Brett Homme again. This week, I'm going to discuss the nutritional value of shark fins.While many people eat shark fins (predominantly the Asian culture), a lot of people are ignorant about the danger in eating shark fins. Shark fins contain dangerous and poisonous chemicals that are obtained through a process called "bioaccumulation." When an animal eats a plant or another animal, it acquires some of the vitamins, minerals, and other chemicals that were in the plant or animal. As the first animal eats more and more plants or animals, it acquires more and more chemicals from all the things it has eaten. Then, when that animal gets eaten, some of the chemicals it had built up in its body get transferred to the animal that ate it. Because sharks are the apex predator of the ocean, they eat literally tons of fish in their lifetime, meaning they stockpile many poisonous chemicals. When humans come along and kill the sharks for their fins, their fins contain toxins that get consumed by humans when the fins are put in dishes such as shark fin soup. One of these toxins is methyl mercury, which is a neurotoxin that has been linked to serious neurological and heart problems as well as infertility. Two other toxins are Beta-Methylamino-L-Alanine (BMAA), which has been linked to Alzheimer's and other degenerative brain diseases, and arsenic, which has been linked to heart disease, cancer, respiratory diseases, stroke, and diabetes. In addition to the toxins that shark fins contain, they also contain very little nutrition in them, and have no taste. There is no reason why shark fins should be consumed, seeing as how they only hurt humans that eat them. Especially when fishers waste 95% of the shark to only get the fins and then leave the shark to thrash around the water until it slowly dies from being unable to get oxygen. It's an immoral practice that needs to be stopped. If it's not, humans will have much bigger problems than simply not being able to have shark fins anymore.
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