Anything wrong with eating Tilapia?
Tilapia, in and of itself, has no particularly great advantages or disadvantages.
As stated, it’s a popular fish because it has very mild flavor, which is highly desired by some people who want to eat fish for health reasons, but do not like “fishy” smelling or tasting fish. For the same reason, there are many people who loathe it, because they feel it doesn’t taste like anything at all.
The problem with tilapia in general is that the market for it consists almost entirely of farm-raised fish, and there are a number of legitimate concerns about farmed fish.
- They are bred and raised in very dense populations, which causes stress and can lead to diseases.
- Because of this elevated risk of disease, farmers dose them with antibiotics and other chemicals/medicines to suppress the diseases. The broadcast method of applying these medicines is contributing to antibiotic- and medicine-resistant organisms like bacteria and parasites.
- They are also generally fed a diet based on corn or other grains, or animal waste and by-products, which are not part of their natural diet. This tends to mean that their nutritional composition is probably not as good as a wild specimen of the same fish.
If you eat fish occasionally, and choose tilapia, then the benefits probably outweigh the risks. However, if your diet consists largely of farmed tilapia (or any farmed fish, for that matter), you might want to do your own research and consider whether or not you want to be consuming all of the chemicals that have been absorbed by the fish as part of the aquaculture processes, and whether you agree that the nutrition is the same as wild fish.
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