The best plan for achieving a healthy weight and maintaining it is to change your eating and exercise habits. Replace foods that expand your waistline with healthy foods, like fish. Fish is a food that is full of satisfying flavor, low in calories, and stocked with heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3 acids are essential fats that your body can't make. They help keep the blood from clotting too easily and add to a better cholesterol ratio.
Fish is a fabulous addition to any healthful diet because its low saturated fat content makes it the perfect protein substitute for fatty cuts of beef and pork. Even shellfish is low in saturated fat and isn't as high in cholesterol as many believe.
Learn how to incorporate fish into your healthy lifestyle.
Health Benefits
Although fish is lean, it does contain some healthy oil. Known as omega-3 fatty acids, these fish oils are thought to offer some amazing health benefits, such as helping to prevent heart disease and cancer, treating psoriasis and arthritis, and relieving the agony of migraine headaches and helping with weight control. Fatty fish tend to have more omega-3s than leaner fish, but even "fatty" fish contain less fat than lean beef or chicken. Even canned fish like tuna, sardines, and salmon, when eaten bones and all, pack your meal with plenty of good-for-your-bones calcium, too.
| Nutritional Values Coho Salmon |
Selection and Storage
When buying fresh fish, always smell it. If you detect a "fishy" odor, don't buy it. Whether you buy whole fish, fish fillets, or steaks, the fish should be firm to the touch. The scales should be shiny and clean, not slimy. Check the eyes: They should be clear, not cloudy and bulging, and not sunken. Fish fillets and steaks should be moist. If they look dried or curled around the edges, they probably aren't fresh.
It's best to cook fresh fish the same day you buy it. (Fish generally spoil faster than beef or chicken, and whole fish generally keeps better than steaks or fillets.) But fish will keep in the refrigerator overnight if you store it in an airtight container over a bowl of ice.
If you need to keep it longer than a day, freeze it. The quality of thawed, frozen fish is better when it freezes quickly, so freeze whole fish only if it weighs two pounds or less. Larger fish should be cut into pieces, steaks, or fillets to ensure a quick freeze. Lean fish will keep in the freezer up to six months -- three months for fatty fish.
When buying most shellfish -- clams, oysters, lobsters, crabs, and crayfish -- it's imperative they still be alive. Live lobsters and crabs are easy to spot. Clams and oysters are trickier, though; you must be sure the shell is closed tightly or closes when you tap the shell.
Fish and shellfish have been dogged by safety questions, including those arising from man-made contaminants. Oysters and clams, if eaten raw, carry a particular risk of passing on diseases such as hepatitis or Norwalk-like viruses. Cook them thoroughly to avoid food-borne illness. Partially cooked shellfish can still harbor harmful bacteria.
Pesticides, mercury, and chemicals like PCB sometimes find their way into fish. Though fatty fish is richer in omega-3s, they're also more likely to harbor environmental contaminants.
Here are some precautions you can take to reduce the odds of eating contaminated fish:
· Eat fish from a variety of sources.
· Choose open-ocean fish and farmed fish over freshwater; they are less likely to harbor toxins.
· Eat smaller, young fish. Older fish are more likely to have accumulated chemicals in their fatty tissues.
· Before you fish, check with your own state's advisories about which waters are unsafe for fishing. Try the Department of Public Health or the Department of Environmental Conservation.
· Don't make a habit of eating the fish you catch for sport if you fish in the same place over and over again.
· Avoid swordfish and albacore. They may be contaminated with mercury.
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