The benefits of getting fish in your diet are well known (it’s in the Mediterranean diet, for example), but mercury poisoning remains a concern. Now, scientists have figured out how to cut levels of mercury in fish by up to 35 percent with a tweak to how it’s packaged.
A team from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Chalmers University of Technology experimented with adding the amino acid cysteine to canned tuna – one of the types that can have the most mercury in it.
When tuna is immersed in water containing cysteine, the novel solution removed 25 to 35 percent of the mercury from the fish, according to lab tests. The more fish flesh that was in contact with the solution, the more mercury was taken out into the liquid.
