What is meant by 'eating lower on the food chain'?
Eating lower on the food chain refers to the concept that we are really in a food web. I know nutritionists like to talk about the food pyramid, about things you want to eat more of at the bottom of the food pyramid and things you want to eat only one or two meals a week of at the bottom of it. It's similar in terms of the toxic food pyramid in that there are certain chemicals, certain foods that you can eat plenty of because they are low on contaminants. But then there are what we call "browser species," or species that browse on all those kinds of food sources. They accumulate chemicals into their bodies, and we are at the top of the food web so we are eating all these other species that have accumulated levels of toxins. So being the top predator on the food web we are getting accumulations of hundreds to thousands to maybe even millions of organisms that are accumulating chemicals in their bodies. And that's all being funneled up into us. So lower on the food web means eating more grains, more fruits, things that a nutritionist will tell you are healthy for other reasons. But eating less red meat and eating less high predator fish, things like swordfish and shark. All these kinds of fish are big and predacious and feed on lots of smaller fish.
