A sustainable approach

Posted by Andrew Wadge on February 12th 2008 in General interest

Since the Second World War, British politics has principally been dominated by the debate about which politicians would make us more prosperous. But in recent years it has become increasingly clear that a key driving force is how we can maintain or improve our current lifestyles in the face of environmental change.

Sustainable development is cropping up more and more in conversations and meetings around the FSA, and like everybody else we have a duty to ensure this issue informs all of our activities and policies. Indeed, we have an action plan that ties in with the Agency’s current strategic plan to take our work forward.

With this in mind, we’ve now decided to review our advice on eating fish to take into account environmental concerns.  Our dietary advice – that we should all aim to eat at least two portions of fish a week, one of which should be an oily fish – is based on sound scientific evidence for the health benefits of fish consumption.  Our aim now is to produce dietary advice that takes into account nutrition, safety and sustainability evidence rather than open up this nutritional evidence for re-appraisal.

It is an interesting area which neatly sums up this paradox of 21st century life – we know that on average we eat nowhere near enough fish in the UK and that eating more would make a major contribution towards achieving a healthy and balanced diet.  However, there is widespread consumer concern as we know that eating some types of fish raises issues about declining fish stocks and modern fishing methods. 

This will be a difficult task but advice such as this will have a net benefit for us all – if you’ll excuse the pun.

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Backwards or Forwards

Posted by Anonymous (not verified) on 23/04/2008 - 10:42

Adopting a healthy lifestyle has positive environmental benefits when we think about increased physical activity yet generally negative ones when we consider healthier eating. The reality is that increasingly we are becoming aware that advice about what is healthy to eat has other environmental consequences. Suggestions to eat organically, eat more fruit and veg, more fish, more wholegrains, less saturated vegetable oils all have environmental consequences. Where is the healthy population focus on physical activity. In regard to food of course we should look to eat more healthily and probably a bit less. The question is do we look back to when the human race caused less environemtnal damage or forward to technological solutions? If we take fish, understanding what in fish provides the benefit then we can either look to fish farming to product more of the right fish with the right characteristics or produce the positive components in isolation using biotechnology and put that componetn into the foods peopel eat.

re: sustainable approach

Posted by Matt Collings (not verified) on 15/02/2008 - 13:49

Good to see the FSA taking sustainability into account. Consumers today are spoilt for choice with regards to what foods are available - and at such low prices. It's about time the true costs of food - be it 'food miles', declining fish stocks, non-fair trade, etc. are taken into account.