FISH Project results show most women have safe mercury levels

On Tuesday of this week, The Sawtooth Mountain Clinic and Grand Portage Health Service in cooperation with the Minnesota Department of Health held a public information meeting on the FISH Project. FISH stands for Fish are Important to Superior Health. It’s the completion of a study of North Shore women of child bearing age.

The meeting highlighted community results of the study and will be repeated in Grand Portage tonight starting at 5:30 p.m.
Recently research has found that a large percentage of infants born along the North Shore have elevated levels of mercury in their systems. From May of last year through June of this year, 499 women between the ages of 16 and 50 who live in or near Grand Portage and Grand Marais participated in the study.

The results show most of the FISH participants had low levels of mercury, though slightly above the U.S. and Canadian averages. Three percent of the participants had levels above what is considered safe for a developing fetus. All of those with the higher level of mercury reported eating more fish than recommended in the department of health’s guidelines.

The guidelines recommend one meal per month of lake trout or walleye, as well as canned tuna. Not everyone who ate more than the recommendations had high mercury levels, because the levels in fish vary lake to lake as well as different people may handle mercury differently.

The good news from the study is that an omega-3 fatty acid known as DHA in the FISH participants was higher than the national average and that the overwhelming majority of these women had mercury levels below the unsafe level. That means women can get enough of the beneficial DHA while keeping their mercury levels low.

DHA is important for brain and eye development in a fetus. The take away for women of child bearing age is eating one to two fish meals per week of fish low in mercury can be beneficial to developing babies.