Eating tuna or swordfish while pregnant may not be as harmful as previously thought.
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New research suggests that the amount of harmful mercury contained in certain types of fish may have been overestimated, reports BBC News Online.
Mercury consumption has been linked to damage to the brain and nervous system, and pregnant women have been advised to avoid eating certain types of fish in order to avoid harming the foetus. Scientists had thought that mercury was stored as methyl mercury in the body of fish such as tuna and shark. Methyl mercury is potentially easily absorbed into human tissue.
However, researchers from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada have suggested that mercury may be stored in a different form that is not so easily absorbed.
“People have used methyl mercury to model the toxic properties of mercury in fish because they don’t know what’s on the mercury in fish tissue.
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By GlobalData“Now that we know this, we can better investigate its toxic properties,” Dr Graham George, who carried out the study while based at Stanford University in the US, was quoted by the BBC as saying.
The research was published in the journal Science.
