Heart Healthy Oily Fish for Lunch: Mackerel, Pepper and Bulgur Wheat Salad

This salad is a regular fixture in our house for workday lunches. It tastes fabulous and provides a neat package of heart healthy ingredients: omega 3 rich oily fish, fresh vegetables and a wholegrain in the form of bulgur wheat.

There is just one area of contention in this recipe – it contains a green pepper! Personally I think green peppers are much maligned and love them in certain dishes (especially in this recipe and in a stir fry) but I know some people aren’t keen on them so feel free to substitute with a different colour (yellow looks good). Bulgur wheat is a low GI carbohydrate and so ideal for a lunchtime recipe – its slow energy release is tailored to prevent you from nodding off or reaching for the cookies mid-afternoon (my extensive desk-based trials show that this works approximately 95% of the time!). If you haven’t tried it yet bulgur wheat is super simple to cook, a bit like a sturdier cousin to cous cous; much less temperamental and with a bit more about it. In this recipe the bulgur wheat is made extra delicious by soaking the grains in stock – I’d definitely suggest trying this way of cooking it just once, even if you don’t fancy trying the whole recipe.

Oily fish and heart health
Back to the main ingredient, the mackerel. Did you know that we still don’t know exactly why the omega 3 fatty acids in oily fish are good for your heart? Some of the benefit is thought to be due to its effect in lowering triglyceride levels but increasingly it seems that one of the main ways that oily fish works is by correcting arrhythmias, abnormalities in the natural rhythm of your heart.
Different places recommend different amounts of oily fish and for different people. The Food Standards Agency in the UK recommends that most people have at least two portions of fish per week, at least one of which should be oily and the American Heart Association simply recommends fish twice a week. For people who have already suffered a myocardial infarction (a heart attack), the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in the UK, quaintly known as NICE, have recently published a recommendation (in May 2007) for doctors to advise these particular patients to have two to four portions of oily fish per week. While this may all sound like a big list of numbers and recommendations I think the important conclusion is that despite a little bit of adverse publicity a couple of years ago about oily fish and its impact on heart health, most groups are now recommending eating oily fish more than ever.

Other “oily” lunch ideas
A couple of other suggestions for oily fish lunches are tinned sardines in tomato sauce on hot toasted granary bread (with lots of black pepper) or a sandwich filled with tinned salmon that has been mixed with low-fat creme fraiche and horseradish sauce (watercress or rocket with this one). If you are really not a fan of the usual suspect oily fishies (the Food Standard Agency provide a good list of oily and non-oily fish), I recently wrote about certain types of tinned tuna which contain a little bit of omega 3 fat. Tinned ventresca tuna in oil is nowhere near as rich a source of omega 3 as, for example, Mackerel, but is a definite improvement on the staple skipjack tuna in brine.

With all that good stuff in it this recipe seems a perfect contribution for Ilva and Joanna’s Heart of the Matter round-up of heart healthy waterlife recipes.