Health Risks Of Eating Fish And Eggs

what’s wrong with eating fish assuming it came from healthy waters you know it’s that’s a it’s a it’s an interesting question and and if you look around the world at some of the healthiest people the okinawans ate fish the sardinians the people in icaria a lot of healthy people do include fish and and so then why wouldn’t we want to eat it when there are some of the healthiest people in the world a couple of things that people need to be aware of for example the okinawans averaged a half an ounce of fish a day that’s about 15 grams for people who are on the metric scale and and so this is a very tiny amount of fish it’s not a lot they might have eaten it twice a week and very small servings uh and and so i think people can be healthy eating small amounts of clean fish the issues for me are several number one that fish is only as clean as the water it’s swimming in and our oceans are becoming more and more contaminated fish is one of our main dietary sources and it is the main dietary source of mercury and it’s one of the main sources of persistent organic pollutants in our environment dioxins and pcbs and all of these things that we know are neurotoxins and so that’s an issue uh for sure and and then the other issue is we are raping the oceans uh there were a group of scientists that that um predicted by 2048 uh there wouldn’t be any fish stocks left to fish it would all be fish farming because we are cleaning out the oceans i remember a program about life in the ocean the last five minutes of the program showed um you know one of these huge nets that that are dragged along the bottom of the ocean everything in the net brought back up to the surface and they picked off the prawns about 20 percent of the weight of what was there was prawns the other 80 percent fell you know they let dye and and turtles and and sharks and you name it dead back to the bottom of the ocean it’s of no value to the to the shrimp industry so we also need to think about how these fish are being caught and and what we’re doing in the process to our our ocean ecosystems which to me is a big issue and then for people who are who are interested in the compassion piece um fish you know we used to think they didn’t feel or think or any of that stuff and that’s just not true there’s a there’s a man by the name of jonathan balcombe that has is a researcher in this area and he’s written several books and we are learning a lot about this the sort of sort of sensibilities if you will of of these creatures that are living in the ocean and i think that needs to be weighed in as well so my personal preference is not to consume fish

according to the best unbiased science is there a clear relation between consuming eggs and heart disease cancer and diabetes well with eggs there there’s actually a fair bit of evidence on both sides i think a fair bit of the evidence on the on the favorable side that they’re healthy comes from the egg industry which isn’t surprising some not so much but i think the studies are are fairly clear that that that eggs do increase certainly diabetes risk and that they can increase blood cholesterol levels because they’re little cholesterol bombs now we know cholesterol from food doesn’t impact blood cholesterol levels as much as we once thought but it still does increase it to some degree and and so i think we need to be aware of that and and so of course if it’s increasing blood cholesterol levels it can be a contributing factor to cardiovascular disease now there was an interesting study that came out i think it was 2018 but this was a harvard study 130 000 uh individuals followed for about three decades so this is a big cohort followed for a long period of time and what these researchers looked at was if we replace just three percent of calories coming from animal protein and replace it with plant protein what will that mean for mortality rates and just to to to set the stage here 60 or to to give you some framework that’s a more practical um three percent of of calories in a 2000 calorie diet which is kind of standard for a lot of people would be about 60 calories worth of animal protein this is not a lot if we take three percent of calories from animal protein replace it with plant protein uh what happens in terms of mortality well if we if that animal protein comes from processed meat we decrease mortality 34 percent if that processed meat is replaced with plant protein that’s a lot if we take the the animal protein and it’s coming from eggs and replace it with with plant protein we reduce mortality by 19 percent that’s significant so if it’s unprocessed meat it’s 12 if it’s dairy it’s eight percent and if it’s poultry or fish it’s six percent so i think this is a pretty significant finding of all of the animal products that were assessed in that study uh eggs came out a number two right after processed meat in terms of how much mortality is increased by replacing that food with plant protein i will pick scramble tofu over scrambled eggs any day