For health reasons I want to switch to a pescatarian diet. My favourite fish is salmon. In fact, I love it so much, I’d happily have it for dinner every day. I honestly don’t think I’d ever get bored of it, especially since I know about a dozen different ways to prepare it. I was just wondering, is it safe to eat one portion of salmon every day? I know you shouldn’t eat tuna every day because of the mercury content and stuff, but is the same true of Salmon? I’ve tried googling about but there’s so much woo out there about food that it’s hard to get a definitive answer. Are there any doctors or dieticians who could help me out?
Browsing various health sites, eating lots of salmon is good for you. Mercury levels are low and it’s very healthy. The only site I could find warning people away from salmon was PETA but their motives aren’t to promote your health.
There are arguments that farmed salmon has higher calories and a much higher ratio of Omega-6 fatty acids to Omega-3, so wild salmon is better, but even farmed salmon isn’t going to hurt you if eaten daily.
Both wild and farmed salmon contain PCBs they get from the environment which can be carcinogenic, and there was a scare about that, but really you’re at risk of getting those from almost anything so I wouldn’t worry much.
Even with tuna, the mercury risk isn’t that bad. Official EPA and FDA advice is that pregnant or nursing women and young children should limit tuna consumption to two servings a week. That’s a fairly conservative recommendation, since the EPA typically sets exposure limits an order of magnitude below the lowest dose known to cause the smallest measurable harmful effect.
For healthy adults, mercury risk is much lower, so a serving a day usually isn’t much of a risk. (There was some kind of lawsuit a few years ago where someone alleged they got mercury poisoning from eating more than a can per day for many years, but I can’t find how that one turned out…)
