Kelsey Marksteiner: Great, great question. This one’s a hard one to answer, I have to say, because it’s very hard to quantify the cost-benefit ratio here, and I don’t think anybody necessarily has done that in any studies. Obviously we all know that there are great benefits to eating canned salmon or sardines, especially if someone, of course, is not getting enough dietary calcium, for example, they have osteoporosis or something like that and they need this extra calcium. It can be tough to think about this because you obviously don’t want them to be getting tons of arsenic in their diet either, and I totally understand that. It’s honestly a hard question to answer, and I don’t know if we have a good answer for that yet because, like I said, there hasn’t been that cost-benefit ratio done, and for someone with a condition that would necessitate maybe a little bit higher dietary calcium intake, the benefit could outweigh the risk of slightly higher arsenic levels coming in from the diet.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a great answer for you there, but I would just think about for this particular patient, at the end of the day, is the benefit of getting that dietary calcium in along with the benefits that we know that fish has, does that outweigh the possible arsenic issues that they’re going to get? From there, if the answer is yes, you just want to think about, OK, what is the minimum that this person needs to eat in order to get their calcium level satisfied and to get the most benefit out of the fish that they are eating, getting omega-3’s and all that kind of stuff? Find the minimum amount that makes those things worth it, and stick to that just so there’s not a ton of arsenic coming in either. Then you just want to think about, OK, does this person have maybe a little bit higher arsenic level in their water? Are they drinking a lot of apple juice or something like that, where the levels could potentially be higher? Just take out as much as you can elsewhere because it sounds like, for this person, getting that dietary calcium is important, and that’s a great way to do it. I would definitely prefer doing it that way than supplementing with calcium, so it probably is worth it, but you just want to make sure that you’re taking out other possible sources of arsenic wherever possible so that you can have maybe slightly extra coming in in that fish intake and it just makes it worth it, if that makes sense.