Consumption Guide Discussion

in my lifetime i have been through many warnings about consumption

don' eat eggs.........then eggs are good for you

coofee.........

chocolate

milk

butter....way better to have the substitute garbage

wine


the list goes on

it's good to be familiar with the guide for consumption


i will continue to eat caught fish from Ontario because i truly enjoy them and they certainly beat any type of storebought fish imo.....which i do not do

PFSA mess your hormones by accumulating in the fat tissues.
The primary reason the fat tissues in human get out of control is over eating lots of junk food, primary vegetable oils (canola, soy, corn), corn fructose and junk foods.
Avoid the above and the PFSA will to not stick to your fat tissue.
The human body it is a fantastic auto-regulated machine.
If you have a good steak once in a while (weekly) the glycine and carnosine from steak blocks junk fats to accumulate in the body. I would never eat a farm salmon but a wild salmon from GBay it is a delicacy of Ontario. If the body has the right type of fats in diet, over 80% (SATURATED FATS - the one doctors love to blame) the body will dump and not pick the PFSA.
Oxidized vegetable oils are the main cause for all chronic diseases from: diabetics, cancer, Alzheimer, Parkinson, etc. These diseases are related, they categorize them as different disease but at the root they are al the same: a metabolic disease, a dysfunction of the mitochondria.
Mitochondria are the small engines in a cell that produce energy. The medical system will never explain this, they will sell you all the chemical possible but not find any culprit. You will asked for another many decades to donate for cancer research and they will never find a root cause even if this is well documented. Why? Not good for business. When is to trust blindly the governments recommendations, remember how safe and effective was the jib jab. Amin.

I appreciate all the comments and I am pretty sure we would all like to help out (contribute) when someone takes the time to post a topic of interest. It's no secret we have done an outstanding job on polluting our planet. Best you can do is the little things like pick up your garbage and what ever else you can think of. We can't fix how the giant companies have polluted our living space. But we all wanted progress and advancement, and a non stick frying pan. Not to mention waterproof rain gear. There are thousands of "Forever Chemicals" in thousands of products. I will continue to eat the fish I catch in the toxic rain, wearing my toxic rain suite, and boots.

If you want to avoid chemicals, you may want to live in a plastic bubble. Oh wait, plastic has chemicals in it. The list of hazards is endless. As always, stay safe. If you can. LOL.

Absolutely Dave......tight lines and GB salmon and bows. No twitches yet....lol. A pic of my health at 75 Dave.

Arnie

What I love is when someone is out fishing lake O saying don’t eat the fish while they smoke a pack of cigarettes. ?

Think we all get the point..follow your personal guide lines re consumtion...and enjoy your sport !!!..LETS PUT THIS ONE TO BED !!!!!

Hate to de rail this topic but I have been noticing the walleye coming out of Lake Huron are extremely wormy these past couple years to the point where I’m almost scared to feed them to my family not the white grubs ither it’s the long tape worms

Thanks Crappeeeman ! Now you have me checking all my T-Fal pans and now I won't be buying anymore Orvil Reddenbockers! My family eats a lot of angled fish so I've tried my best over the years to be careful to control the amount of contaminants that I'm consuming. Thirty one years ago I was off work for nine months , getting EDTA intravenous chelation therapy for mercury poisoning that became evident when cognitive and neurological symptoms became evident. My blood and tissue mercury level was off the scale, and was attributed to workplace exposure (thankfully I was covered by WSIB) to methyl mercury, as well as accumulation from fish consumption. Lake trout, walleye, and whitefish from northern Ontario lakes were the main culprit. I was usually eating fish 2-3X per week. I'm pretty sure canned tuna was also a contributor, as I used to eat a lot. To say it was a wake up call is an understatement. The only good thing that came out of that is that now I have a pearly white smile, as I had to have all my dental amalgam fillings drilled out and replaced during the chelation therapy (the process destroys your lead-based fillings).
A few things I've learned from all that:

I'm lucky to live in the Kawartha Lakes. Sedimentary limestone bedrock gives us low mercury bioaccumulation in fish flesh. Kind of ironic. It's the fish from God's Country up north that you have to watch out for.

I throw the big ones back. Walleye - anything bigger than about 2.5lbs and I release it. Crappie and in most cases brook trout is a good choice as they are a short-lived species.

I'm careful what I eat now if I go north. I check the guide. I avoid areas in the clay belt (clay is a natural chelator that coverts elemental mercury to methylated form). You'll find the most restrictive areas in Ontario are on clay soils. Those Cochrane/Abitibi walleye and sauger were half my problem!

Be careful of northern "Shield" trips taken to waterways that are on impounded systems, esp. newly impounded systems. The mercury in fish will be through the roof. We did a trip by canoe in northern Quebec that traversed much of Hydro Quebec's Whale Diversion Project. I feel bad for the First Nations people who have had their fish become almost inedible from released mercury.

Fly-in trips. Check the lakes in the guide. Consider it a catch and release trip for many areas if you're bring your family. Most areas will be zero consumption for women and children. Again, if you're a guy, then try to pick the smaller walleye, trout, pike to dine on.

I love to eat lake trout. I try to avoid fishing lakes that have larger piscivorous trout that have access to deep water forage (ciscoe, smelt). Mercury levels will be higher in these fish. I mainly fish planktonic lake trout lakes instead. Smaller fish but they sure taste better! We are lucky to live where we do, as many of the nearby lakes have zero consumption limits for trout in these type of lakes. Again, I release the larger trout and keep mid-sized ones for the table.

First, this is an interesting topic and worthy of some discussion so we shouldn't get nasty with the member who posted (unless of course, it was meant to sh-- disturb). I also agree with the folks who have said that people should decide for themselves what they want and do not want to eat based on whatever information they have or use. I think we can all agree though that IF our tax dollars are used for the testing of our fish for the "Guide", then we should all be able to see that information in the "Guide" so that we can make our own informed decisions based on our own unique situations (age, gender, health, diet, etc., etc.). However, my experience with the PFOS/PFAS issue with the "Guide" is that for some strange reason, there are at least a handful of water bodies (that I know of and there are likely more that I do not know of) where the gov't is unwilling to release the PFOS/PFAS information they have and this information has been available to them for at least a few years now. Why, I have no idea but I know there is a fight going on with those in control of the information to get that information released because people are catching and eating fish from these water bodies (the ones I know of are down stream of airports or sites where they have fire fighting training and use fire fighting foam).
You can't make informed decisions when the information (obtained using our tax dollars) is not made public. So once it is public, I see it as a win-win situation for everyone. Those who decide not to eat the fish will leave more for those who are okay with eating the fish. But we need that information to be released.
And yes, enjoy the sport!

Re: canned tuna mercury levels.
For anyone's interest sake. I used to work at Fleming College and one of the many courses we taught was Environmental Monitoring. One of the lab modules was on fish contaminants and we used to have the students run fish samples for mercury analysis. We'd process (acid digest) tissue samples from student-angled fish from local lakes for the most part, but we also wanted to have some "spiked" samples to demonstrate the "detectability" of the equipment we used in our labs.

I went to Loblaws in Lindsay and bought four different types of canned tuna, all big name brands. For a hoot I also hit the "fresh" (yah, right!) seafood counter and bought small samples of blacktip shark, full tuna steak, and swordfish (which I knew would be high in mercury).

The results after we ran the samples:

Swordfish and shark almost broke the equipment. Above 2ppm ! Four times higher than a zero consumption limit as indicated in the Ont. Guide (I believe 0.5ppm
Tuna steak - I can't remember what species it was, or source waters, but it was just shy of 1.0ppm, so toxic zero-consumption class under the guidelines.

Canned tuna - again. I can't remember the individual results, but I remember we were surprised at the range. I do remember that chunk albacore was the highest of the bunch, and it was just barely above 0.5ppm Hg. It would be zero consumption by the guidelines. One of the tuna brands was fairly low - no higher than the local fish flesh we tested. The two others fell into the range that was just under the 0.5ppm cutoff.

I used to pig a lot of canned tuna, as it's an excellent protein source and fairly cheap. I liked to dump a can in a salad. Now I watch how many cans per week I eat and I try to avoid the albacore.

Here's a fish contaminant story for the books, and I swear it's the honest truth!
I grew up down near Oshawa and was lucky enough as a teen to experience the absolute peak of the stocked salmonid fishery in 1980's Lake Ontario. Off the chart alewife biomass grew massive coho, chinook, rainbows, and browns. It was very easy to launch and boat 5-10 fish in about four hours of fishing. The fish were massive. Lots of Chinook in the 28-35lb range, A really good one was in the low forties. I'll never forget the first time I grabbed the rigging stick with a really big one on and was amazed to see my Ambassador reel almost get completely spooled on the first run. It was like trying to stop a freight train! Everybody had a Toronto Star Salmon Hunt ticket but you knew it wasn't worth getting a king weighed unless it was over about 43lbs (I think a 49lb fish won it one year). I remember catching and weighing a 21 lb brown, rainbows up to about 18lbs. It was crazy! People would bring these 35lb dead salmon to shore and dump them in the garbage at the launches. I remember the stink and the maggots! No charges were ever laid that I know of for wasting fish flesh as the stuff was basically toxic waste!

There was a local dog breeder who raised foxhounds for running coyote and he had a pile of hounds (30ish) and some beagles. He was an avid salmon fisherman so he started feeding his dogs some lake Ontario salmon and rainbows to cut down on his food cost. Used to feed tripe but this cheap food was no longer cheap. I cannot say what size of fish he was feeding but I do know it was filleted meat that he had remove the bones from. I can't tell you how much or often he fed the meat.
He did this only during the June - August period . Within three summers of doing this he started losing dogs to cancer. Young dogs that were sometimes not even 1.5years old. Pretty soon it was substantial and he had lost almost 40 percent of his young dogs to cancer. He had the cancer checked at OVC in Guelph and it came back as a type called hemangiosarcoma - a type of blood cancer that usually goes for the spleen and liver in dogs, and forms a big abdominal "blood tumour" that eventually bleeds/ruptures and kills the dog. It's a common cancer in big breeds like Labs and Goldens. Guelph said it was not normally seen in foxhounds. The age of the dogs was a big red flag. Almost all the other dogs developed what the vets called autoimmune conditions - interdigital paw nodules/tumours, complete shed of coat, thickening of skin, photosensitized skin, overgrowth of Candida yeast (a couple actually died from this when the yeast went internal). Some got Cushings with thyroid issues.
It was pretty easy to do the math and figure out what the problem was. I often wonder what size of fish he was feeding his dogs. I wonder if anyone was fattening hogs on those fish?

"First, this is an interesting topic and worthy of some discussion so we shouldn't get nasty with the member who posted (unless of course, it was meant to sh-- disturb). I also agree with the folks who have said that people should decide for themselves what they want and do not want to eat based on whatever information they have or use"

Amen to that. No need to shoot the messenger. I think the OP has very good intentions and not stirring the pot. There are obviously different interpretations of the 'info' available, some of it of high quality and some a bit iffy. There seems to be a lot of misinfo about health issues on the web theses days.

I honestly don’t know why anyone wouldn’t follow the guide to eating Ontario sport Fish.

There is lots of room to be able to consume fish safely within the guidelines.

However, I do laugh at people who fear-monger on both sides of the argument and threat the guidelines as a trash resource.

There are those who don’t follow it and think the guidelines are foolish, and that is just as silly as those that do not believe the guidelines are truthful or strict enough.

I am not a conspiracy theorist but if someone who seems informed is saying that the gov't guidelines are not strict enough I am quite willing to listen. It wouldn't be the first time that gov't guidelines were too lax.