June 8 is World Oceans Day, and NRDC has just released a new Sustainable Seafood Guide My challenge to you: why not celebrate the day by eating healthy, sustainable seafood?

Making smart seafood choices is one of the best ways individuals can help our oceans. Other organizations have already created really great guides that review the sustainability of hundreds of species and their status. There are also guides that look specifically at mercury levels in fish. 

NRDC's guide, however, was created with the intention of offering easy-to-remember, general tips to help you choose delicious seafood that is both healthy for you and our environment - even if you haven't memorized the facts about every creature in the sea.

The guide tells you:

• General tips to keep in mind when you're shopping (like choose American fish over foreign, and wild fish over farmed).

• How to eat the top 5 most popular fish in America in the healthiest, most sustainable way possible.

• A quick list of popular seafood to eat, as well as avoid.

Why does it matter how we select the seafood we eat? It makes a big impact on the environment and the health of our bodies for a variety of reasons.

First, much of the fish we consume was caught by a highly destructive gear called bottom trawlers. Trawlers drag huge nets along the floor of the ocean, "clearcutting" everything from coral and forage fish to 150-year old orange roughy, sea turtles and dolphins in their quest to get other fish. Other fishermen, though, use safer gear, like traps, or hook and line gear, which destroy much less marine life. By sending our consumer dollars towards fish that was caught by sustainable methods, we are helping to preserve our ocean's bounty.

And avoiding big fish (like swordfish and tunas) also makes a big difference, because these large predators at the top of the marine food web are so overfished that 90% of them are now gone. As it turns out, giving the big fish a break is not just good for our oceans but a healthy choice for us as well, because these are the fish that often have high mercury risks.

So check out the guide - and hopefully you'll find something that sticks with you this World Ocean's Day. I'll leave you with a few dinner recommendations from the guide to get you started: try eating wild Alaska salmon, Pacific halibut, squid, mussels, or clams; instead of shrimp, tuna and farmed salmon - you'll feel good about the choice you make for your body and the sea.