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"Whenever an animal dies in the water, its body slowly sinks to the bottom, decaying and decomposing into a rotting husk until it hits the bottom," she explains. "Once it does, this is when bottom feeders, like eels, chew up whatever remains and then onto the next."
If this doesn't perturb you, here's something that might. Biomagnification, or the process by which toxins and other poisonous substances grow and accumulate as one critter eats another, can be dangerous, especially when mercury plays a role (i.e. tons of mercury-clad dead fish being eaten up by eel). What makes eel worse than the other mercury-containing fish you eat? To start, eels are known to contain very high levels of mercury. "Mercury is linked to abnormal fetal development and is extremely harmful to your central nervous system," Dr. Patterson says. "Not only that, but it can have severe effects on your teeth, mouth and gums."
More so, eels are currently produced in unsustainable fisheries. This means that eel farms are highly polluted, overcrowded and just petri dishes of gross things to make a corpse-eating fish even more nasty, Dr. Patterson explains. Did we mention that eel blood is poisonous to humans? Raw eel blood can have some devastating effects on your health. "Although the poisonous effects of eel blood are neutralized when cooked (hence why unagi in sushi isn't served raw, but broiled), it still says a lot about the fish and its diet whose blood is poison," she says. If you still crave the smooth and slimy texture, Dr. Patterson recommends squid instead. "Squid is a great source of protein, has zero carbs and is rich in antioxidants that can play a role in preventing cancer."
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