Or anything else concerning, for that matter. (BPA, maybe?)
I eat a tin of these basically every day. Have been doing so for well over a year now.
No, I’m not doing the whole “sardine diet” or whatever it’s called where you eat nothing but sardines. I’m proud to say I started eating sardines daily before that fad came up. And I eat a lot more than just sardines.
Anyway, I know “fish” in general tends to have high levels of mercury, but I’ve heard that basically the amount of harmful heavy metal sort of toxins in fish generally varies directly with the lifespan of the particular type of fish in question. (The longer it’s been swimming around in mercury-laden (or whatever-laden) water and eating mercury-laden (or whatever-laden) stuff, the more mercury will build up in its system by the time its caught, cooked, put on a table, and consumed by a human.) And I’ve heard that sardines in particular are quite low in such harmful toxins. (Maybe anchovies would be even lower? Not sure.)
My googling for an answer to the question of whether the level of harmful stuff in sardines is so low that eating them daily wouldn’t be an issue hasn’t really yielded helpful results. So, why not ask here?
(I have heard that EVOO is “better for you” (whatever that means, specifically) than non-virgin olive oil. And the particular brand of sardines in “olive oil” I get don’t say “virgin” anywhere on the packaging, so that might be a reason to switch brands. Not sure whether it’s really worth it or not. And the other brands are always way more expensive.)
To reduce your intake of metals, remove the sardines from the tin before eating them.
Meh. We’re only concerned with heavy metal ingestion. Eat all the tin ya like.
Tin is a heavy metal.
It’s okay, the tins mostly use aluminum nowadays
*completely
Tin is actually pretty pricey, and it’s rarer in the Earth’s crust than many precious metals. It also is nothing like aluminum.
No tin is a different metal, you’re thinking of Tim.
If you eat a tin of sardines each day, you have a lot of life choices to think about…
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Sardines are one of the few fish that has a very negligible amount of mercury in them.
Tuna, especially albacore, has way more mercury in it and you’d still need to be eating like 7 cans a day to risk mercury poisoning.
There should be no risk of lead poisoning unless the can they come in is made out of lead for some reason.
Really? I feel like I’ve had doctors tell me to avoid tuna more than once a week. (Not that it matters in my case)
Mercury in fish is caused by coal mining runoff, mainly caused by mines in the US. Thanks to renewables, it’s not nearly as big a problem anymore. But it will be again once the BBB takes effect.
Most of the mercury that ends up in the environment due to coal is from emissions that happen when it is burned. It settles all over the land and eventually gets washed into the ocean.
Building renewables does not solve this problem; only ending the use of coal will do that. For now, worldwide coal use remains near record highs.
And China is by far the biggest source of it.
Because we pay them to burn the coal instead of burning it here
We pay them to produce products instead of producing them here, they CHOOSE to burn coal because it’s cheap but are rapidly building renewables
Thanks for pointing this out. It is imperative that people understand the reality of the energy transition and move away from the spotty doomsday or otherwise reporting on the topic.
Your blood is already full of forever chemicals, microplastics and COVID protein spikes.
Eat on. Enjoy them while you can.
You sound like my kids when I tell them to clean their room. “But the rest of the apartment is also untidy!” Yeah but that doesn’t mean we don’t need to at least try.
Wait till they learn about climate change!
That’s my wife’s favorite because they use olive oil and not soybean. We always have a stack of cans at home and we probably eat around 3-4 a week. From what I understand, smaller fish have less mercury, and I assume sardines have short lifespans so that also helps with heavy metal exposure.
Predatory fish like tuna accumulate extra mercury by eating other fish.
Because they are low in the food chain, sardines are low in contaminants, such as mercury, relative to other fish commonly eaten by humans, and have a relatively low impact in production of greenhouse gases.
For comparison (bluefin tuna):
since bluefins require so much food per unit of weight gained, up to 10 times that of salmon, if bluefins were to be farmed at the same scale as 21st-century salmon farming, many of their prey species might become depleted
I’d advise against it.
Even though sardines may have a lower amount of mercury than most other fish, they still contain it, and mercury is very hard for the body to get rid of. It accumulates and doesn’t cause problems… Until it suddenly does. And it’s not fun.
A friend of mine ate fish 4-5x weekly (not just sardines tho) for about 6 months, and he ended up in the ER and on a very restricted detox diet and meds for almost a year.
So, even though sardines are low on mercury as it gets, I’d limit myself to at most every other day.
not just that, but the salt intake would be insane.
279mg or 12%rdv of salt. It is about half of what is considered a “high sodium food.” Also about twice “low sodium” but not crazy. Are you thinking of salt packed instead of in oil?
I might be. I just remember them being very salty last time I had them.
EVOO might or might not be better depending on which study you look at. EVOO generally tastes better and so it is what you should be using when eating raw. EVOO spoils very quickly so if it isn’t fresh it is bad for you.
It takes years for it to spoil unless you put it in the sun or something. It’s why we use it to preserve stuff for millenia.
Yep
