Top 5 Best Fish You Should NEVER Eat & 5 Fish You Must To Eat

The five best fish to eat and the five worst fish to eat fish can be extremely nutritious or at least it used to be but things have changed in the last 50 years with pollution and heavy metals and farm-raised fish and so forth so today people are very confused they hear good things about fish but they're kind of scared to eat it so today we're going to talk about what you need to know about fish which ones are safe and which ones do you need to avoid comin right up Hey I'm Dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss anything fish have some unique nutrients they have very high rates of EPA and DHA those are the long-chain fatty acids in fish oil there are very very rare in any other food but in fish they're abundant and they're important for two reasons the longest of the fatty acids is called DHA and it is the primary building block of your brain of your nervous system and of your eye of your retina it's the membrane component the primary membrane component of every cell membrane in your body is the DHA and the other long-chain fatty acid is called EPA and that has been found very beneficial to reverse heart disease to prevent heart disease because it's a natural anti-inflammatory helps the body balance the inflammatory responses but as important as those two fatty acids are they are among the most common deficiencies because people don't eat much fish anymore and these fatty acids are very sensitive to heat they spoiled very easily so when we processed food we pretty much removed them from food complete so we're gonna take a look at fish and we're gonna evaluate them and I'm not going to look at all the different controversies about fish we're going to look at primarily two things the benefits that we get from omega-3s the EPA and the DHA those are known as omega-3s but they're different than the omega-3s in plant fats because in plant fats is called linoleic acid and the linolenic acid can theoretically be converted into the EPA and the DHA that we need but the conversion is so poor that less than 1% usually gets converted so eating the plant-based Omega threes is not going to give us the EPA and the DHA that we need whereas if we eat the fish oil then we get the final end product we get a hundred percent of the thing that we need so the milligrams of omega-3 from fish are worth many many many times more the omega-3s in plant fats we're also going to look at the levels of mercury and we're gonna based on the levels of mercury we're gonna talk about how often you want to eat those fish and then we're going to talk about some general recommendations so in general fish is a high protein food it is very much like any other meat it has right around 20% protein in the meat and it doesn't matter which fish it is it's gonna vary up and down three or four percent plus or minus but pretty much 20% so whichever fish we eat we're gonna get a good quality protein it's going to be an animal protein is going to be have a complete set of essential fatty acids in the right combination for us and one of the benefits of protein from fish is that it's generally easier to digest than red meat so people have trouble they want to get the the benefits of red meat but they can't necessarily digest it then they can go protein from fish and when we talk about the mercury the HG stands for mercury that's going to vary tremendously and the reason that it varies is depending on the size and the age of the fish so the general rule of thumb is that a small fish is much safer and a young fish is much safer so you want to avoid the large fish and you want to avoid fish who grow very very slowly and we'll talk about a couple of those in here the large fish like tuna and swordfish they're predatory fish they eat other fish so they concentrate the mercury from the fish that they eat and they live for a long time and grow very big so they're gonna have a very high concentration of mercury whereas a small fish like a sardine it doesn't live very long and it eat mostly algae and plant material so it doesn't concentrate it doesn't consume a lot of mercury and it doesn't live long enough to concentrate a lot of it so small fish is much much safer and young fish is much much safer and the reason I mentioned that is that there's still a lot of variation between fish depending on the location so if the fish lives in an area with a lot of pollution and obviously it's going to concentrate more toxins in the body so that's why we also want to take these numbers with a grain of salt they're based on a list of readings that I got from an FDA study but there's very few of these studies done so we can't guarantee that whatever number that we find is going to hold true for that fish in all situations so we want to keep this in mind and use some common sense along with this but just as an example something called a tile fish if you catch it in the Atlantic then it would have a hundred and forty four parts per billion of mercury whereas if you the same fish or the same species at least in the Mexican Gulf it would have fourteen hundred and fifty parts per billion the highest level ever recorded in a fish was 1450 so it depends on where you catch it also as well as the species and we don't always know so we want to play it safe and go with the safest ones we can find we're going to go where the fish will have the lowest reading and then we also want to know that if we choose small and young fish then we're gonna be much safer another example is trout that can be a really good option if it's freshwater trout so trout can live in streams and lakes but and then it would have 71 in the study they published it had 71 parts per billion whereas if they caught it in the ocean it had 256 parts per billion so the tile fish could vary a factor 10 and the trout could vary a factor 4 right so that's a big big difference and then a lot of people talk about that you shouldn't eat tilapia and you shouldn't eat catfish because they're farm raised and they're absolutely right but it's not just the tilapia and the catfish that are bad because they're farm raised it is all farm raised fish it's just that the catfish and the tilapia are the cheapest and the sturdiest so they're very very easy to raise okay they get a lot for their money when they raise them because they're so sturdy but any fish that your farm raised is going to be a bad idea why because farm raised fish it's unnatural it's not their natural habitat they don't get to move they don't get to eat the things they're used to a lot of these fish they normally eat algae and seaweeds and and small plankton and things like that and in captivity they feed them grain and corn and soybeans and and garbage and just about anything these animals will eat so it's a very unnatural situation for the animals and if they're not living the life that they're supposed to then they get sick and then we get sick eating them as well and then they have to feed them lots and lots of antibiotics okay just like the the cattle and the chickens and so forth and one example of how absurd this is is salmon that in the wild salmon fights against the stream and fighting the the intense work that the salmon does is what makes the flesh red and because in captivity they don't move the the salmon is actually gray it is totally pale and unappetizing so what do they do they feed them red dye they feed them little pellets that end up in their tissue so you're basically just eating artificial color that that the salmon ate farm-raised salmon would basically have no color unless they fed it color pellets and they also found that the farm-raised salmon could have as much as 16 times as high a level of PCBs which is a very toxic carcinogen it's just like mercury it accumulates in in the tissue of the fish furthermore the fish is just like the grass-fed meat in that when you feed them grain when you feed them things they're not supposed to eat you change the ratio between the Omega 6s and the Omega 3s so normally they're gonna have a very very strong omega-3 to omega-6 ratio but when you feed them garbage and and corn and grain then you're going to disturb that that ratio in the wrong directions you're going to bring up the omega sixes and bring down the omega threes and if you think about the Omega 3s that was the reason that we're told to eat fish in the first place but if they farm raise it and they feed it the wrong thing the and it doesn't have as much of the thing that we want when we eat the fish so it sort of defeats the purpose of eating fish in the first place so when we're talking about these fish we're not talking about anything farm-raised right it doesn't matter which fish it is it is not gonna be a good idea if it's farm-raised so let's start off with the fish that you want to avoid and the reason you want to avoid them is that it is very very high in mercury so from the very bottom of the list it's the tile fish from the Mexican Gulf like I mentioned over there fourteen and hundred and fifty parts per billion it's the highest level of mercury ever recorded then next on the list we have swordfish that again it's a large predatory fish so it lives for a long time it concentrates a lot of mercury that's why the levels are extremely high and the same thing about a shark its predatory it's gonna eat other things and concentrate that then we get to the king mackerel and even though mackerel can be extremely healthy and we're gonna have it higher on the list later on here it depends on the size of it so the healthy mackerel that you buy in the in the jar or you buy them smoked or fresh they're going to be small mackerel whereas the king mackerel is somewhere around this size and it lives much longer and it accumulates a lot of toxins so even though mackerel has a lot of good fats the king mackerel you definitely want to avoid and then it's everybody's favorite tuna and there's many many kinds of tuna and the readings they had vary from 350 to 689 but all of those readings are too high next is orange roughy at 571 parts per billion and it really hurts me to see these two the orange roughy and the tuna because those are my absolute favorite fish that if it didn't have this mercury I would eat each of them a couple of times a week probably I love those fish but because they're so high in mercury I still eat them on occasion but I pretty much don't have it more than every two months or so I'll have each one maybe every two months and that way you spread out it would probably be better to avoid it altogether but if you're gonna have it because you just find it so super delicious then make sure that you don't have it on a regular basis so now we're moving up in the categories and we have a category that I would call good or okay okay these are the bad you want to avoid them these are okay but they're not great okay so if you like these fish and you want to eat them for the protein then go ahead but it's not going to have a tremendous benefit because it doesn't have a whole lot of omega-3s in it you would have to eat literally pounds worth of of these fish to get any significant amount number 10 on the list is the mahi-mahi and if you really like it then it's something that you can eat but I wouldn't eat it all the time because the mercury levels are creeping up a little bit it has almost five to ten times more mercury than some of the best fish and it doesn't have a whole lot of omega-3s okay so there's not a tremendous benefit to it other than it's a good protein okay it's a good easily digested food if you love it have it once in a while then we have Cod which is very popular it has a little bit more omega-3s a little bit less mercury but it's still not like super beneficial so on these in terms of frequency I would say the mahi-mahi sort of avoid it but eat it once in a while the cod is pretty much okay but I wouldn't eat it all the time trying to get benefit from it thinking that fish is is super and next in the okay group is number eight croaker which again it has a little bit more of the omega-3s but now we're getting into what they consider really safe ranges of mercury so from now on up with these mercury levels the mercury is low enough that you can eat it as much as you want unless you have like a severe that you know that you have a severe heavy-metal sensitivity then you probably want to avoid anything at all but if that's not the case then these levels are low enough that according to official guidelines you can eat them freely you can enjoy them as much as you want but again it doesn't have a tremendous amount of omega-3 so if you're eating fish for the omega-3 benefits then none of these are gonna cut it they're not going to provide enough omega-3s to really make a difference the flounder number seven that's something that I eat a lot because it's very low in mercury it doesn't have a ton of omega-3s but I just really liked the flavor it's very very easy to digest and it's a good option to alternate with with meat and chicken and other forms of food number six on the list is shrimp everybody's favorite or a lot of people's favorite and even though it doesn't have a tremendous amount of omega-3s you would have to eat a lot of shrimp to get significant amount it is very very low on the mercury it only nine parts per billion it is the lowest item that we have here on the list word of caution any time that you eat shrimp in a restaurant or you most of the stuff you buy in the store it will be farm raised okay you have to look very carefully for the wild-caught because otherwise with the farm raised now you're back into the same situation as what we talked about before number five trout but it has to be freshwater trout the ocean trout is much much higher in mercury and trout is so delicious it is a quite a bit like salmon and it's so delicious when you if you can find it smoked that's my favorite great food but again it to be fresh water now we're up to significant amounts of omega-3s it has a thousand and seventy milligrams of omega-3s and we're not just talking fish oil here it's not like a thousand milligrams of fish oil it's a thousand milligrams of the actual precious omega-3 fatty acids it's the DHA and the epa and something called DPA so those are the three top long-chain fatty acids that do wonders for our brain and nervous system so this might be equivalent to actually about 5,000 milligrams of fish oil depending on how that oil is concentrated it is very moderate it's not the lowest but 71 parts per billion of mercury is probably not going to hurt you so that's again in the green category where they say that you can eat it and enjoy it as much as you want number four on the list is herring this is an old favorite and Sweden they used to pickle it but if you're not a fan of pickled herring then you might want to try it smoked now we're getting up to really good levels we have almost 2,000 milligrams almost twice as much as the trout and 1,890 milligrams of omega-3s and about 84 parts per billion of the mercury number three on the list one of my absolute favorites is sardines I love sardines I eat them probably at least twice a week it is so inexpensive it is so convenient you just pop open a can you get a fork and and you have a meal right there it has 1500 milligrams of omega-3s per 100 grams so all these numbers by the way are per 100 grams of food so the number you see here is basically a percentage so 1500 milligrams means that's 1.5 percent of the entire meal is concentrated omega-3s it only has 13 parts per billion of the mercury because again remember it's a very small very young fish and it doesn't have time to accumulate a lot of toxins so most a lot of fish oil is actually made from sardines now we're getting up into the heavy hitters number two on the list is mackerel and it's the Atlantic mackerel unlike the king mackerel so size matters okay the larger ones are going to accumulate more toxins they live longer they eat more other fish but the small mackerel and the version they tested was the Atlantic is very very safe it only has 50 parts per billion of mercury but it has the highest level of mega threes of any fish two thousand six hundred and seventy milligrams of omega-3 so here you can have one serving of fish a relatively small serving of fish and get equivalent to a handful of official capsules okay so here is where it starts to really matter this is where you can really have an impact down here you can probably still need to take fish oil no matter how much of these fish you eat but up here is where you get a significant amount of these omega-3s number one on the list you all knew that it had to show up somewhere number one is salmon it is the crowning achievement it is the perfect combination of very very low mercury and very very high omega-3s two thousand five hundred 90 milligrams omega-3s and only 22 parts per billion of mercury so no wonder the salmon is so popular it's not just the taste and the availability but it is extremely nutritious again you got to get the wild caught because the farmed salmon is just as bad as the other stuff so use these numbers with caution okay use some common sense take it with a grain of salt because like I said these mercury levels they're based on one set of readings okay the FDA published numbers but it was between 1990 and 2010 or something like that it's not something that they do every year everywhere in the world so just because a number is low doesn't guarantee that that fish is always going to be that low or at that level so you're some common sense and remember that the safest way to go by is small and young fish are gonna be your best bet so is it safe to eat fish anymore yes but you got a stick to the green ones so everything here would be safe to eat but everything on top the top five here would be the most beneficial if you enjoyed this video make sure you check out that one thank you so much for watching I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Dr. Sten Ekberg

Views: 1,116,846

Rating: 4.9042892 out of 5

Keywords: fish, omega 3, best fish to eat, sardines, worst fish to eat, top 10 fish to eat, keto, weight loss, healthy food, low carb, low carb diet, low carb foods, keto diet, ketogenic, fat loss, fish to eat, fish diet, fish without mercury list, is cod healthy, is catfish healthy, sardines nutrition, fish health benefits, keto fish, fish oil, keto doctor, doctor keto, keto dr, dr ekberg, sten ekberg

Id: 0hdVpzvLbYo

Length: 23min 12sec (1392 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 13 2019