In order to ensure the health of her feline friends, Lizzie has been closely following the controversy over mercury in canned tuna products. As reported in recent issues of the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times newspapers, a California Superior Court judge has ruled that seafood producers do NOT have to warn consumers about the mercury in canned tuna products. While the state's Proposition 65 requires companies to warn consumers of foods that contain hazardous ingredients, the FDA's ruling that fish mercury levels are naturally occurring, and therefore exempt from the law, trumps the state's legislation. Starkist, Chicken of the Sea, and Bumble Bee were some of the companies challenged in the court case. The tuna companies successfully squashed testimony, based on 20 years of research and endorsed by a National Academy of Sciences panel, that showed that when pregnant women are exposed to even low levels of mercury, their children have reduced IQs. These companies argued (and won) that the judge should instead look at older studies that tested rats instead of humans. Rats tolerate higher levels of mercury before their babies are harmed. As reported in the Trib, the state's lawyers called the ruling "wrong on the law, wrong on the science, and bad for the women and children of California."

Lizzie says: OH COME ON, tuna companies and your weasly lawyers!!!! You need to be straight with the many people who do not know how bad eating a lot of tuna can be for them, for their children, and for their pets. Even the FDA, in prior statements, has acknowledged that women who are pregnant, might become pregnant, or are nursing, should LIMIT the consumption of fish for themselves and their small children. They should eat NO MORE than 12 ounces a week of fish low in mercury, like light canned tuna. Fish that are high in mercury, like canned white meat tuna or albacore (the expensive, "good stuff"), should be consumed at a rate of no more than 6 ounces a week. Remember, this is only one small can.
Let's think about this, folks - if Mama and the kids should be eating no more than one small can a week of tuna, how much should your sweet kitty be eating? Not a lot and not very often is the answer. This is another case where the people who try to feed their kitties "the good stuff" may be doing much more harm than people who feed cheap old tuna, like that so-called "cat tuna" from Trader Joe’s. A client told my Mom that she went "EWWWWW" when she opened a can of that stuff, it was so dark and smelly and icky, but my Mom said that it was a lot less dangerous than the nice white expensive tuna from a gourmet shop. She says it's sad that things have changed so much - she's old enough to have grown up eating fish every Friday, and being told by her Mom how good it was for her when she complained about having to eat that much fish! So do your kitties a favor, and watch their fish consumption. Remember that dark tuna is less dangerous than white tuna. Your cat is small compared to a child, so feed NO MORE than one small can of "people tuna" a month, and look for dark tuna, not light. If you have been feeding a LOT of tuna in the past and are worried about the possibility of high mercury levels, your kitty's hair can be tested for mercury levels and then you and your vet can decide what to do to try to "detox" your cat if the levels are a problem.

Lizzie also read a recent article in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association that looked at the effect of electroacupuncture in dogs with severe elbow arthritis. The researchers who wrote this article studied this by giving the dogs either a real treatment or a sham (pretend) treatment. The study was blinded to the owners, which means that the owners weren't told which dogs got the real treatment and which ones got the pretend treatment. The researchers found that they couldn't tell if the acupuncture worked but that the owners could tell after a treatment, with almost complete accuracy, whether their dogs got a real or a pretend treatment. The study concluded that more research is needed to decide if acupuncture works.

Lizzie says: Well, those researchers may need to do more researching to convince themselves, but we dogs know more than they do about this - and so do our owners. It's a good thing that we dogs and dog people aren't as "blinded" by traditional thinking about what works and what doesn't as those researchers evidently are! We dogs don't read the books - we just know what makes us feel better. And our owners? My Mom says you've got to trust what a concerned pet owner tells the vet. We all know that acupuncture works!