5 Surprising Types Of Seafood You Should Be Eating For Longevity | Dr. William Li

Today we'll be talking about five surprising seafoods that are healthy to eat. Now, I wrote about seafoods in my book, Eat to Beat Your Diets. And so we're gonna actually talk about what are some of the nuggets of information that I got from the research for that book. First, why is seafood healthy? Well, it turns out that many kinds of seafood have healthy marine omega-3 fatty acids. These are healthy fats that are found in fish and other types of seafood. I'm about to show you. And this is the reason why it's good for you. Now, what does omega-3 do? Omega-3s are mother nature's natural anti-inflammatory substances. They also help to maintain healthy circulation. They assist the lining of your blood vessels, the endothelial cells, to be as healthy as possible so your blood can flow smoothly. They protect the stem cells that are in your body. We all have stem cells that are naturally found in our body. And these stem cells are important for tissue repair, regeneration, so we heal ourselves from the inside out. Omega-3s protect those cells to keep them as viable and vital as possible for regenerative healing. Omega-3 is also good for gut microbiome. They happen to be very good for gut health, keeping your healthy gut bacteria very happy. And that means it's good for your metabolism as well. The other thing that omega-3s do is help your immune system. So if you tally that list up of all of the things that omega-3s do, that tells you why you wanna actually eat seafood. Now, what are the best sources of a marine omega-3 fatty acids? Well, you've probably heard about it, like tumina and salmon and oily fish. And it's true that marine fish are the best sources of omega-3s. Now, if you're a vegan, you can actually get it from plant-based sources as well, like chia seeds, but that's actually not directly omega-3s. That's from a precursor that your body has to metabolize, and you get a lot more omega-3s if you actually eat seafood, okay? Now, you've probably heard people say, eat lower on the food chain because the bigger fish have more likely to have heavy metals like mercury in them. And that's true. That's why you need to be careful about eating swordfish and tuna and some of these larger fish. But then people say, oh, eat really low in the food chain, like anchovies and sardines and mackerels. Now, I actually happen to like sardines and mackerel, all right, but not everybody does. And here's the thing. Sardines and mackerel are not the only ways that you can get healthy omega-3s in seafood. And this is where the surprise comes in. And I'm about to tell you five foods that you probably didn't expect to hear about. And the first one is cod. Cod is a flaky white fish. It's not considered an oily fish at all. It's very mild tasting. And even people who don't like fish generally like cod if they actually have it cooked really, really well. Does not have a fishy flavor at all. Have you ever had cod? Well, if you've ever enjoyed fish and chips, you know, that crunchy British snack in a pub, then it's probably made with cod. So you've probably had it because that's what's usually used. All right, I'm not telling you to eat fish and chips, but, because it's fried. But cod is a source of omega-3s. How much omega-3 does a cod have? Well, it turns out that cods, the healthy amount of cod to eat is not very large. It's only the size of a deck of playing cards. So if you wanna actually have the same amount of omega-3s that's gonna be healthy for your metabolism, all you need is to have that playing deck size, a card deck size of cod. Now, how much omega-3 is in there? 284 milligrams, all right? So you might say, I have no idea what those numbers mean. Well, let's compare it to a known oily fish that has omega-3s, like salmon, okay? So salmon, the size of a deck of playing cards has 1,565 milligrams of omega-3, all right? So that's five times more than what cod has. Cod has only 18% of what the salmon has. So the question is, does cod have enough? And the answer is yes. Cod has enough omega-3s in it to give you a health benefit, all right? So that's a big surprise. Now, the other thing that omega-3s do is they help you burn body fat. And this is how cod has been studied to know, so we know that the smaller amount of omega-3s actually makes a difference. So this is a study from the University of Iceland where they studied 324 people and gave them either salmon, oily salmon, with a lot of omega-3s, or cod, not oily, and much less, five times less omega-3s, to eat three times a week. That's not very much, for eight weeks, okay? And what they did at the very end of the study is they measured the amount of weight loss that was there, and they also measured body fat. And here's what they found. The salmon eaters, not surprisingly, lost a good amount of weight. They lost about 15 pounds, okay, after eight weeks of eating salmon. But the cod eaters also lost weight. They lost about 10 pounds in the same amount of time. 10-pound weight loss, improvement of metabolism, that's not bad. So even though cod is five times less omega-3s than salmon, it has enough to burn body fat and improve your metabolism. Now, I love to cook cod, and there's a lot of super easy ways to do it. So here's a practical tip from me to you. Easiest way that I can tell you how to cook cod, get it in your seafood section or a fishmonger. All right, fishmonger is a purveyor that actually only sells seafood, all right? And you take it home, a little piece, you don't need very much, and you can bake or broil it in the oven. Just preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and while the oven is heating up, it's gonna take a few minutes, all you do is you coat the cod with some flour, and mix in a little bit of dried oregano, all right? Get a pan, like a cast iron pan, sear it, okay, add a little bit of extra olive oil, and sear it on each side, about two minutes on each side. You can add a little garlic if you wanna give it a little more flavor. Then put that onto a baking sheet, squeeze some lemon onto it, and then the oven should be hot. Bake it till it's flaky. Just takes about 10 minutes on each side, and just take a fork, and you can just check it, and you can see it started to flake apart, and you'll be done. That is the tastiest way for you to get healthy omega-3s that can light up your metabolism, all right? And there are lots of different ways of using cod in Mediterranean recipes, and you can actually look up more just by searching cod recipe, and hit video on Google, and take a look at some YouTube videos of other people that actually know how to cook cod in healthy, easy ways. Okay, speaking of another surprising seafood, Mediterranean sea bass, all right? You might be surprised that Mediterranean sea bass is healthy. You might see it on a restaurant menu as Branzino, okay? And as you might suspect, this is a popular fish in the Mediterranean. Sea bass also has healthy omega-3 fatty acids. So how much would you need in terms of sea bass to get as much as you'd get out of cod, right? I just told you cod has 284 milligrams per serving. So how much sea bass would you need to get the same amount as cod? Well, all you would need is a little bit more than cod, one and a half decks of playing card. So one card deck, another hard card deck, half of a card deck, and that's it. You get the same amount as a cod. Now, let's talk a little bit about other things that omega-3s do to actually help your health. Omega-3s I mentioned to you are anti-inflammatory, and one of the ways that omega-3s lower inflammation is they trigger your body to burn harmful extra body fat. Now, body fat has a lot of inflammation. So when you burn down fat, you're also lowering the amount of inflammation that the fat itself causes. So omega-3s can help extinguish some of that fat. And there's another reason that omega-3s are helpful for lowering inflammation and burning down fat and improving your overall metabolism, and that's that omega-3 fatty acids that you might get from Mediterranean sea bass or cod, like we talked about, turns on brown fat. So let me tell you about brown fat. Brown fat is a special type of healthy fat in our bodies, and it's not wiggly-jiggly like the stuff that you don't want on your butt or your thighs or under your arms or under your chin. That's called white fat. Brown fat isn't wiggly-jiggly. Brown fat is wafer-thin, and it's not located like in the muffin top. Brown fat is pasted around the sides of your neck, under your breastbone, between your shoulder blades, and a little bit deep inside your belly. And what it does is it actually, it fires up to burn down fat. So it's like a space heater, all right? And when the space heater turns on, it needs fuel to burn things down. And guess what? Omega-3s trigger the brown fat to fire up, and it starts to burn down the fuel from a harmful white fat, all right? This is a process called thermogenesis. I write about this in my book, "'Eat to Beat Your Diet." It was originally discovered, by the way, in animals that were hibernating, because think about it. How do these animals that load up in the fall and early winter, they get these big fat cheeks and big pudgy bodies, they then waddle into a cave, how do they stay warm all winter long, right? And they're not eating. Well, they undergo thermogenesis. Their brown fat fires up, gives them heat, and gives them the fuel that they're using in order to be able to survive the winter. All right, so the fuel that your brown fat gets when you have Omega-3s comes from the harmful white fat. And so brown fat is the good fat fights the bad fat, which is the white fat. And Omega-3s, which you can find from seafood of all sorts, can turn on that good fat to burn away that harmful fat. I love Mediterranean sea bass, and I'll tell you a little tip of how I actually cook it. So I like to buy Mediterranean sea bass whole, all right? You can coat it with some extra virgin olive oil if you really want to. Ask the fishmonger or the person behind the seafood counter to gut it for you and slice it so they'll put it up in half. And then what you do is just stuff it with garlic and herbs, some lemon slices. This is how they do it in the Mediterranean. And then you can grill it. You can just grill that fish. It's a simple, easy way to create a beautiful, mild, flaky, delicious fish. So here's what you do. Get the grill going hot, and put the fish in a grilling basket, all right? This is kind of like a two-side thing. The basket, the mesh is on both sides so the fish won't stick. And all you gotta do is put it onto the hot grill about 10 minutes each side, all right? One side 10 minutes, the other side 10 minutes, about 20 minutes in total, and take it off and let it rest. Put it onto a dish, put on a little bit of extra virgin olive oil, squeeze a little lemon on it. You can add some more herbs like oregano, and then serve it family style. Everyone's gonna love this juicy white flesh scented with herbs and lemon, all right? Next surprising seafood, I bet you wouldn't think that I would actually say shrimp. That's right. Shrimp also has healthy omega-3 fatty acids, and they're delicious. Now you wanna get wild-caught shrimp, not farmed shrimp, because farmed shrimp are often grown, farmed, in areas that are not so sanitary. So look for the wild-caught shrimp. So, I love shrimp. So how much shrimp do you need to eat in order to be able to get the same amount of omega-3s as cod? Guess what? You'd only need to eat four medium-sized shrimp, which you can easily find in the seafood section of your grocery store. And if you don't have fresh shrimp, you can get frozen shrimp, or previously frozen shrimp, in the freezer section, where we often have frozen seafood. Now, you can even make shrimp kind of like a side dish and get your omega-3s without it having been the main dish. Now, I like to cook shrimp very, very simply. So I'm gonna give you some tips. First, if you wanna get the most flavor out of a shrimp, okay, what you wanna do is cook the shrimp with the head on. So you have to go look for shrimp that actually is sold with its head on. Go to the Asian grocery store or the Portuguese fish market. You'll find they often sell the head because that's where a ton of flavor is, okay? About 10 times the flavor of the whole shrimp is packed inside the head. So you get everything. When you cook with the head, you get all that flavor oozing through the entire flesh, all right? Second tip is cook the shrimp with the shell on. But the shell also has shrimp flavoring, all right? And by the way, it also has a natural bioactive called astaxanthin, which is what makes shrimp pink when you actually cook it. So the shell and the head gives a lot of flavor to the shrimp while it's cooking. Also keeps it moist, all right? So that's my tip for you and how to actually get the most flavor out of it. Now, if you're using frozen shrimp, now frozen seafood can be just as good as fresh caught. And the reason is when it comes onto the boat, it gets frozen, snap frozen right away. So you're actually catching all that omega-3s and everything else that's just frozen. There's nowhere to actually degrade it, no time. It's locked in, all right? But if you're using frozen shrimp, what you do wanna do is you wanna actually thaw it, okay? You can thaw it in some water and defrost it first before you actually cook with it. That way you can make sure that you can cook it all the way through, which is actually really important for any kind of seafood. All right? So what are some of my practical tips for you for cooking shrimp? I like to use a cast iron pan. I put a little extra virgin olive oil on it. I add a little bit of garlic, okay? And while that's heating up, gotta prepare the shrimp. So if the shrimp's got the shell on it, head or not, okay? What I do is I take a knife, a paring knife, and I slice down the back of the shell, okay? If you're not that comfortable with a knife, you can also use a pair of scissors. Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut down the back. And then you take a blade and you just scrape out the thin vein, okay, down it. And now you kind of cut it lengthwise about halfway down. Now when the shrimp cooks, it'll open up just like that beautiful shrimp that you see when you go to a restaurant, all right? And you do that, if you want to peel it, you can peel the shell off. And if you leave the shell on, which is what I recommend you do to get more flavor out of it then you just sear the shrimp that way. About three minutes on each side, you'll see the shrimp open up like this, all right? And it'll actually turn kind of white and solid from transparent, which is what the raw shrimp is, to a whitish color and just pull it off. Okay, if you want to add a little splash of white wine, a little bit of tomato sauce, crushed chili flakes, if you want to actually put a little zing with chili peppers, now you've actually enhanced it with some capsaicin, which is a bioactive that lights up your metabolism. That'll enhance the brown fat triggering burning effect of the seafood, the omega-3 fatty acids. So that's another way to get a lot out of it. Hey, I want to share another resource with you. It's my free guide on boosting your metabolism. I'll let you in on something that most health and wellness experts don't talk about. And that's that you can actually enjoy your food while eating to improve your metabolism. And if this sounds like a paradox, I explained in this guide how science is teaching us that it's true. In my guide, I share five foods that activate your body's beneficial brown fat and tell you how it works to burn down the harmful body fat you want to lose. The best part, healing your metabolism can taste great. Check out my guide on boosting your metabolism available right now. It's free, in the caption below. Now, back to the video. Next surprising seafood are mussels. This is the kind of shellfish you probably have seen it. It kind of looks like a clam, but it's oval and it's got a black shell, all right? Now, mussels are very, very popular in the Mediterranean and in Asia as well, but you'll see them steamed. You'll see them cooked with pasta. Paella, the seafood paella, the Spanish rice dish will often be loaded with mussels. Lots of different recipes out there, okay? And you can buy mussels alive, on ice, in a mesh bag. And I'll just tell you, they cook really, really fast, just in about five or 10 minutes. So it's a great way to actually cook something very, very quickly in a delicious way that's got good, healthy omega-3s, all right? First, let's talk about how much omega-3s a mussel's have. All right, now, to get the same amount of benefit, omega-3s, as a piece of cod, you would only have to eat about 10 to 12 mussels. That's about this big. Got a little piece of meat in the middle of it. That's a bowl full of mussels, okay? Perfect for a meal. So in one bowl, 10 or 12 mussels, you'll get exactly the amount of omega-3s from the meat of the mussel that you would actually get from a piece of cod. Now, mussels are a super solid source of omega-3s. In fact, there are even healthy dog foods that contain mussel meat in order to give pets, man's best friend, healthy omega-3s in their diet. So humans don't miss out. All right, last surprising seafood with healthy omega-3s is squid. Now, you might know squid as calamari. You might see that on a restaurant menu. Popular seafood, both in Asia as well as the Mediterranean. And if you don't know much about squid, let me just tell you, it's kind of a tube-like, cephalopod is what they call it, it's related to it, like octopus. It's got a tube as the main body and it's got some tentacles on the end of it, all right? And both parts, both the tube and the tentacles can be eaten, all right? You can buy fresh squid. More likely, you'll find previously frozen squid or frozen squid. And if you get the whole squid that hasn't been cleaned out yet, okay? You can always ask your fishmonger to help you clean it out. To clean the squid, all right, all you do is you actually pull up the tentacles and inside the middle of the squid, inside the body, you'll see this little transparent, it's like a piece of plastic. It's a hard part of cartilage that looks like the blade of a small butter knife or a cheese knife. This little part of the squid is called the gladius, all right? And it kind of looks like an old-fashioned quill on a feather pen. You know those medieval pens that the Three Musketeers wrote with and it's got a little quill on the end of it with ink? In fact, the word calamari comes from the Latin word calamarium, which actually means reed pen, the kind of pen that actually has a quill on the end of it, all right? That's the name, that's where it got its name. So here are different ways that you can actually eat calamari. You can eat it sliced up, to slice the tubes up into rings, right? Or you can eat it with the tentacles or you can just eat the tentacles. And the best, or you can eat both together, obviously. Best way that I like to suggest that you try calamari is saute in the pan, all right? Again, cast iron pan, add some extra virgin olive oil, add some chopped garlic, all right? Or if you want to do it Asian style, add some ginger and some scallion in an oil in a wok, all right? And then throw the rings and throw the tentacles in and just let it cook that way, all right? Takes about eight to 10 minutes to actually cook it. But once it's cooked, you'll see the rings get firm and the tentacles will actually also get firm. And then you can add any kind of sauce. You want to splash it with some white wine. You want to add some tomato sauce, put some oyster sauce, black bean sauce. So many ways you can actually finish that dish. And then you can serve it onto a pasta. You can mix it into pasta. You could actually serve it with rice, brown rice as a healthy rice. Squids are very versatile and it cooks really, really quickly, okay? Under 15 minutes, you'll actually get it cooked. So how much squid do you need to eat to get the same amount of healthy omega-3s as a piece of cod, okay? The answer is just three medium squids worth of tentacles, all right? Or the rings of about 10 small squid, all right? So it's actually a good bit of squid. A squid meal will actually give you all that you need in order to be able to get that benefit. All right, that's it. Hope you enjoyed learning from this and thanks very much for watching. Dr. Lee out. Hi there, if you enjoyed watching this video, I know you'll love the next one. Stay here and check it out and I'll see you there.