Pan-Asian cooking and fish go together like Mary Berry and massive, beautiful slices of delicious cake. They work well, but that doesn’t mean you should eat sticky toffee pudding for your lunch every day – that would just be silly (although on bad days, more than tempting).
ish lovers can easily feel superior when gorging on salmon stir-fry, smoked mackerel, sushi platters, tuna salad, or skewered grilled prawns when sat next to their steak-eating friends or their fast-food loving colleagues. Fish is perfect because it’s low in fat, high in omega and gives us vast amounts of brainpower…right?
[quote align=”center” color=”#b64736″]Pan-Asian cooking and fish go together like Mary Berry and massive, beautiful slices of delicious cake[/quote]Here’s the deal; there are many health benefits of eating fish, including that white fish is lower in fat than any other source of animal protein and it’s packed full of omega-3 fatty acids. These good fats are useful as they help to regulate blood clotting and vessel constriction, they reduce tissue inflammation – which helps ease symptoms of arthritis, and one study showed that women who ate fish just twice a month lessened their risk of heart disease by up to half in some cases!
However, it has been discovered in recent years that eating too much saltwater fish like tuna may increase exposure to mercury, which is toxic. As mercury builds up over time it can cause heart disease and damage to the central nervous system.
Fish with naturally occurring high levels of mercury include swordfish, tuna, mackerel, and shark.
The advice for fish lovers seems to be, as with most things, eat it in moderation. This means no more than a couple of fishy meals per week. And I’d recommend no more than one portion of stickie toffee pudding per day too, unless you want to be a little bit fat and well, extremely happy.
