Omega-3 fatty acids protect against the potential negative effects of mercury and PCBs, especially in developing fetuses.

“By the way, there have been now studies that have come out showing that even though fish have these contaminants, that the omega-3 fatty acids protect against them, and even during pregnancy. So there was this big push decades ago about pregnant women should avoid eating fish because of the mercury. I think that was a huge mistake, huge mistake, and I'm actually involved in a study looking at omega-3 index in cord blood and neurodevelopmental outcomes. But there's been a couple of studies. One, I think big one was in 2015, American Journal of Pediatric published that basically the omega-3 fatty acids, women eating fish, the omega-3 fatty acids protected against any neurotoxicity. And in fact, those children had better neural outcomes than women that avoided fish.”

“So fish intake during pregnancy and intelligence at one year or seven years of life, I forgot all the follow-up times, but it was shown that omega-3 was correlated with improved intelligence if the mothers were eating fish, and they were actually using mercury as a biomarker to basically validate their dietary recall because the women that were taking in more omega-3 had higher mercury. And guess what? The higher mercury was correlated with higher intelligence in the children, not because mercury is improving intelligence, but because the omega-3 is. And the omega-3, the mercury doesn't even matter if you have the omega-3 there. It's really protecting against any potential toxic effects of mercury.”

“In the developing fetus, where they're so much more sensitive, so much more sensitive to the mercury, the PCBs, and everything, the omega-3 fatty acids are protecting.”

“And it turns out that um newer studies have come out since then that show that even women eating a lot of fish in fact um the omega-3 fatty acids were protecting against the mercury toxicity. And there was even one study that was published a few years ago that showed higher levels of mercury which was indicative of higher omega-3 intake because people that were taking in fish had higher mercury actually was a biioarker for intelligence and they and the children had higher um intelligence quotient scores.”

“if a developing fetus which is very very sensitive to mercury way more sensitive than we are as adults if they're okay and protected by the omega-3 fatty acids I feel a lot better about eating some some sardines and getting some mercury in”