Attention tuna poke fans: you may want to pay attention to the origin of your tuna. A study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives found that yellowfin tuna caught in industrialized parts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans has 36 times more pollutants than those caught in pristine, remote areas such as the West Pacific Ocean.
For the first-of-its-kind study, researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego screened 117 yellowfin tuna for 247 toxic compounds. The samples were caught in 12 locations spanning the globe.
Every fish tested contained pollutants. The worst offenders were caught in waters near built-up areas off the Atlantic coast of Europe, and the east and west coasts of North America. The cleanest samples were caught off of Asia and in the Pacific Islands.
Yellowfin tuna caught in industrialized parts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans had 36 times more pollutants than those caught in more remote waters.
The fish were contaminated with a class of chemicals called persistent organic pollutants (POPs), which includes pesticides, flame retardants, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). While NPR reports that much of the tuna analyzed would still be considered safe for human consumption, the study highlights some troubling findings.
90 per cent of the tuna tested from the northeast Atlantic and 60 per cent from the Gulf of Mexico showed levels of pollutants that would be considered unsafe for certain segments of the population, such as children and pregnant women.
“I don’t want to be the bad guy here. I love to eat fish. I love tuna,” Sascha Nicklisch, a postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the study, told NPR. “It’s good to know most are safe to eat, but we need to make more information available so people can make their own choices.”
