SEAwise review of health impact of different fish and fish sizes

The SEAwise project works to deliver a fully operational tool that will allow fishers, managers, and policy makers to easily apply Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM) in their fisheries. This SEAwise report evaluates the health impacts of different fish species. The consumption of different types of fish is part of a healthy diet, where the health impact depends on the nutrient content of fish as well as possible contaminants. Information on these aspects were collected from institutional and governmental sources and quality assured. National nutritional databases were consulted to obtain regional data to respond to the case studies approach of the SEAWISE project. When data was not available from national databases, a literature review was conducted to attain complementary data. As the raw data from different sources was in various formats and structures, the data was subsequently adapted to ensure unit equivalence and homogeneous descriptions to allow combination and analyses of all the information.

The health impacts of nutrients and contaminants content in fishes depends on the person’s requirements. Certain population groups can have increased nutritional needs, e.g. pregnant or elderly people, and citizens of certain countries can present specific nutritional deficits. To determine the potential health impact, an in depth analysis of European nutritional needs was therefore conducted.

The combination of the fish nutritional and contaminant contents and the nutritional requirements and characteristics of the populations groups enabled SEAwise to design a fish recommendation system. The system is based on a ranked list of fishes that was created in the project and from this, best choices for overall health benefits of each population group was established.

More information about the SEAwise project can be found at https://seawiseproject.org/