By John Connelly
When compiling names of agenda-driven lobbying groups who care little about the collateral damage their campaigns inflict on public health and nutrition, the Sierra Club rarely makes the list. In fact, it is usually a list of well-meaning environmental stewards that features the Sierra Club.
But intrepid reporters and inquiring readers must look past pedestrian rhetoric. The Sierra Club employs inaccurate hyperbole that would be the envy of perennially marginalized groups such as Greenpeace.
The Sierra Club wants to clean up the environment and scrub contaminants from the landscape, a noble and embraceable goal. But how it goes about doing that, in some cases, can harm sensitive populations such as pregnant women and young children — damage that Sierra Club lobbyists appear to care little if anything about.
For weeks before the Environmental Protection Agency ruling on mercury and coal-burning power plants, consumers were presented with a slew of calculated pieces of misinformation about mercury in seafood, generated by the Sierra Club. It was not as part of a public education campaign gone awry, but as part of a targeted lobbying effort that has, essentially, nothing to do with fish.
Sierra Club sought to bring the issue of coal-burning power plant regulation to readers’ plates by equating a tuna fish sandwich with “coal on whole wheat,” a reckless and willful disregard for environmental realities, government nutrition guidelines and peer-reviewed scientific evidence.
Internationally recognized authorities — including but not limited to the World Health Organization, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the United States Department of Agriculture and Harvard School of Public Health — all agree that the predominant risk associated with eating commercial seafood is not eating enough. For pregnant women and new mothers, in particular, that means denying their children essential nutrients such as omega-3 fatty acids, which help babies’ eyes and brains develop normally.
The vast majority of Americans eat commercial seafood from oceans or aquaculture. While power plant pollution can contaminate inland waterways and freshwater fish, it certainly does not correlate to tuna, which thrive in the ocean. The vast majority of the trace amounts of methylmercury indigenous to all ocean seafood are the result of underwater thermal activity and mineral deposits — a phenomenon that has continued uninterrupted for millennia.
California’s judiciary even ruled on this issue in 2009, noting that “methylmercury in tuna is naturally occurring.” Conflating mercury pollution from coal-burning power plants with methylmercury generated by underwater volcanoes is wrong and deceptive.
The 2010 Dietary Guidelines, issued by the United States Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, recommend that women “eat at least 8 and up to 12 ounces of seafood every week during pregnancy and breast-feeding.” Children need their mothers to pass along the unique nutrients in seafood for optimal neurological and eye development. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans are clear that pregnant and breast-feeding women can eat all types of canned tuna.
A study published in the Lancet in 2007 found that children whose mothers eat no fish during pregnancy are 29 percent more likely to have abnormally low IQs. Sierra Club’s myopic lobbying efforts cause demonstrable harm when the group peddles misinformation that will undoubtedly scare people away from a healthy product such as seafood.
When the Sierra Club is finished celebrating its successes in promoting mercury regulation, perhaps it can answer to the pregnant women and children who will be the clear collateral damage of the half-truths and distortions that contributed to its victory.
John Connelly is president of the National Fisheries Institute.