Seafood Nutrition Partnership
OmegaMatters: Episode 17
Hosts: Drs. Bill Harris & Kristina Harris Jackson
Guest: Linda Cornish
Background and Key Takeaways:
Linda Cornish is the president of the Seafood Nutrition Partnership (SNP). She received her MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and has had many management and leadership positions throughout career, but she’s also always retained a passion for public health. Seafood Nutrition Partnership is a non-profit organization that inspires a healthier America through a balanced diet that includes seafood. And she’s launched public health awareness campaigns during Seafood Nutrition Month, which is in October. At the start of the pandemic in 2020, SNP launched the Eat Seafood America campaign so Americans could be healthier and have a stronger immune system through seafood nutrition. In this episode, she talks about how SNP works to create more public awareness for all things seafood and the studies the organization has commissioned to get relevant health authorities to recognize the importance of seafood in overall health.
Visit www.omegaquant.com/omegamatters-broadcasts/ to learn more.
SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: All right. Welcome to Omega Matters. I’m Kristina, this is Bill, and we’re here with Linda Cornish today. She is the president of the Seafood Nutrition Partnership, and we are going to talk about all things fish and seafood. Linda received her MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles and has had many management and leadership positions throughout her career, but she’s also always retained a passion for public health. Currently, she is the president of the Seafood Nutrition Partnership, or SNP. That’s a non-profit organization that inspires a healthier America through a balanced diet that includes seafood. She’s responsible for launching public health awareness campaigns, especially during Seafood Nutrition Month, which is in October. At the start of the pandemic in 2020, SNP launched the Eat Seafood America campaign so Americans could be healthier and have a stronger immune system through seafood nutrition. She’s been an amazing person to be connected with and has great knowledge about what’s going on in this fish and seafood world. And so we are just so excited to talk to you today, Linda. Thank you for coming on.
Linda Cornish: Oh, thanks, Kristina.
Linda Cornish: Bill. Nice to see you.
Dr. Bill Harris: Likewise.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: So can you first start off telling us about Seafood Nutrition Partnership, the history, it’s goals? What’s going on with that?
Linda Cornish: Seafood Nutrition Partnership is a charitable non-profit that’s been around for almost 10 years, and I’m the president and founder. The whole mission for our existence is to help Americans be healthier through eating more seafood for better health, following the dietary guidelines that are recommended by agencies such as the USDA Dietary Guidelines, the Food and Drug Administration and other prominent organizations such as American Heart Association. And we’ve been doing that through really the help of a lot of our key stakeholders on our board, our Science Council, which Bill is a part of, as well as our ambassadors. So it’s taken a village to get this message out to the American public.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: So something that I end up feeling like is, when I give advice to eat more fish, it’s always part of what I talk about. I feel like it always ends there of like, “Here’s the science. Just go eat more fish.” And I feel like Seafood Nutrition Partnership picks up at the really practical part of how do we do this, how do people actually cook the fish, how do you select it. So you actually have campaigns and grocery stores all over the country and YouTube videos, and Instagram feeds about how to actually cook fish, which I think is so cool. What other kind of interactive and public health facing campaigns are you guys doing right now?
Linda Cornish: Well, first just want to agree with you that our role at SNP is to be that bridge from the science to the consumers. And the studies on the benefits of seafood is are so numerous. I mean, both of you have contributed to that, and, and Bill, you know to a greater degree. There are 40,000 studies on the health benefits of seafood nutrition for heart health, brain health, and overall wellness that have been published since the 1970s. And I always feel that we’re just standing on the shoulders of giants and that it’s our honor to get this information out to the general public. So that’s why we do have several consumer outreach initiatives to both consumers and health influencers. It’s been a great privilege to see the awareness being built about why it’s important to include more seafood nutrition into our diets. Bill, you seem like you’ve wanted to say something. You’ve been part of our science council from the start.
Dr. Bill Harris: Right. And it’s been great fun. I’m looking forward to this. And I think last year I wasn’t able to go and Tina stepped in to cover for me, which is wonderful. But, yeah, I mean, we’re very omega-3 focused here at OmegaMatters. Seafood is a bigger deal than just the omega-3s. So how do you talk about the wider benefits of seafood?
Linda Cornish: Well, you know, Omega-3s definitely matter for our health. It’s one of the key nutrients that we do promote. But we do talk about seafood nutrition as a whole. So it’s one of the best lean proteins for Americans, and it’s also filled with vitamins, minerals, and nutrients that are essential for our health. So it’s the whole package. We really do advocate for whole foods and that people make sure to eat enough Omega-3s. We do advocate for people to supplement too with Omega-3s because some people may be vegetarians and can’t get enough of that seafood protein.
Dr. Bill Harris: Right. One of the other benefits that I would point out is that when you’re eating fish there’s other things you’re not eating.
Linda Cornish: Correct.
Dr. Bill Harris: It’s a great substitution for other less healthy options, right? Like a big steak, for example. So it’s not just what’s in seafood; it’s also what the seafood is replacing.
Linda Cornish: Right. I think it’s amazing to know the benefits for seafood nutrition that I think Americans are not aware of. You know, that our brains are made up of fats and mostly Omega-3s, DHA, and some EPA, and just our overall body’s made up of these key fatty acids. So I think when Americans hear that, it’s like, “Okay, well, how is this to benefit me?” We can break it down into layman’s terms for them. And talk about seafood being good for our brain, good for our health and overall wellness. In fact, studies have shown that moms who eat seafood have had babies that have shown that their IQs are higher than moms who do not eat seafood by almost seven IQ points. Even the American Psychiatric Association recommends eating fatty fish because people who eat fatty fish are shown to have like 20% less risk of anxiety and depression.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Wow.
Linda Cornish: And so it’s really not targeting like, “Oh, if I eat this, it’s just for the brain or it’s the heart.” Seafood has just an overall wellness story that we try to share with everybody and that it’s been recommended by prominent organizations. And we’re just a vehicle to get this information out to the general public.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: I think that’s so important. And especially you talked about fish and seafood during pregnancy, which is something I focus on as well. Some of the biggest issues are the fear of fish and contaminants, especially for pregnant women. And there was, you know, the, the mercury FDA advisory essentially like 20 or 30 years ago that is still holding on. And it’s a big fear factor for pregnant women.
Linda Cornish: Yeah.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: What do you usually say when people ask you about toxins in fish and things like that?
Linda Cornish: The first thing I tell people about food in general is that the American food system is safe. We have a great system that evaluates and inspects our food. And so yes, when we see media, you know, we tend to really hear the negative headlines more.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Mm-hmm.
Linda Cornish: But just take a step back. Our food system is safe. [00:08:30] We have food inspectors at all points along the supply chain. And also at the retail and food service areas, the seafood buyers are following sustainable practices and also making sure that they’re buying safe seafood. And so just step one, that America has a safe food system. More specifically on seafood and the FDA recommendations for pregnant women, you know, that advisory, came out in 2004 initially. And so the science wasn’t as established about the benefits of seafood, so the FDA and the government went very conservative. The advisory uses a 1000% safety factor, and so we wanna make sure that American moms are safe. And so over the years, the FDA has tried its best to put forth that the benefits of eating seafood outweigh the risks. And, I think it was in 2016, the FDA net effects report showed that the benefits of eating fish outweigh the risk.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Mm-hmm.
Linda Cornish: Still, the message is not getting out enough. And, you know, there’s always just cause for concern. One of the most recent developments that I think we need to get out more is that the FDA has recently updated this year it’s seafood advisory for pregnant women. And so for the first time in 2022, the year for seafood you know, the FDA has clearly stated that moms should eat fish to support their baby’s brain and their health. They’ve never had the word brain in there before.
Dr. Bill Harris: Mm-hmm.
Linda Cornish: This was the result of several listening sessions that Seafood Nutrition Partnership had with the FDA last year, and the Science Council was involved. And, you know, we have an abundance of science and support now. Why? Because the Scientific Nutrition Advisory Council, Bill included, and led by Tom Brenna and Dr. Joe Hibbeln, we did a systematic review of all the evidence available on the benefits of mom’s eating fish during pregnancy. It was an 18-month effort. We went through, at first, 2000 studies, culled it down to about 44, and recognized that almost all the studies but two show that it was positive for moms to eat more seafood. And the two studies that were left out were the null studies. There wasn’t a study that was negative. And so as we’re gaining more science, we’re sharing that back with the FDA so they have more confidence in providing updated guidance for pregnant women. So moms should eat seafood. They only eat about 1.8 ounces per week. And the dietary guidelines say moms are supposed to eat 8-12 ounces per week.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Mm-hmm.
Linda Cornish: And we have an infographic on our website, seafoodnutrition.org, summarizing the FDA’s net effects report. I think it’s about 180 pages, so we boiled it down to one page (laughs) for everybody.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Thank you.
Linda Cornish: I mean, basically, I think they went through 56 species that are commercially available, and so we looked at the top 10 species that Americans are eating. And so looking at the benefits of seafood versus when you actually meet the risk of mercury exposure. So for example, salmon, one of the top seafoods we eat. I think it’s number two right now. You can have up to 800 ounces of salmon per week before reaching mercury risk. And with tuna, I think tuna is one of those that people are asking about. In the report, you can have up to 56 ounces per week before reaching mercury risk. So when we talk about risk, it’s all relative.
Dr. Bill Harris: When you say, when you say mercury risk, what do you mean? Is that the thousandfold safety factor in there too?
Linda Cornish: A thousandfold safety factor’s in there.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah.
Linda Cornish: And so even then it’s still very safe. It’s clearly laid out in the FDA report. But I think there’s just not enough resources to get this information out. Consumers, when they hear something, “Oh, be careful about this.” We’re kind of a risk averse society on certain things but not on others. Like be careful to not overeat on fast food, but guess what? We’re still eating it.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Right, right.
Linda Cornish: Like, make sure you drink enough water, but you can also have toxicity drinking too much water. So it’s about balance.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Right.
Linda Cornish: And so we need to understand what the risk levels are.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Mm-hmm.
Linda Cornish: Quite frankly, I think the Science Council has proven that it is risky to not eat seafood.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Right.
Dr. Bill Harris: That’s the way it’s been.
Linda Cornish: We don’t eat it.
Dr. Bill Harris: That’s the way it’s been.
Linda Cornish: Yeah.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: The riskiest amount of fish to eat during pregnancy is zero, is none.
Linda Cornish: Right.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Yeah, versus one to two. But even higher amounts of fish intake, there are plenty of cultures where they still eat fish every day throughout pregnancy. And often, they have better preterm birth rates in those countries. There’s not a lot of environmental evidence to show that high fish intake is dangerous for pregnancy.
Linda Cornish: Preterm birth is one of the areas where we need to talk more about. Moms who have more seafood and omega-3s, DHA, you know, it’s been shown in the Cochran report that, you can have a risk reduction of 40% or more. Preterm birth is one of the costliest health issues for women and pregnant moms, and for the baby. Babies don’t have the head start in developing the best brain when they are born earlier.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Mm-hmm.
Linda Cornish: I think talking about the benefits of seafood for one of the highest cost issues and consequences for our population. We should talk about that more.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: It’s just crazy how few interventions or solutions there are for preterm birth. It’s almost nothing. There are steroid shots. There’s bedrest, which is hugely damaging and hard to do. And I think aspirin might be one. Of all the things doctors recommend… and fish is a food.
Linda Cornish: Oh, wow.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: The research in the preterm birth area has just been shockingly strong for fish and more specifically, DHA.
Linda Cornish: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: So, yeah. We have that and now it’s like the implementation piece, which is always the hardest.
Linda Cornish: Right.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: I think what is convenient is that the general public recommendations are pretty similar to the pregnancy recommendations. And if I remember correctly, your Eat Seafood America campaign is trying to get people eat two servings of fish a week.
Linda Cornish: Yeah, at least. The dietary guidelines, you know, want us to eat at least two servings of fish per week. That’s it.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Mm-hmm.
Linda Cornish: And amazingly, you know, only about one in five Americans follow that. So we have 80% of Americans that we need to just get a couple of meals of seafood into their diets. Actually, during the pandemic, Americans actually rushed to seafood more. They actually love seafood at restaurants. And when restaurants closed, all of a sudden people had more time at home. It’s like they started experimenting more. So that number actually went up to about 30% of Americans eating seafood twice a week. And I think it’s coming down a little bit.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Yeah.
Linda Cornish: The good news is we’ve opened up people’s eyes more to the health benefits of seafood and how easy it is to get into our diets.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Mm-hmm.
Linda Cornish: I would love to answer any of the questions you get most often as dietitian.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Bill Harris: I’ve got one. What are the top five or six fish that Americans eat?
Linda Cornish: There are only about 10 species of seafood that Americans eat very much of.
And so we’re not an adventurous bunch. Number one is shrimp, number two is salmon, number three is tuna, and then it kind of falls from there. Those three species make up about 50 to 60% of what we eat.
Dr. Bill Harris: Okay.Good for Omega-3, per se.
Linda Cornish: Right, but they’re good for lean protein.
Dr. Bill Harris: Right.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: So the other thing that I get asked about, which is not directly related to nutrition, is sustainability. Basically people are worried about overfishing and the health of the oceans.
Linda Cornish: Mm-hmm
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: How does fish stack up compared to beef in terms of how sustainable it is? There’s so many aspects to sustainability that I have a hard time coming to a clear answer on that. But if you have any resources on those topics or organizations that you like to point people to, that would be really helpful for me.
Linda Cornish: Well, yeah. So I would say that SNP could not exist without the great sustainable seafood movement that’s been happening for the last 20 years.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Mm-hmm.
Linda Cornish: And so you know, we need to have a sustainable seafood supply for us to create a demand for seafood. So it’s definitely been something that has made a lot of progress. And so, I guess the first point is that seafood is the last wild commercially available food source for Americans and in the world. Most of the food we eat are farmed. And so when we talk about sustainability, we are trying to manage a wild resource, so that we can have more for future generations. In the 1980s, it wasn’t the same story. There’s organizations that have been working to make sure we have a more sustainable seafood supply. First of all, the US has a great management with NOAA Fisheries. We are one of the global leaders for sustainable seafood, so we manage the oceans very well and the stock in our oceans. We have a 200 mile economic zone from our coast, and that is all managed by NOAA Fisheries. In Alaska, sustainability’s built into their constitution. So what does sustainable mean?
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Yeah.
Linda Cornish: In wild fisheries, you have a stock of fish. So imagine a large ocean and you have different pools of fish and there are scientists that can evaluate the health levels of the amount of fish that should be in that space in the ocean. And then they can predict, you know, how quickly their newborn, guppy fish can grow and sustain itself. And so for example in Alaska, they take the total stock and then determine the allowable catch, which is really just a minute percentage of the fish restock.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Mm-hmm.
Linda Cornish: In Alaska, they take even a smaller percentage for actual capture for our dinner tables. And so we’re managing a wild resource. And so when we talk about sustainability, it’s really trying to manage a wild resource so that we don’t take all of it out and leave none for the future. So organizations, like NOAA Fisheries. There’s Marine Stewardship Council and a few others around the world. The UN, Food and Agriculture Organization manages this, and has a standard that we all have to meet to be sustainable. The also monitor the stock around the world for wild and aquaculture.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Mm-hmm.
Linda Cornish: If you look at the United Nations Sophia report, it’s the state of the world’s fisheries and agriculture. As of last year’s report, I think about 65% of the fisheries were fished at sustainable levels.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Mm-hmm.
Linda Cornish: So we have about 35% that we need to monitor and make sure that it becomes more sustainable.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Mm-hmm.
Linda Cornish: If we manage these resources effectively, we can continue to double our catch, but really the onus is on us to make sure we all use sustainable fishing practices. The other aspect of fishing is aquaculture, which is farmed seafood. And that makes about 50% of the world’s supply of seafood.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Wow.
Linda Cornish: So when we talk about aquaculture the term becomes more responsible seafood. Using the best animal husbandry that we know of to make sure that aquaculture farms, whether it’s in oceans, on land, have fish that are grown and water that have enough space for them.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Mm-hmm
Linda Cornish: And they’re getting the best feed. The feed component is actually a very expensive part of aquaculture. I think people think, “Oh, you can just grow by throwing anything in the water.” But it’s a complex science, just like feeding humans. It’s very complex science of creating the feed. The component that they’re watching for is, are we over feeding the fish? Because that creates like nutrient density at the bottom of the ocean.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: No, this is great.
Linda Cornish: To summarize, sustainability is an important part of the seafood industry. There are some reports that 80 to 90% of retailers and food service operators have a sustainable seafood policy in place now.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: That’s good.
Linda Cornish: This was worked on by a lot of NGOs over the last 10, 20 years. No one talks about this. It’s a journey. We never have a stopping point it’s like, “Oh, seafood’s sustainable.” We just have to have a constant monitoring of the valuable resource in our oceans, and also as we grow, you know, aquaculture, here in the US and around the world.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: That was great. I appreciated that. A lot of times people are concerned that they’re eating fish and adding to the problem. But if you’re eating fish, you’re actually supporting groups that are monitoring sustainability.
Linda Cornish: Yes.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Partially, if there’s an economic impetus to do so, that really helps it actually happen. And so they have to make sure that they can have seafood to catch every year, so they have to make sure it’s a sustainable quota. Actually eating fish helps sustainability.
Linda Cornish: Helps the ocean.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Yeah.
Linda Cornish: What a great point to make Kristina, because I think I think in the 80s the ground fish on the West Coast had collapsed.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Mm-hmm.
Linda Cornish: And so there were some sustainable measurements to make sure we don’t catch certain fish. And they actually survived and recovered. But people forgot about the species out there, you know, like rockfish. And without catching it, we don’t have the focus on that fishery.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Mm-hmm.
Linda Cornish: The fisherman don’t catch it anymore, so we don’t monitor it. In other words, we don’t know how it’s doing if we don’t have an attention on that fishery. And so you’re right, if we have an attention to it, we can actually manage it better.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Right. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Oh, those are really, really helpful answers that are grounded in the broader picture instead of individual anecdotes. So we probably need to wrap up here. Do we have any final questions? I feel like we covered a lot.
Dr. Bill Harris: I think we covered at lot. It’s been a great conversation.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Yeah. So thank you so much.
Linda Cornish: Yeah, thank you. I guess I’ll just leave that, our website is seafoodnutrition.org. And what we try to tell people is, what we eat matters and omega-3 matters, and it matters for our health and our planet’s health. We also want everyone to know that seafood is a climate friendly protein.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: (laughs) Yes.
Linda Cornish: It’s a less intensive way to you know, either harvest fish or grow fish. And so it doesn’t produce as much of the greenhouse gas emissions as land based animals produce. And so, good for our planet and good for jobs. And I just encourage everyone to try and get to that twice a week or more seafood meal.
Dr. Bill Harris: Amen.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Awesome. Thank you so much, Linda. It was great.
Linda Cornish: Thank you.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Bye.
Dr. Bill Harris: Thank you very much. Bye-bye.