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

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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