Is the government too lax in advice on tuna consumption?(Up front: news/trends/advice)

This spring, two federal agencies issued the government's first advisory on limits for safe amounts of tuna to eat, because of its mercury content. The Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency say that women of childbearing age, pregnant women, nursing mothers, and young children should eat no more than 6 ounces of tuna steak or canned white albacore tuna per week. (Albacore, different from light tuna, is more likely to accumulate mercury.) As a result of industrial pollution and power-plant emissions, mercury accumulates in fish as they feed and can harm developing nervous systems.

But the government's advice is at odds with a longstanding EPA safety assessment, which suggests that the limit should be just 3 ounces of albacore a week. That's the amount recommended by the food-safety experts at Consumers Union, publisher of CONSUMER REPORTS. They say that if women of childbearing age eat albacore, any other fish they eat that week should be very low-mercury (see the table at the right). We recommend that young children not eat albacore at all.

Ads from the U.S. Tuna Foundation, a trade group, try to put the government advisory in a very rosy light, One ad says, among other things, that mercury levels in albacore are "well below ...