Eating salmon two to three times per week is the sweet spot recommended by both the FDA and the American Heart Association. Salmon is classified as a “Best Choice” fish, meaning it’s low enough in mercury that you can safely enjoy multiple servings weekly. A standard serving is 3 ounces cooked (roughly the size of your palm), and the Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend at least 8 ounces of seafood per week based on a 2,000-calorie diet.
What Two to Three Servings Actually Looks Like
The American Heart Association specifically recommends 2 servings of fatty fish per week, with salmon at the top of the list. The FDA goes slightly further, saying 2 to 3 servings from “Best Choice” fish like salmon is ideal. In practical terms, that’s about two palm-sized fillets per week, or three smaller portions spread across different meals.
You don’t need to eat salmon exclusively to hit these targets. Any combination of low-mercury fatty fish counts: sardines, mackerel, herring, and anchovies all deliver similar omega-3 benefits. But if salmon is your go-to, two to three servings per week keeps you well within safe and beneficial range.
Why Salmon Stands Out Nutritionally
A single 3-ounce serving of cooked Atlantic salmon delivers roughly 1.5 to 1.8 grams of omega-3 fatty acids, the type your body uses most efficiently for heart and brain health. Wild Atlantic salmon provides about 1.22 grams of DHA and 0.35 grams of EPA per serving, while farmed Atlantic salmon comes in at 1.24 grams of DHA and 0.59 grams of EPA. Either version gives you a substantial dose in just one meal.
Eating fish and seafood regularly is consistently associated with lower cardiovascular risk. The omega-3s in salmon help reduce inflammation, support healthy blood pressure, and improve blood lipid levels. There’s also some evidence for cognitive benefits: a randomized trial in preschool children found that those eating salmon three times per week for 16 weeks showed modest improvements in certain measures of fluid intelligence compared to children eating meat instead.
Wild vs. Farmed: Does It Matter?
Both wild and farmed salmon are healthy choices, but they differ in a few ways worth knowing. A 3-ounce fillet of wild salmon has fewer calories and about half the total fat of the same amount of farmed salmon. Farmed salmon delivers slightly more omega-3s overall, but it also carries more than double the saturated fat.
The bigger concern with farmed salmon is contaminant levels. PCB concentrations are about 16 times higher in farmed fish than in wild fish. These levels are still generally considered safe for the recommended 2 to 3 servings per week, but if you eat salmon more frequently than that, choosing wild-caught can help minimize your exposure over time.
Mercury Is Minimal in Salmon
One of the main reasons salmon earns its “Best Choice” ranking is its exceptionally low mercury content. Fresh or frozen salmon averages just 0.022 parts per million of mercury, and canned salmon is even lower at 0.014 ppm. For comparison, bigeye tuna averages around 0.689 ppm, more than 30 times higher.
Harvard Health has noted that while eating large amounts of certain fish can raise mercury levels, the increase attributed to salmon specifically is quite small. Salmon is firmly in the low-mercury category, which means the recommended 2 to 3 servings per week poses essentially no mercury risk for most people. Even three 6-ounce servings per week is listed as a reasonable intake for low-mercury seafood like salmon.
Can You Eat Salmon Every Day?
Eating salmon daily isn’t dangerous for most adults, but it goes beyond what guidelines recommend and introduces some trade-offs. The main considerations are cumulative exposure to environmental contaminants like PCBs (especially from farmed salmon) and the cost of eating high-quality fish seven days a week. If you do eat salmon more than three times per week, opting for wild-caught varieties reduces your contaminant exposure.
For most people, the practical ceiling is about three servings per week. Beyond that, rotating in other low-mercury fish or plant-based omega-3 sources gives you nutritional variety without the diminishing returns of eating the same protein daily.
Recommendations During Pregnancy and for Children
Pregnant and breastfeeding women are encouraged to eat 2 to 3 servings per week from the “Best Choice” list, which includes salmon. The serving size during pregnancy is 4 ounces rather than the standard 3. This recommendation reflects the importance of omega-3s for fetal brain development, balanced against the need to keep contaminant intake low.
For children, the FDA recommends 2 servings per week from “Best Choice” fish, with portion sizes scaled by age: about 1 ounce for ages 1 to 3, 2 ounces for ages 4 to 7, 3 ounces for ages 8 to 10, and 4 ounces at age 11. Salmon’s low mercury content makes it one of the safest options for kids who are just starting to eat fish regularly.