What's on the seafood menu today?

In addition to the omega-3 proteins we seek, there is an array of unsavory and unintentional side dishes that could come with sea creatures: heavy metals, salmonella and banned pesticides or hormones. Since the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, food safety experts have focused on the danger of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — PAHs — in seafood from that area. And there is guilt: Eating some fish contributes to the problem of overfishing endangered species, while eating others could harm fragile ecosystems or cultures in other ways.

To help consumers make choices that are environmentally friendly and healthy, the advocacy group Food and Water Watch on Wednesday published the National Smart Seafood Guide 2010 that weighs nutritional and environmental considerations for eating 100 types of seafood — and may help take some of the anxiety out of choosing a fish dish.

"The guide comes at a critical time. We've been fielding countless questions from consumers on seafood safety after the Gulf oil spill," said Marianne Cufone, Food & Water Watch's fish program director. "Unfortunately, because of the spill, many people are considering imported seafood as a safer alternative to domestic. Often, it's not."

Failed fish
Indeed, Food and Water Watch named imported coastal farmed shrimp the worst of the worst on its "Dirty Dozen" list of seafood products that it says fail health and sustainability measures. Imported shrimp, much of it farmed in Asia, may be tainted with "antibiotic, pesticide or bacterial residues" that are not allowed in better-regulated markets.

Also on the guide's buyer-beware list are caviar from sturgeon that are endangered by poaching, overfishing, river damming and pollution; shark and Chilean seabass because of a tendency to have high mercury levels; and Atlantic and farmed salmon, because they introduce hazards to natural salmon populations.

As for the safety of seafood from the Gulf of Mexico, the guide says to keep watching for Food and Drug Administration updates amid ongoing testing. But Gulf coast commercial fishermen will likely be grateful for the perspective the guide offers on seafood safety. As they are quick to point out, their seafood — about 2 percent of the total in the U.S. market — is getting far more attention than imported seafood products. There are at least three federal agencies and a gaggle of state agencies and other health groups examining Gulf seafood and waters, and most are giving the products a clean bill of health.

"We are so much more scrutinized right now than any other food or fish coming into this country," said Ewell Smith, executive director of the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board. His organization is scrambling to protect the reputation of Gulf fisheries products since the broken Deepwater Horizon dumped millions of gallons of oil into the water. "In spite of all these fears that are in place, there haven't been any illnesses."

JEFFERSON PARISH — Sure it's hard to take on powerful oil companies operating in the Gulf, but that wasn't stopping Frazer O'Hara, when he took his anti-petroleum message on the road.

When I came across him on Friday, he was about 30 miles into his journey, cycling south on Interstate 310 heading into the bayou. It was midday, and hot even by local standards — a soupy 90-plus degrees.

On the back of his white shirt in large hand-painted letters, it said, "Bicycles prevent oil spills."

In a roadside chat, with semi-trucks roaring past, a sweat-drenched but cheerful O'Hara explained his mission: "I'm just trying to take over the right hand lane as much as possible with the message that we could prevent this kind of (oil spill) disaster," by putting the brakes on oil consumption. "That it's our choice."

The 29-year-old Loyola University grad said he had set out in the morning from Jefferson parish, next to New Orleans, bound for Grand Isle, a barrier island at the edge of the bayou, a journey of just over 100 miles.

Was it legal to bike down the Interstate? No, he said, but so far the police had not taken an interest. That changed moments later when state trooper Johnny Champagne pulled up on the shoulder.

Photo by Kari Huus/msnbc.com

O'Hara rides south on I-310, on a journey to Grand Isle, La. His shirt reads: "Bikes prevent oil spills."

O'Hara was ready with his rationale, his message about oil, and he quickly pointed out that as a taxpayer he had helped pay for the road.

Champagne noted that indeed, it is not legal to bike on the Interstate, but he didn't press the issue nor pursue philosophical discussion.

"Just making sure everything was okay," he said after assessing the situation. After the trooper left, O'Hara explained that he was also working with a non-profit called Team Gulf, an Internet-connected activist group that turned its focus to helping in the Gulf after the Deepwater Horizon accident.

Corporate interests are powerful and daunting, said O'Hara, so people needed to band together to be influential.

"The only thing we can do is amass the strength we have in numbers." For the day, though, he was a one-man demonstration, with many hours on the road ahead to get his message out.

A photographer taking pictures of a BP refinery in Texas was detained by a BP security official, local police and a man who said he was from the Department of Homeland Security, according to ProPublica, a non-profit news organization in the U.S.

The photographer, Lance Rosenfield, said he was confronted by the officials shortly after arriving in Texas City, Texas, to work on a story that is part of an ongoing collaboration between PBS and ProPublica.

Rosenfield was released after officials looked through the pictures he had taken and took down his date of birth, Social Security number and other personal information, the photographer said. The information was turned over to the BP security guard who said this was standard procedure, ProPublica quoted Rosenfield as saying.

Rosenfield, a Texas-based freelance photographer, said he was followed by a BP employee after taking a picture on a public road near the refinery, and then cornered by two police cars at a gas station. The officials told Rosenfield they had the right to look at the pictures taken near the refinery and if he did not comply he would be "taken in," the photographer said according to ProPublica.

BP gave ProPublica the following statement after the incident:

"BP Security followed the industry practice that is required by federal law. The photographer was released with his photographs after those photos were viewed by a representative of the Joint Terrorism Task Force who determined that the photographer's actions did not pose a threat to public safety."

In response to BP, ProPublica's editor-in-chief Paul Steiger said:

"We certainly appreciate the need to secure the nation's refineries. But we're deeply troubled by BP's conduct here, especially when they knew we were working on deadline on critical stories about this very facility. And we see no reason why, if law enforcement needed to review the unpublished photographs, that should have included sharing them with a representative of a private company."

When msnbc.com contacted BP, spokeswoman Sheila Williams said there was nothing the firm wanted to add to its earlier comment.

ProPublica filed two recent reports about BP. One deals with the similartities between the 2005 explosion at the Texas City refinery and the blast at Deepwater Horizon, and another is about thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals that were release by the refinery earlier this year.

Two National Public Radio staffers say there's been a mystifying roadblock on their attempts to report on the health effects of the spill in Louisiana's southernmost parish. Bridget DeSimone reports that while she and Betty Ann Bowser found local officials and media contacts at the Unified Command Center Operations generally helpful, they were stymied in trying to report on one angle:

It has been virtually impossible to get any information about the federal mobile medical unit in the fishing town of Venice, La. The glorified double-wide trailer sits on a spit of newly graveled land known to some as the "BP compound." Ringed with barbed wire-topped chain link fencing, it's tightly restricted by police and private security guards.

And they say they're not the first to run into this roadblock -- NewsHour colleagues and reporters from Fox News also were denied access to the unit. Read the NPR report here. And The Huffington Post has a little more to say on the topic, too.

The Coast Guard says BP has been forced to remove a cap that was containing some of the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.

Images from BP well suggest dramatic increase in oil flow. Watch the BP's live stream of the oil leak below: