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| Advantages of Eating Fish for Human Health |
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Solutions and actions taken to secure safe fish
consumption
Introduction
The cost to society of illness due to foodborn
diseases or poisoning makes it important to do
something to prevent this. The national bodies of
food administration have a primary responsibility
in this field. Below we will describe a system for
food safety that is widely implemented in the food
industry, ecpecially in the fisheries sector.
But what we eat is also an individual
responsibility - in the end we will share some
thoughts about this.
The HACCP system
The challenge of food safety has forced the
national authorities to take action. In the
80’s the FDA of America developed a system
called the “Hazard Analysis and Critical
Control Point (HACCP) system”. In the HACCP
system, each substance, micro-organism or condition
of food that can cause disease is called a
"hazard". HACCP involves seven
principles13:
- Analyze hazards. Potential hazards
associated with a food and measures to control
those hazards are identified. The hazard could
be biological, such as a microbe; chemical,
such as a toxin; or physical, such as ground
glass or metal fragments.
- Identify critical control points.
These are points in a food's production--from
its raw state through processing and shipping
to consumption by the consumer--at which the
potential hazard can be controlled or
eliminated. Examples are cooking, cooling,
packaging, and metal detection.
- Establish preventive measures with critical
limits for each control point. For a cooked
food, for example, this might include setting
the minimum cooking temperature and time
required to ensure the elimination of any
harmful microbes.
- Establish procedures to monitor the
critical control points. Such procedures
might include determining how and by whom
cooking time and temperature should be
monitored.
- Establish corrective actions to be taken
when monitoring shows that a critical limit has
not been met--for example, reprocessing or
disposing of food if the minimum cooking
temperature is not met.
- Establish procedures to verify that the
system is working properly--for example,
testing time-and-temperature recording devices
to verify that a cooking unit is working
properly.
- Establish effective recordkeeping to
document the HACCP system. This would
include records of hazards and their control
methods, the monitoring of safety requirements
and action taken to correct potential problems.
Each of these principles must be backed by
sound scientific knowledge: for example,
published microbiological studies on time and
temperature factors for controlling foodborne
pathogens.
The system is now applied in the fisheries
sector and in the fish processing industry in the
EU and in America.
The individual responsibility
Despite all this we do not say that you should
eliminate fish from your diet. Fish remains one of
the healthiest, low-calorie sources of many
nutrients, such as protein, the
cholesterol-lowering omega-3 fatty acids, the B
vitamins, fluoride, iodine, zinc, and iron. Canned
salmon and sardines, bones included, are excellent
nondairy sources of calcium.
Try varying the types of fish you choose. There
are plenty of smaller, leaner fish which are less
likely to be contaminated; these include cod,
flounder, haddock, Pacific halibut, ocean perch,
pollock, and sole.
As for tuna, swordfish, and shark, if you're
concerned about mercury, try not to eat more than
one weekly serving of these fish.
Compared to other foodstuffs, fish is well
controlled. The HACCP system is not implemented on
the same basis for all foodstuffs.
Since “Your are what you eat” the
best way to secure your health is to control what
you eat. For this you have a personal
responsibility. This means that you have to know
what the food contains and what your body needs.
You also have to know if you are allergic to any of
the natural foodstuffs.
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