The Surprising Truth About Omega-3s in the Fish You're Eating
Imagine eating fish every single day for an entire year. What kind of impact would that have on your health? That’s exactly what author Paul Greenberg set out to discover. As an environmental writer and lifelong fisherman, he was determined to find out which fish are best for not only our well-being, but for the environment too. In this episode, Paul joins Dr. Oz to discuss the findings in his new book, “The Omega Principle: Seafood and the Quest for a Long Life and a Healthier Planet," to reveal the surprising discovery he made about omega-3s, and why he says we need to start changing the types of fish we’re eating right now. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Why do you call Omega-3s the Forrest Gump molecule?
I'm glad you asked.
So remember Forrest Gump, you know, he just turns up everywhere important, right?
He's with JFK, he's there in Nixon's summit with China, he's at Vietnam.
And you're never sure what Forrest is actually doing in the action.
Is he important because he's there?
Or is he there because he's important?
And I think that's the thing about the Omega-3.
Hey, everyone. everyone.
I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Imagine eating fish every single day for an entire year.
What kind of impact would that have on your health?
Well, that's exactly what my next guest set out to discover.
Paul Greenberg is an environmental writer and author of The Omega Principle, Seafood and the Quest for a Long Life and a Healthier Planet.
As a lifelong fisherman, I know a bit about that.
Paul was determined to find out which fish are best, not only for our well-being, but for the environment as well.
Today he's joining us to reveal the surprising discovery he made about omega-3s, which you know I talked a lot about, and why he says we need to start changing the types of fish that we're eating and doing it right now might be wise for us.
So, Paul, let's start with this little experiment you did.
Yeah.
I'm glad you're here, by the way.
The book is riveting.
Oh, thank you so much.
You challenged some of the dogma that we've been talking about, so I'm looking forward to that.
But first, let's go to the experiment.
Every single day for 365 days, you decided to have fish.
I did.
I decided to get rid of all of my land food meat.
And I use the term land food because we call everything from the CC foods, so why not call everything from the land food?
Got rid of the land food meat, and then every single day, every single meal, I tried to have fish or shellfish, focusing primarily on those oily fish that are particularly high in omega-3 fatty acids.
And I did have my blood drawn before, and I had it drawn afterward, and I looked at those key markers, which you know all about, before and after, and tried to compare.
So your levels, you can measure the level of omega-3s in your bloodstream?
Yes.
You can indeed.
And actually, unfortunately, I only found out about that midway through my research, you know, because all this stuff is really emerging very closely.
It's very new stuff.
So there's a company called OmegaQuant.
You can get your finger pricked, you can send in your blood, and they will tell you the percentage of your omega-3s.
So I found out that I could do that midway through my experiment.
So I have a midway level, and then I have an end level.
Was it a big difference between the midway and the end level?
It was.
It went from about 9% omega-3 fatty acids in my blood lipids to over close to 11%.
So that's pretty significant change just over six months.
So I can only imagine.
I mean, just to put it in perspective, most Americans have omega-3 blood lipid levels below 5%.
Desirable is in the 79%.
And then when I got done with the experiment, basically people said I had the blood of a Mediterranean fisherman in about 1895. Is that right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, because not only did I really super raise my omega-3 levels, I also lowered my omega-6 levels.
So you guys have probably talked on the show before about how the ratio between omega-3s and omega-6s is important and may contribute to the questions of inflammation and so forth.
So I seem to have improved my ratio as well.
So let's get into the actual physiologic changes that happened to you.
Did you feel better?
I did feel better.
Yeah.
I felt psychologically better.
And you know that omega-3 fatty acids have been linked to alleviating depression.
Did I actually, were the markers in my blood better?
I have to tell you, no.
That my triglycerides, my cholesterol, good and bad cholesterol ratios, heart rate, all these kinds of things stayed pretty much the same.
Which, you know, threw me a little bit into confusion because, I mean, I don't know if you feel this way as a doctor, but sometimes I have this feeling, maybe we're measuring the wrong things.
You know, and the other thing that kind of made me think, well...
This shouldn't be just an experiment that I do once, you know, in one year out of the 80-some-odd that I hope to live, but that maybe we ought to think about overall lifestyle changes.
And it's then that I started to look at some of these big meta-analyses of dietary patterns.
And there you start to see really significant changes in populations where fish is really central to their diet, where they are eating a Mediterranean or what I call a pescaterranean diet, where very low levels of animal protein, but the animal protein is primarily coming from the sea.
Then you start to see in those dietary studies big changes in longevity, big changes in reduction of chronic disease.
So I'm not going to eat fish every meal every day for the rest of my life, but I do see myself having low animal protein with my primary animal protein coming from the sea probably for the rest of my life.
And the book you get into is a bit.
Let's just touch on it now.
Yeah.
Part of the challenge might be sort of the reductionistic view of food, right?
So is the only reason we're eating fish because they have omega-3s?
Well, it's so funny.
People look at fish like some sort of nutraceutical.
And I mean, you coming from the Mediterranean, you know that that's not how people in the Mediterranean look at fish at all.
They look at it as this wonderful, celebratory, good food that they eat.
But when I go, like I did a reading last night in New York, and this guy said, I used to take salmon And now I take krill oil.
I was like, you took salmon?
Well, no, no, I ate salmon.
And the thing is, that's the thing.
So it's important to remember when we talk about omega-3 supplements, where do they come from?
Well, they come from what's called the reduction industry.
I'm glad you used that word, reduction, because what does the reduction industry do?
It takes 20 to 25 million tons, that's a quarter of the world's wild catcher fish, and boils it down into animal feed and fish oil and dietary supplements.
And fertilizer.
And fertilizer and pet food.
And yeah, we get this omega-3 out of the whole deal.
But what if we've made a mistake about fish?
What if it's not just omega-3s that are great about them?
What if it's the fact that they're...
They deliver high protein with low calories, low saturated fat.
What if the whole thing about fish isn't necessarily that we're getting omega-3s, it's that we're cutting out things like feedlot beef, feedlot pork, and putting the good stuff in our body instead of the bad stuff.
That's what I think is going on.
If we're eating fish that don't have omega-3s in them anyway, which is what happens when you have farmed fish because they're not eating the micro plants that have the omega-3s in them to begin with and they're eating corn, it doesn't do you any good to eat the whole fish.
Well, first of all, I would beg to differ.
Farm fish, they are what they eat, just as we are what we eat.
And farmed salmon actually does have pretty high omega-3 levels, often equal to or higher than wild salmon.
Are they being supplemented with omega-3s?
They're being often put on a finishing feed of fish oil in the feed.
So they'll end up with a profile, a fatty acid profile, that is not too different.
They will have higher levels of omega-6, of course, because as you mentioned, they're getting soy.
They're getting land food products which you wouldn't get in a wild fish.
But that being said, I do think we could figure out farmed fish.
We could figure out a feed for them that was nutritionally good for us and also good for the planet.
But we would have to make some significant changes in the way that works.
For example?
Well, for example, one out of every two bites of food that Americans get on their plate goes in the garbage, right?
We throw out basically half of our food.
During the course of my research on the Omega Principle, I found this amazing creature called the black soldier fly.
It sounds not so appealing, but what does the black soldier fly do?
It actually eats food waste, and it grows big and fat, and you can take those black soldier fly larvae Turn them into meal, and it makes excellent, excellent fish food.
It's 98% as nutritional as a Peruvian anchoveta, which is the main way that we feed farm fish these days.
What's that?
Peruvian what?
Peruvian anchoveta.
So the most caught fish in the world is a fish nobody in America knows about.
It's called the Peruvian anchoveta.
It's an anchovy.
I went fishing in the book.
I go to Peru.
It sounds like an anchovy.
It sounds tasty.
It's delicious.
It's delicious.
I'll have the Peruvian anchovy.
And the thing is, 99% We're good to go.
So, like, it was funny, when I was in Peru, I went to the one cannery that actually produced anchovies for human consumption, and the guy was so happy to see me.
He's like, please, take some anchovies home with me.
He gave me, I kid you not, a 20-pound can of anchovies.
And because I was on an all-fish diet, I ate those suckers.
I ate every last one.
TSA, like, looked at me when I saw this can of anchovies, like...
Really?
That's Andrew?
Well, why do you call omega-3s the Forrest Gump molecule?
The Forrest Gump molecule.
I'm glad you asked.
So, basically, remember Forrest Gump, you know, he just turns up everywhere important, right?
He's there.
Life like a box of chocolate.
Life like a box of chocolate.
And he shows up and he's there with JFK. He's there in Nixon's summit with China.
He's at Vietnam.
And you're never sure what Forrest is actually doing in the action.
He's just there.
And is he important because he's there?
Or is he there because he's important?
And I think that's the thing about the Omega-3 is that Our brains are 5-10% DHA, omega-3 fatty acids.
Omega-3 fatty acids seem to have an effect on cardiovascular health.
They seem to affect inflammation.
They seem to affect our eyes.
They seem to affect our joints.
But when you look at all the studies, and it's so nice, by the way, to be on the show with a doctor, you know?
No, but who understands?
Like, there's studies and then there are studies.
And when you start to pick through all of the studies that look at omega-3 fatty acids, generally they're what we call association studies.
You know, they're saying...
As a statistician said to me, basically an association study says when there are chickens, there are eggs.
It doesn't say that the eggs cause the chickens or the chickens cause the eggs.
It just shows that they happen to show up.
And of course, the worst example of an association study is you can lead you to these really weird conclusions like, I live in a White House.
The president lives in a White House.
Therefore, I'm the president.
And that's the problem with an association study.
But when we look at randomized control trials, where we actually...
I'm going to give Lisa Placebo and Dr. Oz the real deal that we're testing.
And we can actually see how you guys do over time.
And that's considered the top of the evidence pyramid.
When we look at randomized control trials of omega-3 supplements, they don't really show too much in the way of effect when it comes to cardiovascular disease, at least.
Yeah.
It seems...
To me, when I push omega-3s, I'm sujic because I'm worried about mental health issues.
Yeah.
And because our brain cells are 50% fat, we're all fatheads.
That's right.
That's right.
Fat on the end of a stick is something with the brain and the spinal cord.
Exactly.
Up next, why Paul says our ocean is suffering and what everyone can do about it.
So I can see why omega-3s are more flexible.
They have to be flexible, obviously, for cold water fish to really move in cold water.
That's right.
It makes sense.
I want to shift gears a second.
The omega-3 part I get, and I also am hesitant to recommend people eating fish for omega-3 benefits purely.
There's something much bigger than the benefit of fish than just omega-3s.
If you want only omega-3s, you can get it from plankton and algae.
Yep.
Right?
Algae-based omega-3s are probably the best anyway because they're free of toxins.
You can make them in vats in South Carolina.
That's right.
There's no environmental hazards.
It's inexpensive.
It doesn't repeat on you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It tastes better.
Lots of reasons.
Yep.
The part about your story that really caught me, and again, I'm talking to Paul Greenberg, the Omega Principle name of the book, is not the book.
It's the TED Talk around the book.
Oh, yeah.
Thank you.
Which I was really caught by because you gave, when we talk about the effect on the ocean of humanity, it seems so daunting.
You can't even get your head around it.
That's right.
You changed my mind on that.
You gave me some options that I could begin to use in my life that might improve the situation.
For everyone out there listening, you know, it's only going to happen because each and every one of us start to do the right thing.
Absolutely.
These are not hard things to do.
It's not about not eating fish.
It's about changing the fish we eat.
So give us a primer, if you don't mind.
I'm going to turn it over to you.
Educate us on the wasteful way we harvest fish right now, the mistakes we've made hurting some of our fish stocks, and what actually might work to allow humans to eat as much fish as they want for the rest of their lives without destroying the environment.
Yep, absolutely.
All right, well, first of all, again, as you say, tons and tons of fish we take out of the ocean every year, 80 to 90 million metric tons of wild fish.
That's the equivalent to the human weight of China that we take out of the ocean.
And we take primarily these top-level predators like your tuna, like your salmon, like your sea basses and things like that.
There's only so much of those big fish at the top of the pyramid.
But we're also hollowing out the food pyramid or the ocean food pyramid by taking all of those little fish and boiling them down into animal feed or dietary supplements.
So my first and foremost suggestion is let's stay away from those big predator fish like the tunas and so forth because they tend to be higher in toxins anyway.
And let's eat those smaller fish instead of just using them as animal feed.
You might say, well, then aren't we just going to hollow out the bottom of the food pyramid?
No, because if we took half as many of those little fish, right, and paid fishermen twice the price, right, so that they're getting their money and we're getting good food.
If we ate things like anchovies, herring, sardines, super high in omega-3 fatty acids.
Amazing, amazing.
You know, well, again, Mediterranean person, you know, you know, that's...
But the herring, we were at a conference in Stockholm.
I think, I mean, I thought I was going to look like a herring.
You have herring every meal.
Every meal.
But not in the Mediterranean, right?
Lunch, dinner, yeah.
Right.
You can find these things.
Herring is probably the best-tasting fish in the world to me.
The American palate would not agree.
Well, you know, the American palate, frankly, needs a little bit of a schooling.
And I mean, just to talk about your example of herring, do you know that 80% of the main herring catch goes into lobster traps?
Oh, please.
As bait.
As bait.
It tastes better than lobster.
I love lobster.
I really do.
Someone was born in Maine.
He's a maniac.
He actually can get a license to catch lobster because he's born there.
Wow.
And we eat tons of it, and I adore it, but herring tastes better.
I'm with you.
And the thing is, is that when you look at the fatty acid profile, I mean, lobster, higher in cholesterol.
Herring, higher in omega-3 fatty acids.
So, you know, I always say, like, somebody needs to invent a main herring role.
Yes, I like it.
Yes.
I've tried.
I've tweaked it around.
I did a story called Three Sustainable Seafood Sandwiches, which leads me to the other categories that we can talk about in terms of what are really, truly sustainable.
I really try to push people towards things like clams, mussels, and oysters.
Technically, they're called bivalves.
I won't go into why, but suffice to say, they have two shells.
Just tell me what they are.
Come on now.
Five valves basically means they have an input and an output.
So they're filters.
They're filter feeders.
And they are straining microscopic algae from the water.
So they're actually making the water cleaner and clearer.
They take those microscopic algae and they turn them into protein and good fats.
Because where do omega-3s come from?
Ultimately, they come from algae.
And so things like mussels, clams, and oysters actually concentrate them in their flesh.
They are very easy to grow.
You don't have to feed them anything.
They create structure in the marine environment.
Fish love little nooks and crannies.
And if you ever see a mussel farm, it's basically a rope with lots of mussels hanging off of it.
It's a beautiful, beautiful habitat for larval fish and things like that.
So again, let's eat herring, let's eat sardines, let's eat anchovies, and let's also eat lots of clams, mussels, and oysters.
Also, another interesting thing that's emerging are marine vegetables, things like kelp, seaweeds, which also can be high in omega-3 fatty acids, which also do great things by removing nitrogen, nitrates from the water column.
And that circles back to this larger question.
You know, other books that I've written, Four Fish and American Catch, Four Fish looked at the conflict between wild and farmed fish.
American Catch looked at foreign versus domestic.
This book really looks at land food versus seafood.
And what does land food do to our environment?
It actually hurts seafood because all the fertilizer that we put into the rivers, that flow into the rivers from growing all that corn and soy and feedlot beef, they cause too much nitrogen in the water, dead zones, fish die.
Meanwhile, things like kelp actually suck nitrogen from the water, suck nitrates from the water, incorporate it into their tissues.
We're actually cleaning the water when we grow seaweed.
Are there seaweed farms?
Yeah, yeah.
And in fact, there's a great character in the book named Bren Smith who has this company called the Thimble Island Oyster Company.
Also, he is a nonprofit called Green Wave.
And he's actually taking fishermen and retraining them to be seaweed farmers.
And there's a growing, growing market for kelp.
Interestingly, another cool thing that I found out in the course of this research was they've done studies where they're feeding kelp to cattle and finding that it drastically reduces their methane emissions.
Yeah, it's kind of amazing.
I'm stunned.
That would be just by itself a huge benefit.
A huge benefit.
I mean, a lot of people don't know that after energy production, agriculture is the next greatest contributor to greenhouse gases, both through all the carbon, all the fossil fuels you need to burn to grow corn and so forth, but also, frankly, from cow farts.
Cows produce tons and tons of methane.
Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas So if we could actually use the sea to fix cattle, I mean, no-brainer.
So what are the four fish that we're eating that dominate our food supply that you're concerned about?
I'm really concerned about tuna, first of all, because it's a large predator.
It roams the wide expanse of the ocean.
You might have heard those recent stories in the Associated Press about seafood slavery.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning series, great, great series, found that Huge amount of forced labor is happening aboard these tuna vessels.
And also tuna is the largest source of methylmercury in the American diet.
So I'm concerned about tuna.
Salmon I'm concerned about, not so much from a wild salmon perspective, because actually our wild salmon populations in Alaska are very well managed.
But the farmed salmon, as we've talked about earlier in the interview, they eat a tremendous amount of wild fish.
All of those Peruvian anchoveta that get ground up, mostly they're going to salmon farms.
So unless we can fix that problem of salmon farming, salmon are going to continue to cause a problem for us.
I talk about cod quite a bit in 4fish, and cod is a problematic fish just because you get it by dragging the bottom with trawls, with bottom trawls.
And if we continue to drag the bottom all over the world, we're going to mess up our bottoms and, you know, really mess up the marine ecosystem.
And the last fish I talk about is sea bass, and that's really a catch-all because I think we talked about this last time it was on your radio show.
Seabass is this catch-all world.
There's actually eight different taxonomic families that have fish called Seabass in them.
It's sort of like, you know, it's just a market name.
But what concerns me about the name sea bass is it gives us this cloak for mining many different seas.
Like remember Chilean sea bass?
Yes.
So Chilean sea bass, what was that?
It was just a replacement for striped bass, which we overfished in the northeast, and California white sea bass, which we overfished in California.
So when we have these kind of slippery market names, we can mine all these different ecosystems and slot fish in, you know, as a replacement for the others.
So broadly speaking, that really was the subject of my book for fish. - But let me just go up to it.
Yeah, yeah.
So first of all, tuna, I've talked about this in my own personal story, that my mercury levels were so high, I got a letter from the State Department of Health.
Really?
It was twice what's acceptable.
And I'm not a huge tuna fish eater, but I was eating tuna fish.
When I was a resident- Where were you eating tuna?
Well, I think it was because we had spent some time overseas and I was eating a lot of fish that was probably gathered from areas that weren't very clean.
So it's not just an American problem, it's a world problem.
Yeah, absolutely.
But when I was resident training, this would make tuna fish every single day.
Now the U.S. government's advising pregnant women to be careful about tuna fish, and for good reason.
Yeah, yeah.
Cod, good example.
I mean, we've slaughtered cod.
I know there's a lot of food fraud around cod now because a lot of what you're thinking is cod is not.
That's right.
Salmon, I didn't realize until I read your book that it was a problem because I thought farmed salmon is sort of a good cheat.
Well, it can be.
If we could fix the feed system for salmon, I think that actually farmed salmon could work for us.
But we have to fix the feed situation, and we also have to fix where we farm them.
When you farm salmon close to shore and in poorly circulating areas, the same problem as land food.
Nitrates go into the water, you get algal blooms and stuff.
So we can fix a lot of these problems, but it requires some conscious thought.
Don't salmon need to move to spawn?
Well, wild salmon, sure.
Wild salmon spawn in rivers, migrate out to sea, come back in a couple of years, and they spawn again.
Farmed salmon, all that spawning work is done in a hatchery.
And so basically those are done, that's the early part of their life cycle is in a tank, and then they move them out to what's called a net pen in the open ocean and just let them grow fast.
So it's not, farmed salmon does not live a natural salmon's life.
Mm-hmm.
But on the other hand, I often feel aquaculture gets beaten up a little too heavily because, I mean, what do we do to cows and pigs?
I mean, when you look at the average salmon farm, it is so much nicer looking.
It's like a spa.
It's true.
Compared to a CAFO, compared to a confined animal feeding operation, which, you know, frankly, is poisoning middle America with all, you know, poisoning water supplies and doing all these really bad things.
So, you know, yes, aquaculture has problems, but let's not be too hard on it.
- Coming up, the four fish everyone is overeating and what you should be eating instead.
Fish fraud.
Yeah.
Food fraud in general, probably the biggest illegal business period just because there's so much food bought.
Yep.
And we've ignored it for a long time, but I've been getting louder about it on the show.
Yep.
And fish fraud is probably the best example because it's so hard.
You mentioned sea bass.
Whenever I'm with the kids, they say, what are we eating?
I say, sea bass.
What?
Because I mean, pretty much most any fish I can make up is part of the sea bass family.
Right.
Especially if you don't know all this, and who cares, frankly, if you know the individual species.
But the fraud is deep because there are expensive fish that are being purchased by consumers that are often replaced, and those replacement fish are problematic.
Walk the audience through that.
Well, so, yeah, so something like 40 to 50 percent of fish has been shown in restaurants by the nonprofit Oceana to be fraudulently labeled or mislabeled.
I think you need to be more conscious of where you're buying your fish.
Much more conscious, I think, than when you're talking about land food meat.
Because with land food meat, you know, there are farms, there are supply chains, there's traceability.
Fish, it's all over the place.
The average piece of fish changes hands seven to eight times before it goes from the fisherman to the plate.
So that's really tough.
I'm sorry, seven to eight times?
Seven to eight times.
And travels many thousands of miles.
Often, like crazy stuff, like a huge amount of Alaska salmon, for example, it's caught in Alaska, frozen whole, sent to China or Indonesia or wherever, defrosted, boned, refrozen, and sent back to us, double frozen.
Oh my goodness.
So, I mean, so there's just a huge amount of changing of hands.
So, how do we confront this?
Well, from a supermarket perspective, I think that there are supermarket chains that do better with clearly having clear supply chains.
Greenpeace produces a report called Carting Away the Oceans, Cato, C-A-T-O. If you Google that, there is a ranking of supermarkets.
And I won't list them on air, but take a look.
And I would let that inform you if you're going to a supermarket.
But if you want to be super— Cato.
C-A-T-O. Carting away the oceans.
Just Google carting away the oceans and Greenpeace and it will come up.
We'll put a link on DrRoz.com.
Yeah, that'd be great.
But if you want to go really, like, super fishy and, like, really fix your fish supply problem, there's a whole other thing you can do, which is to join what's called a community-supported fishery, or a CSF. Now, you've probably heard of community-supported agriculture.
You know, it's usually farmer market-based where you buy a share and you get it throughout the year.
So there are...
Probably on the order of 60 or 70 community supported fisheries now.
If users go to a site called localcatch.org, they will be able to find a community supported fishery near them.
And that's a way of buying local fish from your local producer.
That said, caveat emptor, buyer beware, there are all sorts of people sort of masquerading as community-supported fisheries.
I recently wrote an article for Medium about this company called Sea to Table.
And Sea to Table, I know the people very well.
I've worked with them over the years.
They've sold many or given away many copies of my book.
But recently, the AP actually tracked down and traced where their fish was coming from, and they found, again, tuna coming from all over the world.
They claimed that they were only using, you know, locally caught, you know, American fish and so forth.
But in fact, they were doing the same thing as everybody else.
They had multiple suppliers that were in turn had multiple sub-suppliers, and the fish was coming in from all over the place.
You know, they tried to do good for a while, but at the same time, you know, when AP investigated it, they found all of these issues with the supply chain.
So if you're going to go with community-supported fishery, do some research and make sure that these guys who are selling the fish are actually the ones catching the fish.
Do we have enough fish to support the planet?
If everyone starts eating more fish, and there's 7 billion of us...
How long?
Maybe 9 billion.
How long can the fish sustain us?
Well, so, first of all, I'm not saying let's eat more fish.
I think a reasonable amount of seafood for all people is a couple meals a week.
And that's when I go back to the Mediterranean style of eating.
Mediterranean diet studies, which began, you know, in the late 1940s, I talk about this in the Omega Principle, They found that, it was funny, so the Greek government invited the Americans to come over and look at their patterns of eating and give them suggestions for how they could improve their diets.
When they did that, they found that the Crete people that they looked at were living longer, had lower cardiovascular disease, lower chronic disease.
Why?
Well, they were eating a lot less meat.
Like just, you know, a couple meals a week of any animal protein.
And the rest of it was vegetables and fruits and whole grains.
So when I say people should eat more fish, no, I say let's eat a pescaterranean style.
Let's have a couple of meals of fish a week and cut out all the meat.
And that, in and of itself, if we could reduce the amount of meat that we're using, I think it would improve the quality of our waterways, which in turn would increase the quantity of fish.
The other thing is that, you're right, Lisa, you know, if we rebuilt every wild fishery in the world, the estimates are, so currently we harvest about 85 million metric tons, we could get it up to about 100 million if we, you know, if we...
We fixed the management everywhere.
We could get up to 100 million tons.
It still wouldn't be enough.
So farming is necessary.
We do need to do aquaculture.
We do need to grow fish as well as shellfish.
But I'm saying it's not just fish.
Let's focus on farming things like clams, mussels, and oysters, which we can actually have a lot more of.
We can have more farms like this.
I mean, you know the United States...
In terms of aquaculture, you know, fish and shellfish farming, we're 17th in the world.
We're behind North Korea in terms of total pounds of seafood growing, even though the United States controls more ocean than any country on Earth.
This is not economically viable.
I would think that would be one of the first things that people would want to start investing in.
They should, and they absolutely should.
It's probably the only moment where I can see the present government in line with some of my thinking, because I know that Wilbur Ross actually got sort of obsessed by the fact that 90% of the seafood Americans eat is imported.
And, you know, he became obsessed with wanting to fix the seafood deficit.
How are you going to fix the seafood deficit?
Well, it's a huge issue with this bill that's before the House right now, where they want to basically...
Got the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which is the main law that managed, that helped Americans rebuild our wild fisheries.
And so I don't want, we shouldn't be catching more wild fish in America, but farming more shellfish, farming more finfish, yes, that is something that we could do.
Did you mention shrimp is one of the fishes you'd want to farm?
Oh, yeah, well, so, right, so I get a little confused with shrimp because in my book, Four Fish, I talk about four fish, but in my TED Talk, shrimp is actually the most consumed seafood in America.
We eat more shrimp than the next two combined, so four pounds per person per year compared to two pounds of tuna and two pounds of salmon.
Shrimp is mostly coming to us from Southeast Asia.
But there is really interesting ways that we could get more shrimp grown here.
There's an amazing place called Eco Shrimp Garden that is in Newburgh, New York.
It's an old factory space where they're growing shrimp basically in a warehouse.
Shrimp grow really quickly, so you can grow them in a tank without too much energy.
You can get two, sometimes three crops a year.
And you could set up these little shrimp farms.
Basically, the Rust Belt in America could become the Shrimp Belt.
You could convert all of those old, useless, burned-out factories into shrimp farms, and it would be amazing for Americans, and it would be amazing for our health.
So more shelled fish, including shrimp, more small fish, less big fish.
Yep.
It's okay to have farmed.
Yep.
And know where you're getting it from.
That's right.
Absolutely.
Traceability is key.
I do learn, Paul.
Paul Greenberg, you can read more about his great work on the Amiga principle, seafood and a quest for a long life and a healthier planet.
