Forty years after announcing the human brain's dependence on fish oils and fats, UK Professor Michael Crawford believes we're still not eating enough seafood. He warns that rises in rates of global mental illness can be directly attributed to a loss of seafood in our diets, as Michael Mackenzie writes.

Eating fresh seafood may be good for you, but when you consider the time and money it takes to buy and eat fresh, not to mention stories of heavy metals, declining fish stocks, destroyed habitats and questionable aquaculture practices, it suddenly seems easier to pop a krill oil pill.

There’s been no change over 500 million years in the chemistry of the ways in which the brain works—the things that make it work. It’s absolutely dependent on the chemistry of the food that comes from the sea. Professor Michael Crawford

But while DHA supplements may be better than nothing, visiting UK Professor Michael Crawford believes we need to eat the real deal, and far more than we do now.

Professor Crawford, a long time brain scientist and seafood advocate, worries that fish oil supplements enable us to fall back on filling up on fast food, animal fats and vegetable oils that will countermand the benefits of eating from the sea. He’s very worried that our reliance on terrestrial food chains harm not only our environment but our physical and mental health.

Professor Crawford says he eats seafood everyday, but insists it doesn’t have to be fish—it just has to come from the sea, where our brains were born.

‘There’s been no change over 500 million years in the chemistry of the ways in which the brain works—the things that make it work. It’s absolutely dependent on the chemistry of the food that comes from the sea,’ he said.

It’s now 40 years since Professor Crawford and Australian researcher Andrew Sinclair co-published the first description of the dependence of the human brain on arachidonic (AHA) and docosahexaenoic acids (DHA)—the fish oils and fats that are essential to brain development.

Since then Professor Crawford has published hundreds of peer reviewed papers on related subjects, written three books, been elected by his peers to the Hall of Fame at the Royal Society of Medicine and last year was elected The Brain Trust's Brain of the Year—an honour he shares with Stephen Hawking and Edward de Bono.

Professor Crawford is also the founder and director of the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition and recently gave a public lecture in WA titled, The Driving Force: Food, Evolution and the Future, where he argued that rises in rates of global mental illness can be directly attributed to a loss of seafood in our diets in favour of land based nutrition.

‘If you look down through the centuries, all the written languages and the civilisations all started at the coastal regions and beside water—the Yangtze, the Ganges, the Nile… they’re all around coastlines and they’re all around eating tonnes of fish and seafood,’ said Professor Crawford.

While the chemical needs of our brain may not have changed in half a billion years, its marine birthplace has—human pollutants, dioxins and heavy metals have contaminated many of those same coastal ecosystems, and the death and disfigurement in the 1950s and 1960s of Japanese people after eating mercury-laced seafood in Minamata Bay awoke the world to the dangers we’d created.

However, Professor Crawford compares the concentrations of mercury and other heavy metals like cadmium at Minamata with the intense radiation poisonings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki: tragic, deadly events that have never been repeated.

‘The mercury thing is a bum scare. A red herring if I can use that,’ he said.

Professor Crawford firmly believes the benefits of eating seafood far outweigh unsubstantiated threats from mercury. His frustration with these views is plain to hear.

‘The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) brought out an advisory that people shouldn’t eat, if they’re pregnant, more than two fish a week because of the content of methyl mercury and the impact on the unborn child’s brain,’ he said.

‘Now this was without completely investigating the epidemiology and the benefits of eating fish versus the dis-benefits… and all they had to do, which they didn’t do, was to look at Japanese women who ate seafood every day of the week… and they gave birth to the children that grew up and today have the greatest longevity, the least serious major depression, the least heart disease and the least cancer of any industrialised nation.’

Brain expert says eat more seafood Saturday 16 November 2013 Listen to Professor Crawford on the benefits of more seafood in our diets and how marine agriculture could prop up the demand on diminishing global fish stocks. More This [series episode segment] has image,

When it comes to the proven build-up of mercury through marine food chains, with the end accumulator being the shark (or when it appears on our plate, the flake), Professor Crawford counters by suggesting you can eat a different kind of seafood every day of the month, and that the high rates of selenium in marine animals actually helps counteract any effects of mercury that may be present.

‘Fish and seafood also contain iodine, selenium, zinc, copper and manganese—all of which are important for the protection of the brain… and the intensification of land based food has gone so crazy that the nutrients are being replaced by calories and energy from the fat in animal production—about three to six times the amount from protein.’

‘We have a problem—obesity, yes, diabetes type 2, yes, and now the most sinister thing—mental ill health… and it was totally predictable. We [Andrew Sinclair and Professor Crawford] predicted it would happen in 1972… and it is the greatest threat to mankind ever.’

So what’s the answer? Because haven’t we been destroying marine populations at a rate of knots anyway?

According to Professor Crawford, we can grow the fish and seafood we need to eat using marine agriculture—not highly controversial aquaculture. Listen to his example of how to farm fish in a more environmentally friendly way:

Find out more on RN First Bite, exploring the cultural, social, scientific, historical and sensual world of food.

