Many people enjoy the flavor of catfish, but it offers a variety of health benefits as well. Including the nutritious fish in your diet helps you meet your protein needs and boosts your intake of vitamins and healthy fats and fatty acids. Consider catfish regularly in your meal planning.
A 3-oz. serving of catfish introduces 122 calories and 6.1 g of fat into your diet. The low amount of calories in this fish make it a popular choice for a healthy meal plan — women generally require approximately 300 to 500 calories per meal, and men need around 400 to 600 calories, so it fits in well and allows you to serve several healthy side dishes with it. The fat content is also relatively low, and little of it is saturated fat – 2 g. Avoid consuming more than 16 to 22 g of saturated fat per day.
Catfish is also low in mercury, and is a tremendous source of Vitamin B-12. The benefits to the human body just keep coming. It can be seasoned in various ways, added to a range of Mexican dishes, and makes for a great nutritional addition to your diet.
More than 15 grams of protein are contained in the average serving of catfish. This means that eating a meal that contains catfish will give your body all of the amino acids that it requires each day for healthy maintenance. This is what is required for your body to develop and build healthy and lean muscle mass. It also gives you an energy boost that can help counteract any carbohydrates you might have recently consumed.
The National Institutes of Health funded study by Weaver and colleagues looked at the favorable omega-3 fatty acid content and unfavorable omega-6 contents of commonly eaten fish and found that while catfish and tilapia contain both, they contain a high amount of unfavorable omega-6 fat. Does this mean you should give them up? No! The rebuttal by Harris is in the same journal. He says the logic of judging fatty fish by the amounts of omega-3 and omega-6 fat contents is flawed. Governmental and professional organizations haven’t used such a ratio for years.
My take? I’m going to continue to eat fish — at least twice weekly. I’m going to choose a variety of fatty fish — including tilapia and catfish along with others especially high in the good fats such as salmon, tuna and mackerel. However, I would go for catfish because I have a catfish pond in my compound!
