Mercury Poisoning and Tuna

[sergio mendes]

I eat LOTS of tuna...how worried should we be about the mercury levels they've recently reported as VERY high? Thanks

 

[athlete21]

Im not sure what you consider A LOT of tuna, but you should be ok if you eat less then 4 cans a day. You can probably eat more then that. Perhaps you should use a different protein source every few days to be safe.lol tuna is nasty anyway

 

[bigmik44]

I eat about 4-6 cans per week. I've read that tuna is a short lived fish and that mercury doesn't have time to accumulate like other fish. Don't know how true that is.

 

[PTO]

FDA hasn't put any sort of restriction on it yet. This may sound like a suprise...but FDA put out an unofficial recommendation of 1 CAN A WEEK.

Just FYI.

 

[scherejs]

tuna

i read a few weeks ago in men's health or one of those mags in the gym that canned light chunk tuna has the lowest mercury of the tuna's and it was actually pretty safe. the albacore(sp?) was supposed to be the one with the higher mercury levels. getdiesel

 

[that]

Im pretty sure as long as yo dont eat over 4 cans per day ur cool. How u could eat 5 cans of tuna a day is beyond me. I think there more so talking about tuna that u would fish out urself. As long as u dont see a restriction , i wouldnt worrie about it. chunk is best.

 

[Iron_Gook]

I looked into this a while back and this is what I found. First, you shouldn't be eating that much tuna. It's nice to eat every now and then but 4 cans a day seems a little "cult-like".

Seriously, I was eating a ton of the stuff myself because it's so damn cheap. I heard about the possibility of mercury posioning from my G/F. So I looked into it and found that tuna which is fished for canning (canned tuna) generally is much younger/smaller than tunas sold fresh (tuna steaks, sushi (older/bigger)). Since the canned tuna is younger it hasn't had a significant opportunity to accumulate higher mercury levels in it's system. Therefore, canned tuna should be relatively safe for consumption.

Now, as for fresh tuna and other large predatory fish like tuna, swordfish, shark, etc... I would limit my consumption of these products as they have been linked to higher mercury levels due to their size/age. (Big fish eating a lot of little fish = higher mercury levels).

Hope this helps but I still recommend you find different protein sources.

IG

 

[Grizzly]

I wouldn't worry. I've averaged AT LEAST 5 cans a day for the last 5 years and I'm still just fine.

 

[Grizzly]

I wouldn't worry because you should be cycling your sources of protein anyway.

Huh???? Since when did this become an issue?

 

[Grizzly]

It depends on what you mean by cycling. I took it to mean eat tuna for 3 months, steak for 3 months, chicken for 3 months, eggs for 3 months and repeat.

If you meant to simply eat all of them in a given day, then that's fine.