Tuna is popular for a reason: It's incredibly healthy, containing high levels of protein and omega-3 fatty acids, and it's delicious. Unfortunately, it also contains mercury.
However, according to New Food magazine, a team of researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden has discovered a way to greatly reduce the amount of mercury in canned tuna.
According to Healthline, mercury is incredibly toxic to humans.
Pregnant women and small children are advised to eat tuna sparingly or not at all because of the danger mercury poses to the nervous system of fetuses and small children. Even healthy adults should watch their intake because mercury can lead to brain cell death and has been linked to a higher risk of heart disease.
Healthline notes that different kinds of tuna have different mercury levels. Canned light tuna contains 0.126 parts per million, while canned albacore tuna contains 0.350 ppm. The threshold for what's safe to regularly consume is 0.3 ppm.
That's where this development from the team at Chalmers comes in. According to New Food magazine, the team turned to something called active packaging, which involves adding materials that interact with food during storage. It's generally done to increase a food's shelf life, but this is the first time it's been used for food safety.
The researchers discovered that by adding a water-based solution of cysteine to canned tuna, they could decrease mercury levels by up to 35%. Cysteine is an amino acid that naturally binds to mercury so it will extract some of the mercury that is bound to the protein in the tuna.
The team found that the cysteine will extract mercury from the tuna for two weeks before it stops. This will put albacore tuna below the 0.3 ppm threshold and reduce the amount of mercury in light tuna even further, allowing people to enjoy the benefits of eating more tuna without the health concerns.
"The beauty of this type of packaging is that it is active while the product is on the shelf," Przemysław Strachowski, the study's lead author, said, according to New Food magazine. "No additional production steps would be needed if a method like this were used industrially. The application of our result could increase the safety margin for fish consumption."
While mercury is an element that naturally occurs in nature, it's compounded by the burning of dirty energy sources like coal and natural gas.
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The way it looks 😍 Mercury pollution is released into the air and then falls into water, where small organisms absorb it. It then eventually works its way up the food chain into the fish that humans eat. No amount of cooking or cleaning can remove the mercury, which is what makes this development so big.
Further research and industrial application are needed before this mercury removal technique is put into use on a large scale.
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