The Food and Drug Administration will investigate whether tens of millions of cans of tuna sold each year contain potentially hazardous levels of mercury.
Responding to a Tribune series this month on mercury in fish, the FDA said it will review the possibility that there are elevated mercury levels in some cans of "light tuna," one of America's best-selling seafoods and a product the agency has recommended repeatedly as a low-mercury choice.
The Tribune revealed that the U.S. tuna industry is using a potentially high-mercury tuna species, yellowfin, to make about 15 percent of the 1.2 billion cans of light tuna sold annually. Most of these cans are not labeled yellowfin, making it impossible for consumers to know which cans might be high in mercury.
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But top consumer and environmental groups called on the tuna industry to stop using yellowfin in canned light tuna.
"It's unforgivable," said Linda Greer, a toxicologist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading conservation group. She said it was ironic that "efforts to recommend canned light tuna to people is undermined by industry shoving contaminated fish into the wrong cans."
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