You know fish is good for you, and especially your heart, but you also know that eating too much increases your exposure to mercury. So what’s the best thing to do?
The good news, according to Swedish researchers, is that we get beneficial effects from even low levels of omega-3 in the fish, and we’d have to eat large amounts of fish before we began to suffer from mercury poisoning.
Overall, it’s safe for us to eat fish two to three times a week, and especially if we avoid the ‘predatory’ fish, such as pike and perch, which have the highest levels of methyl mercury from swimming in polluted waters.
Fish do absorb other pollutants too, such as PCBs and dioxin, but researchers from Umea University didn’t measure for those.
If in doubt, take omega-3 fish oil supplements instead, we suppose.
(Source: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2012; 96: 706).
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