How To Eat Fish To Benefit Your Health!

My patients and I are lucky. We live in an area surrounded by the ocean and several big lakes. Not only is it a beautiful environment but it is home to one of the best foods you can eat, fish, which is abundant here. There are many great fish restaurants in this area that are always packed with customers who love it. In fact, fish is one of the best foods you can eat for good health. It is full of protein, potassium, and heart and joint healthy Omega-3 fats.
However, because my patients like to eat fish so much, it's important to make them aware that not all fish are equal - in their health benefits that is. While they can be full of good nutrition, some have the ability to absorb too much mercury and pass it along when consumed.
Let me share with you my advice to patients about what kind, and how much, fish you can safely eat to be sure you are getting the most health benefit from it.
Choosing The Most Beneficial Fish
Fish is naturally one of Nature's perfect foods. It's lean, full of protein, and an excellent source of omega-3 oils that reduce inflammation in your body and protect against cardiovascular disease and arthritis. Fish also keeps your skin and joints lubricated and reduces cholesterol. One fish oil, in particular, DHA, helps babies neuro-pathways and cognition to develop correctly.
Fish like wild Alaskan salmon, tiny krill, and yellowfin tuna, have high levels of these beneficial Omega-3 oils. In addition, they are good sources of potassium, a mineral many people do not get enough of! Potassium aids energy and muscle function as well as prevents metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes.
With all of these good nutritional, health preserving things that fish has going for it, just like my patients, you may be tempted to eat a lot of it, thinking if a little is good, more must be phenomenal! Well, with fish, not so much.
In fact, when I talk to my patients about eating fish, I like to emphasize two important concepts - moderation and avoidance. Now, those two terms may seem contradictory, but in eating fish there are many that you can eat in moderation and other fish that you should avoid altogether. Why? Because of their mercury content.
All fish contain a certain amount of mercury which you process as a toxin that eventually clears from your body. Light to moderate consumption of certain types of fish should pose no problem for you. As I counsel my patients, your risk of Hg (mercury) toxicity increases with the types and amounts of fish you consume.
Here's a list I pass along to my patients from what the US EPA and the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) recommend to decrease your mercury exposure from eating fish:
• Avoid shark, King mackerel, swordfish, tilefish, grouper, Marlin, orange roughy, lake bass, walleye - these have the highest levels of Hg.
• Limit white albacore tuna to 18 oz a month - it contains more Hg than light tuna.
• Limit saltwater bass, croaker, halibut, bluefin tuna, sea trout, Maine lobster to 18 oz a month. These have moderate levels of Hg.
• Limit Carp, Mahi-Mahi, crab, snapper, perch, cod, monkfish to 24 oz a month. These have lower levels of Hg.
• Shrimp, sardines, canned light tuna, wild Alaskan salmon, pollock, whitefish, and catfish, black cod - these have the lowest levels of Hg. You can enjoy up to 12 ounces a week.
Get The Most Benefit From Your Fish
If you stay within the guidelines recommended above for what types and how much fish to consume, you'll be getting a lot of benefit out of your fish-eating experiences. However, there are several other things you can do to optimize the benefits of eating fish and to help neutralize some of the drawbacks of eating it:
• Add some fermented foods to your diet - things like yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, help remove toxins, like mercury, from your body through creating good gut bacteria.
• Adequate amounts of antioxidants like Vitamin C, E, and resveratrol - help prevent damaging oxidation effects of mercury.
• Add some natural chelators to your diet - things like garlic, selenium, cilantro, and chlorella. These substances bind to toxins like mercury and move them out of your body.
• Adequate fiber intake - sweeps the colon clean and lessens levels of mercury accumulation.
• Supplement - you can get the good benefits of eating fish with none of the bad by taking Omega-3 fish oil supplements, like those that come from fish such as krill, which are abundant in these oils.
Eating a variety of fish is a delightful experience, which delivers a lot of health benefits. We need to follow the guidelines listed above, though, to avoid mercury toxicity, which can cause a multitude of health problems, including depression, kidney disease, fertility problems and Alzheimer's. With a little common sense, however, we can still enjoy eating the seafood we love so much without concern of toxicity!

How One Can Create A Complete Or High Quality Protein Intake To Grow Taller And Build Lean Muscle

We have been led to believe that any meat is a good protein source. Wrong! Cured ham has only 16 percent protein; hot dogs, only 7 percent, less than dried skim milk, which has over 34 percent, or sunflower seeds with 27 percent; lentils have more than 23 percent protein. And while all we need to satisfy our protein needs is a 8 ounces of complete high-quality protein a day, we are getting far more than that. It is understood that incomplete proteins alone do not provide an adequate diet. But one can create complete, or high-quality, proteins by combining foods so that those that are low in some amino acids are eaten together with ones that are high in those same acids.
These complementary proteins-all from plant sources-are in this way completed and so can supply protein needs quite nicely. You just have to know how. Soy beans, for example, are low in the amino acid tryptophan, but high in lysine. To enhance their biological values to grow taller, combine them with complementary proteins like nuts, grains, and seeds, which are low in lysine but high in tryptophan.
In countless combinations, they can make satisfying, delicious dishes. Tofu, for example, made by curdling soy bean milk and packing the solids in layers of cloth, has a protein value-in terms of completeness, digestibility and other factors-only slightly less than animal flesh. It can be made even higher in quality by combining it with grains such as brown rice. Soy bean sprouts and soy flour can also be used in cooking to enhance the complementary values of other foods.
Other legumes, like chick-peas, lentils, and various kinds of beans, are low in certain amino acids, but high in others. They also can be combined with grains, nuts, and seeds to form complementary proteins of high nutritional value to grow taller. Consider, after all, how the rest of the world, which has not had the luxury of high meat diets, subsists. Central American and Caribbean nations use beans and rice as staples. Middle Eastern countries combine sesame paste with chick-peas, while Italians mix lentils, chick-peas, and other beans with pasta. Grains and cereals make ideal complements to legumes because they are generally high in tryptophan and low in isoleucine and lysine.
Grains and cereals supply half the world's protein and are great sources of fibre, too. They do not need to be complemented with meat products to raise the protein values. The myth has been that cereals, grains, and seeds are incomplete, poor sources of protein even when combined. This is false. When you combine grains, seeds and legumes, you can easily exceed animal protein quality to grow taller and rebuild numerous tissues.

Discover a List of Good Fats To Start Eating and Improve Your Health and Well Being

One of the most important things you can do if you want to improve your health is get a list of good fats and start including them into your daily diet.
I started doing this myself many months ago and feel tremendously better for having done it.
Also, in this article, I'd like to dispel some health myths regarding fats that are preventing people from achieving the good health they deserve.
First, here's a list of good fats you should start shopping for: olive oil, fish oil (supplements), coconut oil (extremely healthy, and the best oil to cook foods with), eggs (cage free), fish (fatty species only like salmon, tuna, hoki, sardines), avocados, nuts like almonds and walnuts, any grass fed or free range meat (beef, chicken, lamb), and flaxseed oil.
Now, some of those good fats are particularly rich in omega 3 fats, which are vital for good health. Fatty fish and fish oil supplements made from them, for example, are probably the number one source.
What I also want to point out is the health myth that has been going around for many years that all saturated fats are bad and only unsaturated fats are good for you. This is nonsense and is doing a lot of people a lot of disservice who are listening to this advice.
For example, eggs are one of nature's most perfect foods and yet they are a source of saturated fats. Coconut oil is probably the healthiest oil one can consume and cook with and it's largely saturated fat. Do some research yourself on these or talk to a naturopathic doctor and you'll discover the truth for yourself.
Of course the monounsaturated fats can be good for you, too, and I listed some of them above.
Other fats occur in oils such as canola, peanut, or sunflower and safflower oil. I avoid these because they are high in omega 6 and 9.
Although we need some omega 6 and 9, most of us already get way too much of it. We actually need to increase our omega 3 to omega 6 and 9 ratio. Some natural health experts believe this ratio is out of balance because of our modern diets. They strongly believe this unbalanced ratio is what has caused so many health problems for so many people.
Unfortunately, if you read product labels, like most salad dressings or what kinds of oils go into snacks like chips and cookies, it's exactly these types of oils like canola, sunflower, safflower or soybean. Please cut back on them, or at least take a highly purified, concentrated fish oil supplement daily to help bring your ratio back into a healthier balance.