Jaw Dropping Sushi Details

By Rebecca Toback

Something seems fishy. While seeming like a healthy choice, sushi can pack more than what meets the eye

While the new Yankee Stadium hosts over 400 places to spend your hard earned cash inside its massive walls, that was not the most shocking number I experienced on my first visit to the big new ball yard in the Bronx this spring.

My friends and I always ate sushi when we were on diets, and my mom, sister and I have had sushi dinners almost weekly for as long as I can remember. So I can say it was beyond a surprise when I arrived at the food court in the new and improved Yankee Stadium and saw that a simple California roll was over 250 calories, and a tuna roll was impending 200! How many calories are tu(na) many?

Six small pieces of tuna, rolled in sticky rice and seaweed accounting for one-tenth of my daily recommended caloric intake? I don’t think so. Studying the menu with my family brought a sense of communal incredulity about the calories packed into the tiny Japanese delicacies, now passing for ballpark grub. (“Buy me some peanuts and …. Alaska Roll?”)

What if I was wrong, and sushi was not as healthy as everyone had made me think for the last 19 years. Come to think of it Seinfeld, I have seen some fat fish at the aquarium.

According to Glamour.com the carbs in one roll of sushi are equivalent to that of three pieces of white bread. Again, do the math that means just two rolls, equal three sandwiches! Carbs-information.com, says that ½ a cup of sushi rice usually contains 48 grams of carbs, or about one fifth of your daily carbohydrate count.

A few weeks back I took a trip to a neighborhood health food store, and made a b-line right for the sushi aisle. I picked up a lobster roll and a brown rice California roll, and strolled to the counter looking forward to a healthy, satisfying lunch.

Just after cracking open the chopsticks I plated my 16 pieces of sushi and was about to toss the containers, when I glimpsed from the corner of my eye the nutritional stats of my meal. Yikes! Half of one roll was again over 200 calories. You do the math. My first instinct was to throw the rice balls away. I wanted a healthy lunch, not a carb laden imposter. I felt like banging the chopsticks together and starting a rally against all those people who had guaranteed me that sushi was healthy for so many years. Some guarantee that was; I want my money back!

Not only is the nutritional value of sushi something to be concerned about, you must also be thinking about toxin levels of the fish and where your raw fish has been bathing.

In 2008, The New York Times visited 20 New York City restaurants and stores to test the mercury levels in their tuna sushi. Five of the 20 venues were selling fish with mercury levels high enough for the Food and Drug Administration to take the raw fish off the market. According to The New York Times only six pieces of sushi from some of these eateries a week would exceed an acceptable mercury level in the human body.

In late 2008, Jeremy Piven stepped down from his roll in “Speed-the-Plow” claiming to have been stricken with a “sushi-induced” case of mercury poisoning. The Entourage actor said he had been previously warned about having high mercury content, from 20 years of sushi eating, but fans and reporters across the country were skeptical about how realistic the never substantiated mercury poisoning was.

Still, mercury poisoning is just one more thing to think about before ordering your next piece of tuna sashimi. A thought provoking sushi story recently broke on ABC News about a study that showed that salmon tapeworm infestations tripled in Kyoto, Japan, in 2008.

As river dwellers, salmon are susceptible to ingesting one of the many tapeworms inhabiting inland waterways. But, lets face reality, while the chance of you eating a salmon laced tapeworm is low, I know I would not be happy with a parasitic worm squirming inside of me for up to 30 years, growing as large as 39 feet. Pass the barf bag, please.

The solution is simple, if not appetizing: to eliminate chance of hosting a live tapeworm in your stomach, cook your fish. If tapeworms scare you as much as they do me, fish like tuna, and other deep ocean fish, are safer choices. When trying to pick a low-in-calorie dinner, sushi may not be as “safe” a choice as you and I once thought.