Salmon
The same omega-3 as the sardine, in a fish most people will actually eat. Where it came from decides what you get.
How to use it
Twice a week as a main. Cold smoked over a salad, or hot out of the oven.
The best version
Wild caught, from Alaska or the northern Pacific, fresh or frozen. Farmed salmon eats what it is fed, and that decides its fatty acids; a wild fish eats its own food.
How to prepare it
Low and slow. Fifteen minutes in an oven at a hundred and twenty degrees gives you a fish that still glistens; a hard sear dries it out and drives the fat out of the flesh.
What it does
Marine omega-3 has been studied at scale. Across 13 randomised trials with 127,477 participants between them and a mean of five years of treatment, the risk of myocardial infarction came out at a rate ratio of 0.92, death from coronary heart disease at 0.92, and cardiovascular death at 0.93.
Watch out
The trials handed out capsules, not fish, and the gain per person was small and measured over five years. Salmon is good food rather than a treatment.
Hu Y, Hu FB, Manson JE. Journal of the American Heart Association, 2019.
The pink of farmed salmon comes out of the feed and says nothing about quality. Wild salmon is pink on its own because it eats shellfish.