Wild-caught seafood can absolutely be a smart choice — but it’s not automatically the healthiest option on the plate. Environmental toxins like microplastics, mercury, PCBs, and forever chemicals are now pervasive in our oceans, and understanding how they move through the food chain helps you choose more confidently.
Here’s the key concept: biomagnification. Mercury enters the ocean through atmospheric pollution, converts to methylmercury, binds to fat, and concentrates as it moves up the food chain. Top predators — tuna, swordfish, shark — carry the heaviest load. Lower-trophic fish like sardines and anchovies? Far less exposure, and just as nutrient-dense.
Farmed fish isn’t off the table — and sometimes it’s the safer, healthier choice. Quality varies widely by species, diet, and farming practices. The real question is what the fish was fed.
The better framework: think nutrient density per serving, not price per pound. Salmon, for example, is relatively low in mercury and rich in omega-3s — strong value by that measure. Regenerative aquaculture farmed fish like that sold by Seatopia mitigates environmental concerns and optimizes nutrient profile. When in doubt, look for third-party testing. Knowing what’s actually in your food is always more powerful than guessing.
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Full Transcript
Why Wild-Caught Seafood Raises Concerns 0:00
So I'm not going to say that all wild-caught seafood is bad, but I am definitely not gonna condone for my family blindly buying wild caught seafood and thinking that it's great because of the mystique. I know better, I want to be able to feed my. Family without concerns of that toxins that have now become so prevalent in the environment where wild cut seafood was historically sourced from with microplastics and mercury levels up hundreds of percentage points with a lot of fish. It's very different than most other things that we eat because a of the fish that would like to eat are carnivorous and they're eating multiple other animals that were also carniverous.
So you get a bio magnification. There's a very few other types of food that eat today that has that trophic bio-magnification, which is why seafood becomes such a risk,
Bioaccumulation and Trophic Level Risks 0:54
right? What other animal are we regular eating that 8 other animals in most agricultural systems? There's not a lot of that. So bio magnification becomes a very significant concern. And it's the reason why when you look at. The top of the food chain organisms, you have these outliers of toxicity exposure through bio magnification. So does take additional sort of caution or precaution to think about what did I eat and what it eat. And what is it? You have all these different layers and. Come to your point, how was the experience for that?
Was it living in a stressed out environment and was what it ate toxic or stressed? We have to think very, very differently about how we source things and we have. Go the extra mile because of the environment. We. have seen levels of mercury in the ocean go up over 300% since the Industrial Revolution, primarily because of things like coal fire plants. We also see it in brake dust and a handful of other things, but it's being released in atmosphere. It then falls back down with rain into rivers and directly into the Ocean.
And then it gets consumed by zooplankton and phytoplanking because they mistake it for other Elements and minerals that they're looking for,
Mercury Pollution in the Ocean 2:23
but what's interesting is what happens to that mercury is it turns into what? It's called methyl mercury in the ocean and binds into the fatty tissues because it binds in to fat. It ends up going from 1. Organism to the next and bio accumulating as it goes up bio magnifying as he goes off the trophic level. So that if you're eating at the bottom of the trophy level, you might be getting a very small dosage at, let's say, a sardine or anchovy. But if your eating one level up from that, like a macro, or you could have to expect.
You would expect that it might be 2x, but that mackerel ate sardines and anchovies its entire life. And then when you go up another level to, let's just say like an albacore, you could have 10x and then you'd go to something like a swordfish or a tuna or even like killer whales. We have the data when a lot of these large predatory whales wash up on to beaches. The levels of mercury are so high that the animal is considered a biohazard that you don't even want to be in close proximity to it because the levels are mercury so it's a really strange time to.
Alive where the blue planet. Which is 70 plus plus 7% ocean where all life derived from this ocean were at this point in history where we've put so much.
Aquaculture, Testing, and Better Seafood Choices 3:48
industrial toxins in the ocean that simply eating from the. Ocean today is questionable, right? Like we raise fish oftentimes in open ocean aquaculture, but we don't allow them just to go forge in. The ocean, because if they do, then they bio accumulate mercury, just like wild fish and things like microplastics and mercury and PCVs and all these forever chemicals are now in ocean. And they show up in the fish that we raise in aquaculture. If you feed them, just ground up bait fish. So what we feed, them is important.
if we think about food as medicine, it should be less about how much is it per pound to how, much, is per milligram of nutrient preserving. And when we, think, about it that way, you start asking different questions. It's not just how big is, but what's in it and what not in, and it also matters. And the only way to know is to test the product. So salmon is considered a relatively low mercury risk. And communities and societies that eat a lot of salmon are not getting the same sort of mercury exposure to people who are eating a a swordfish or tuna.
To say that farm fish is good or bad doesn't take into the nuance that really should be considered. If it's farmed on a species appropriate nutrient dense diet and from a source that's truly scalable and doesn' t have exposure to those toxins, now we're talking about true solutions. There are solutions that simply need to be celebrated and scaled.
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