Australia’s dietary guidelines and the environmental impact of food “from paddock to plate”

To the Editor: Selvey and Carey1 cite an article by Srinivasan and colleagues2 to support their claim that “Forty per cent of Australia’s managed fish stocks have been deemed overfished”. However, the data in that article were misquoted from the Australian Government’s Fishery status reports 2006, which actually stated that 14 of the 97 fish stocks reviewed were overfished3 — 14%, not 40%. More recent evidence from the 2012 review of 150 fish stocks showed that only two (1.3%) were at risk of overfishing, and plans were already in place for their effective recovery.4