If you want to be eating healthy, you need to eat salmon. The potential health benefits are substantial. If there were a pill that could do what salmon could do, millions of people would have prescriptions for it. Two common complaints I hear about salmon is that people don’t like the taste and that its too expensive. If cheap, great tasting food led to optimum health, we’d all live to be 100. Food is not a form of entertainment. It is first and foremost the building blocks of your body. A food like salmon can have a taste that turns people off. But it can be seasoned or eaten mixed in with other more palatable foods. Salmon with a large bite of sweet potatoes is a healthy and good tasting medicine snack. And with it you get a wide variety of those building blocks your body needs.
Salmon is best know for being high in heart healthy omega 3s. These healthy fats are known to have wide ranging health benefits for your body. Most well known is the role they play in preventing heart disease. They can lower triglycerides and prevent hardening of the arteries. Prescription drug companies would love to have a new pill that could make those claims. They’d sell billions of dollars worth.
But salmon is much more then just a medium for delivering omega 3 fats. Just a small, 4-ounce serving has over 2 and a half times your daily requirement of vitamin D. There is a lot more awareness out there now about all the benefits of this vitamin. It can lead to decreases in a broad set of diseases from heart disease to cancer to stroke. It is also suspected to play a role in mental health. And today more people then ever are deficient as they avoid the sun or wear strong sunblock.
Salmon is also high in vitamin B12, which also promotes a whole host of healthy functions. The same small serving that supplies you with so much vitamin D and omega 3s supplies you with a whole day’s worth of B12. This is important too as B12 can only come from animal sources. When people try to eat healthy, they often cut out things like red meat and eggs which are high in B12. In this way salmon can play a vital nutritional role in your diet.
And while a small 4-ounce portion of fish doesn’t sound that filling, its actually quite high in fat and protein, yet relatively low in calories. So it can keep you feeling full and satisfied without having to consume a lot of calories. All those nutrients your body consumes also help keep you feeling full.
Now many people will still say this is nice, but I can’t afford it. I think you can. On average, a pound of wild caught salmon costs about $12. So a 4 ounce portion costs you just $3. Served with some potatoes or vegetables or rice, and you have a meal for less then the cost of eating fast food. And an incredibly healthy meal at that. Many stores also sell dried or smoked salmon that can be a great way to snack throughout the day or to add to a small meal.