hardly any fish to catch. A creepy quiet filled the air where the noise of sea birds should have been. In fact, the only sound consistently heard amid the lapping ocean waves was that of garbage hitting the hull of his boat. Macfadyen was sailing through the aftermath of the 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that hit the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant at Fukushima, Japan, in 2011. “The wave came in over the land, picked up an unbelievable load of stuff and carried it out to sea. And it’s still out there, everywhere you look,” Macfadyen said. He also noted that something in the water near Japan reacted to his boat’s bright yellow paint job, causing the craft to lose its sheen in what he described as a “strange and unprecedented way.”
When he finished his voyage, Macfadyen declared it official: “The ocean is broken.”
To be fair, even though an estimated 25 tons of debris were said to have been swept out into the Pacific Ocean after the tsunami hit,2 the sea was already in deep trouble way before the Fukushima earthquake.
Ever heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Right now as you read this, an island twice the size of America comprised entirely of rubbish—everything from water bottles to used syringes to broken boats and storm-captured houses—all kept together by swirling currents is floating out in the Pacific Ocean.3 In fact, five garbage patches are perpetually accruing trash out in the subtropical oceans between the continents. An Australian research team investigating the ocean garbage dumps concluded, “humans have put so much plastic into our planet’s oceans that even if everyone in the world stopped putting garbage in the ocean today, giant garbage patches would continue to grow for hundreds of years.”4 And that was before the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami hit, with its 25 tons of debris.
Until it was banned by the U.S. Congress in 1988, America used the ocean as a giant toilet—literally. That is, thousands upon thousands of tons of processed municipal sewage were regularly dumped into the ocean for decades. The last 400 tons were dumped by New York City in 1992.5 Too many oil spills have occurred over the years . . . so many that the well-known 1989 Exxon-Valdez spill and the BP oil spill in 2010 do not even make the “top ten worst” list (for the record, according to Popular Mechanics, the worst oil spill in history happened during the first Gulf War, when somewhere between 240 and 336 million gallons of oil were purposefully dumped into the Persian Gulf by Iraqi forces attempting to slow American troops as they fled Kuwait).6
Before all that, the ocean was used as a testing ground for America’s atomic bomb development at the Bikini Atoll islands, where twenty-three surface and subsurface nuclear devices were detonated between 1946 and 1958.7 In addition, decades of toxic runoff from industrial pollution—everything from agriculture to mining—has allowed all manner of noxious chemicals and heavy metals to seep into the ocean. In the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) that owns the crippled Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant has admitted that some 400 tons of irradiated groundwater is continually being dumped into the plant’s harbor in the Pacific Ocean every single day.8 Somehow, though, TEPCO claims the radioactive water is magically confined to the 0.3 square kilometers (0.12 square miles) within the bay in front of the nuclear plant—a claim scientists have outright called “silly.”9
This puts a whole new perspective on eating so-called “bottom feeders” like shrimp, crabs, and other shellfish that have subsisted off of ocean waste even before the ocean became as filthy and polluted as it is today. Fish in general, especially larger fish that live longer, such as tuna and shark, tend to accumulate toxic heavy metals. The primary pathway to mercury exposure in most humans is through eating these fish. Studies have also shown that bluefin tuna have been able to carry poisonous, radioactive cesium 134, with a half-life of a little over two years, and cesium 137, with a half-life of a little over thirty years, all the way from Japan to the United States—cesium that is traceable to Fukushima.10
It has long been common knowledge that seaweed is an efficient metal ion absorber as well; in fact, European researchers in 2005 demonstrated the use of seaweed as a way to decontaminate heavy metals such as cadmium and zinc from toxic water runoff continuing to drain from old metal mines.11 This fact hasn’t stopped the commercialization of several types of seaweed for human consumption, promoted as a “healthy” snack food option before any real testing was done on the heavy metals accumulated in them. For example, a 2009 analysis of six different edible seaweed products from Spain showed that all contained levels of toxic cadmium exceeding French regulations and one type contained particularly high levels of total and inorganic arsenic.12
Studies have also shown that marine life experiences stress from continued pollution exposure, exhibiting physiological symptoms such as thinned stomach linings and ulcers, high blood glucose levels, decreased hormone levels, and weight loss.13 Just imagine what it does to humans who consume those stressed, sickened creatures.
In short, the sea has been used as a gigantic garbage can for hundreds of years, and now, nearly everything in the ocean is polluted. Simply put, whatever goes into the ocean goes into the food chain there, where it will ultimately wind up in some form or fashion on someone’s dinner plate.
Dietary defense against mercury in sushi, fish, and other foods
Although mercury is present in alarmingly high concentrations in sushi and fish, my research into the Metals Capturing Capacity of foods and dietary supplements has revealed a surprisingly positive finding: Many foods naturally bind with and “capture” dietary mercury during digestion, surviving the “acid bath” of the stomach and likely preventing the mercury from being absorbed through intestinal walls.
In fact, mercury is the easiest of all heavy metals to capture in this fashion, and seaweeds tend to have very high efficiency in capturing free mercury during digestion. Even the nori seaweed often used in sushi is able to capture around 85 percent of dietary mercury, according to my lab tests. Other seaweeds are more effective, however. One brand of dulse seaweed, for example, showed an ability to capture 99 percent of dietary mercury.
In the lab, mercury is well known as a “sticky” element that sticks to everything, including sample tubing on laboratory equipment. This stickiness makes mercury easy to capture in the gastrointestinal tract using natural foods that contain insoluble fibers, such as fruits and vegetables.
Nearly all whole foods containing natural fibers show some affinity for capturing elemental mercury, including cereals and fruits. Strawberries and camu camu were the most effective fruits for this purpose, and nearly all grass powders (such as alfalfa grass powder) and chlorella superfood supplements showed high affinity for mercury.
The “Metals Defense” formula I developed at the lab captures nearly 100 percent of elemental mercury, leaving almost no mercury available for absorption during digestion. (See the full laboratory details on this formula at www.heavymetalsdefense.com.)
Methyl- versus ethylmercury
Both ethyl- and methylmercury are organic mercury. Organic mercury readily builds up in the environment. While some mercury apologists claim that ethylmercury is not harmful (they ridiculously compare it to ethyl alcohol), ethylmercury is actually far more harmful than methylmercury once it enters your body’s cells. As stated in the abstract of a published study entitled “Toxicity of ethylmercury (and Thimerosal): a comparison with methylmercury”:
EtHg’s [ethylmercury] toxicity profile is different from that of meHg [methylmercury], leading to different exposure and toxicity risks. Therefore, in real-life scenarios, a simultaneous exposure to both etHg and meHg might result in enhanced neurotoxic effects in developing mammals. However, our knowledge on this subject is still incomplete, and studies are required to address the predictability of the additive or synergic toxicological effects of
