Is Sushi Safe For Your Children to Eat?

When you are looking to make the best dietary choices for your child, some answers are pretty obvious.  A fast food diet is typically a poor choice for little ones, while you can’t go wrong with fruits and veggies.  What about fish though, in particular, raw fish?  Let’s examine whether or not sushi is safe for children to eat.

For starters, it is important to point out that sushi made with cooked fish and non-fish items such as veggie rolls is certainly safe for little ones.  Where the questions really revolve is around raw fish sushi options.  Whether or not these choices are safe for your little ones seems to be a point of debate among parents, but here is the bottom line.  If the fish used by your favorite sushi restaurant is good quality and bought from the right sources, sushi can certainly be a good choice for younger children and teens. 

Sushi containing raw fish of any kind is not generally recommended for toddlers under the age of 5, whose immune systems are still developing.  Even at the best restaurants food poisoning can sometimes occur, and the younger your child is the more careful you have to be

The primary concern when feeding raw fish to children is mercury poisoning.  To alleviate this risk, you can opt to select low mercury fish, farm raised fish, or even offer little sushi at a time.  Low mercury sushi includes tuna, salmon, and farm trout or catfish.  Cross contamination can also be an issue, so don’t take chances and always avoid the seafood buffet, no matter how cheap it is or how good it looks.  We don’t wish to make you paranoid, but who knows whether the sushi roll you just served your child was picked up then put back in the wrong place by another diner?

Surprisingly, studies show that children introduced to cooked fish before the age of nine months were less likely to develop skin conditions and other fish related allergy symptoms.  While feeding fish to a child whose entire family has a severe fish allergy is not recommended, for many it can actually help prevent the allergy from forming.

Feeding sushi to children can certainly be fine if you use your common sense.  The key as with any other food is to introduce it slowly and in moderation, and make sure you choose the best local sushi restaurants to treat your family for a sushi dinner.