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Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know if anyone reading this will find this useful but I just now discovered canned mackerel in olive oil as a meat source and it is incredible. It almost feels like taking an antidepressant. Some magic about eating the fish that I have never experienced taking omega-3 pills or fish oil pills. I even started looking better and my brother noticed I looked healthier.

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If you don't get the same effect from salmon it might be because they have a large amount of phosphatidylserine which is a anti-inflammatory/immune suppressant.

Try adding some chilli sauce. Mixed with the olive oil and fish it's amazing. After experimenting with quite a lot of chilli sauce with mackerel/oil over a period of years, I really recommend "Encona West Indian Hot Pepper Sauce".

If the 'sunflower oil' etc versions of the mackerel are available it also mixes extremely well with those and they can be cheaper than the olive oil tins.

Agree on all counts except the sunflower oil. In general, avoid seed/vegetable oils, especially if they are used in high-heat cooking as in this example.

Vegetable/seed oils are not whole foods or naturally stable. They are modern frankenfoods made from leftover agri-waste via industrial chemical processes. Under high heat these oils become highly oxidated and not the kind of stuff you want your body to deal with.

Do you have a source on this? Because this is contrary to what I have learned

Comparison of the oxidative stability of soybean and sunflower oils enriched with herbal plant extracts (Kozowlski, Gruczyńska, Chem Zvesti. 2018; 72(10): 2607–2615.)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6096694/

Sunflower oil generally has a higher smoke point than olive oil.

True. I cook with ghee (clarified butter) most of the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Smoke_point_of_cookin...

Agreed. Mackerel is absolutely fantastic. If you enjoy seafood, I definitely wouldn't bother with pills or powders.

How much do I have to eat? How often? Is there any metal danger ala tuna?

Canned mackerel generally has mercury at levels near that of salmon.

King Mackerel is known to contain a lot of mercury, but that is a different species of Mackerel which is quite large (in general, larger predatory fish have greater concentrations of mercury).

As long as you are eating the tinned Mackerels, the kind which are small like sardines, I don't think you have significant mercury risk. Canned/tinned mackerel and sardines are considered some of the safest and most sustainable fish you can consume.

https://www.csu.edu/cerc/researchreports/documents/MercuryFa...

Thank you! I plan to buy some after work. I want to try to incorporate fish into my diet. Final question: raw or cooked? Does cooking deplete some of the good stuff inside?

Cooking usually changes some of the vitamin/nutrient content, but honestly if you like cooked fish, cook it. If you prefer sushi/sashimi, go for that. With diet try not to let perfection get in the way of obvious improvements. I could get way more nutrients by eating liver raw, but y'know, um no thanks.

King Mackerel is on the FDA's do not eat list due to mercury content; Atka and Atlantic are fine.

How does a person determine what kind of mackerel it is?

For example: https://www.amazon.com/Season-Skinless-Boneless-Fillets-Mack...

Close your eyes and pretend it is what it says on the tin. Any kind of processed fish, even if they aren't explicitly adulterating it with something else, is going to have a bunch of other stuff caught up in the nets that winds up in the can.

This advice applies to virtually all other foods as well, so...

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