I know fish has its laundry list of benefits, but surely consuming a large amount can have detrimental effects due to mercury, microplastics and PCBs, yet it doesn’t seem to affect blue zones like Okinawa where their citizens outlive most other nations (with a large amount of centenarians) and consume large amounts of fish.
Why is this?
In: 5
The Japanese in general have a very long life expectancy, largely because of extremely low obesity rates. In the US, for example, heart disease is the #1 cause of death and stroke is #5. Fish might contain some harmful chemicals, but it’s also a pretty lean source of protein. What’s important here is not just that they *are* eating fish, but that they *aren’t* eating a lot of high-fat land meats like beef.
That said: nutrition is really complicated. We can be pretty confident that obesity is bad for you, but exactly why obesity occurs is an active area of research (yes, calories-in/calories-out, but there’s lots of variables that influence both).
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