Not only are there no health benefi

Not only are there no health benefits to eating shark fin, but new research shows that they are loaded with mercury and heavy metals that are higher than safe levels for humans.

Alternative medicine proponents say shark cartilage has cancer-fighting properties, a claim that has its origins in a mistaken belief that sharks do not get cancer. They do, though, and according to the National Cancer Institute, only one randomized clinical study on shark cartilage as a human cancer treatment has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and it showed the cartilage to be ineffective.

“We tested whether a pharmaceutical that was an extract of shark cartilage would increase survival in lung cancer patients,” said Charles Lu, an oncologist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston who led that study in 2010. He and his colleagues supplemented normal chemotherapy treatment with doses of the shark extract in a randomized subset of 397 patients. “Unfortunately we saw no improvement in survival in [that subset],” Lu told Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.

In fact, shark fins can be extremely unhealthy. Like many other fish products, they have been known to contain dangerously high levels of mercury. Mercury comes from ocean pollution, and, at the top of the food chain, sharks retain higher levels of the substance than most marine creatures.

A 2001 report by the watchdog group Wild Aid found that levels of the poisonous heavy metal found in shark fins from Hong Kong — which get distributed to cities all over the world — were 42 times higher than safe limits for humans.

So, in short, health risks, rather than benefits, will be eliminated with the passing of the California ban.