Tuna salad is super easy to make. You usually have all the ingredients on hand, there's no cooking involved, and tuna is very good for your heart. Try to eat fish at least twice a week!

Ingredients:
1 can tuna fish
2 Tbsp mayonnaise
1 Tbsp capers
1 Tbsp mustard
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp dill
1 tsp parsley

Drain out the tuna fish. If you have cats, this is a great treat for them :) Then mix together all ingredients. Some people mix in cottage cheese, too - about 1/3 of a cup. I'm not a fan for mixing it in myself - I like to eat it on the side, separately. You can try it both ways to see which way you like it better.

You can eat this on its own - in which case it is *extremely* low carb. You can of course also eat it on a wrap or whole wheat bread, in which case you'd want to add in the carb count for whatever you put it on. Another alternative is to create a bed of lettuce, and eat it that way. Lettuce has little nutrition, but it does have juicy fiber elements which are good for you.

There are a number of discussions about tuna fish that it's worth mentioning here. The first is the discussion about whether you should get tuna fish that's packed in water, vs tuna fish that's packed in oil. The argument here is that you don't need the excess oil that the tuna-in-oil gives you. Now that the world realizes that many oils are very good for you, this is less of an issues. Still, I would personally rather get "pure" tuna fish and then choose myself which oil type to add to it. So I get tuna packed in water - and feed that water to my cats - and then add in an oil of my own choosing when it comes to making the dish for myself.

The second discussion regarding tuna fish regards mercury. Tuna is a large fish, and mercury tends to accumulate in large fish. So you shouldn't eat tuna fish (or any of these fish types) *every day*. On the other hand, it's critical for heart health and other reasons to have fish frequently. Most doctors recommend having fish at least twice a week for health reasons.

So fish is just like any other food choice. If you ate, for example, oranges 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and nothing else, you'd get a host of nutritional deficiency problems because of the lack of protein in your diet. On the other hand, if you never ate oranges at all, you'd get scurvy and your teeth would fall out. You should never completely avoid a type of food - and you should never eat just that food all day long. Balance is key!


Lisa Shea's Library of Low Carb Books