Smoked Salmon - How Much?

Hi,

Is there a heuristic for how much to limit smoked salmon, if at all?

It’s probably one of my favorite foods. Most of the recommendations I find are on processed red meat but I believe smoked salmon is also processed/cured as it’s smoked?

Does this mean it should also be limited to near zero as it can be harmful in excess? If not, is there a decent heuristic on how much is ok per week?

There’s no real guideline here, unfortunately. As you correctly pointed out, the current guidelines refer to red meat and processed red meats, but not processed meat in general. I don’t think near zero intake is likely to improve health trajectory, but I’d treat it the same as red meat and limit it to a few servings per week or 12 to 18 ounces/wk.

Makes sense! Thanks!

Using that heuristic would daily consumption be ok as long as we’re not exceeding 12-18oz of smoked salmon a week?

Ex: 40g/day or 60g 4x a week.

I think that’s fine, but admittedly, I have no data to support that recommendation.

No worries! Appreciate you answering again. I take it that if I were to consume red meat as well that it we be cumulative with smoked salmon in terms of the 12-18oz consumption? They wouldn’t be counted separately or anything.

I don’t generally unless I’m going out but just wanted to know out of curiosity’s sake.

I don’t think it matters if you count the smoked salmon separately from red meat, as we’re just making things up here. In practical terms, I’d personally limit red meat and smoked salmon to 1-2x/wk tops each. Again, this is mostly made up.

Hey, I had a quick follow-up question. Perhaps I’m being a bit pedantic but I noticed processed red meat recommendations are always expressed as “per day” like <50g per day whereas unprocessed red meat is per week. Can this be extrapolated by week to allow for more flexibility?

For example, limit processed red meat to <350g/week.

so one day I may have 100g, another with 100g, and another again with 80g but then none for the rest of the week. That’d still put me under <350g/week (~40g/day). So theoretically this should still allow for a healthy dietary pattern.

It doesn’t make sense to me why that is expressed per day rather than week but perhaps I’m thinking about it wrong.

Ali,

To put a bow on this, I do not think it matters whether it’s weekly or daily. I do think if someone is consuming a lot of processed, unprocessed red, and/or smoked meat regularly, there are improvements that could be made to their dietary pattern for health. I would not recommend trying to max these things out, rather I would be looking at ways to replace them if I was forced to take a position. Still, this is mostly made up. I can’t speak to how the authors of the guidelines decided to use different timing intervals.

-Jordan