature could enact a similar moratorium in the
Chesapeake Bay (the largest menhaden nursery in the world).
The menhaden is a small fish that in its multitudes plays such a big
role in our economy and environment that its fate shouldn’t be
effectively controlled by a single company and its bottles of fish oil
supplements. If our government is serious about standing up for the
little guy, it should start by giving a little, but crucial, fish a
fair deal.
Paul Greenberg is the author of the forthcoming “Four Fish: The Future
of the Last Wild Food.”