Whether you are trying to become a Dad, are already a Dad, or even just looking out for your own Dad’s health - seafood plays a major role in men’s health.
1. A healthy heart leads to healthy blood flow... ya know? ❤️
Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men in the United States, according to the CDC. And while heart health may not be the most exciting dinner conversation, here is why it belongs in one: erectile function and cardiovascular health run on the same plumbing. As Mayo Clinic puts it, erectile dysfunction and heart disease “are closely linked. They both depend on healthy blood vessels” - and both often begin with damage to the inner lining of those vessels. Because the arteries involved are smaller than the ones around the heart, ED can show up years before any chest pain does. That makes it something to pay attention to rather than ignore, and a good reason to raise it with your doctor rather than work around it.
Here is where seafood comes in. The American Heart Association recommends two servings of fish a week, particularly fatty fish, at about three ounces cooked per serving, and notes that regularly eating fish and seafood “is consistently associated with a lower risk for cardiovascular disease.” That is an association drawn from population research rather than a guarantee for any one person - but it is a well-established one, and two meals a week is a genuinely easy habit to build. Omega-3 rich fish like king salmon and sablefish are among the highest in omega-3s of anything you can put on a plate.
2. Work with the numbers. 📈
Researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health followed 155 men attending a fertility clinic and analysed 338 semen samples. Men in the highest quartile of fish intake had an adjusted mean total sperm count of 168 million, compared with 102 million in the lowest quartile. Fatty fish like salmon showed the strongest association with sperm count, while white fish like cod and halibut showed the strongest association with the percentage of normally shaped sperm.
It is worth being straight about what that does and does not show. This was an observational study of men who were already attending a fertility clinic, and the authors say plainly that “it is not possible to extrapolate from these findings on semen quality to relations with fertility potential.” So this is not a fertility treatment, and nobody should read it as one. What it is is a reasonable argument for swapping some of the bacon and pepperoni for halibut tacos and grilled salmon - which, for plenty of other reasons, it already was. (Afeiche MC, Gaskins AJ, Williams PL, et al. The Journal of Nutrition, 2014;144(7):1091-1098.)
3. Put out the inflammation fire. 🔥
Omega-3s are genuinely involved in how the body regulates inflammation, and the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements explains the mechanism clearly: the eicosanoids your body makes from omega-6 fats are “generally more potent mediators of inflammation” than the ones it makes from omega-3 fatty acids, so higher concentrations of EPA and DHA relative to arachidonic acid “tip the eicosanoid balance toward less inflammatory activity.”
What that adds up to in practice is less settled than the headlines suggest, and we would rather tell you that than oversell it. The NIH’s own read is that the evidence for omega-3 supplementation is stronger for people who already have coronary heart disease than for healthy people, and that large trials have landed in different places - REDUCE-IT and STRENGTH used similar doses and reached opposite conclusions. Which is a decent argument for getting your omega-3s from food you actually want to eat, rather than from a pill.
Eat wild, stay wild! 🐟