The diet of humans is a weird thing. Some of the things eaten here in America would seem downright disgusting in other parts of the world. Similarly, we find it largely repulsive that in some parts of the world, people eat dogs, cats, insects, and even rotten fertilized eggs.

And vegans aren’t off the table either. Plants don’t sound good when you think that they grow in the dirt, have bugs crawling on them and are often fertilized with animal waste.

The bottom line with food, however, is that people have to eat, and we will pretty much eat anything that tastes good, especially if it gives us good nutrition.

Some foods, however, should be avoided not because it is gross or culturally repulsive, but because they are very bad for us. And not in the way that a candy bar is bad for us.

One example of this is dolphin meat. Dolphin meat is consumed in some parts of Japan, and historically speaking, it was a little more common (though never a real staple).

Even if you are the type of person who loves trying exotic meats, however, dolphins should be avoided because it has extremely high levels of mercury and methylmercury.

Action for Dolphins (AFD) is a nonprofit in Australia, and they reported:

“In some of the highest reported levels of mercury in dolphin meat, test results from a Japanese lab found Risso’s dolphin offal has mercury levels of 106 ppm mercury and 1.7 ppm methyl mercury, 265 times the 0.4ppm regulatory limit in Japan.”

The exact levels of these dangerous substances range greatly depending on where the dolphin lived and what it ate. Even dolphins on the lower end of mercury contamination, however, were still at around 50 times the safe limit.

This is because dolphins are at the top of the food chain in the ocean. The ocean has about .5 mg of methylmercury per 50 million liters of seawater, which really doesn’t sound like much (and it isn’t).

Animals that live at the bottom of the food chain, like sardines and shrimp, don’t live long enough to get much of it in their system, but their bodies do absorb some of it from what they eat. As you look up higher in the food chain, however, the concentration of methylmercury goes up quite quickly.

This is because when methylmercury is eaten, it stays in the body. By the time you get up to larger fish like a tuna, it is eating a diet exclusively of fish that have already absorbed quite a bit of the toxic elements. That is why it is generally recommended that people limit their consumption of larger wild-caught fish.

Dolphins are at the top of the food chain when it comes to animals that eat other fish. They also live for many years in the wild, increasing the concentration of toxic elements like methylmercury the whole time.

The end result is that dolphins are never safe to eat.

Thought that was fascinating? Here’s another story you might like: Why You’ll Never See A Great White Shark In An Aquarium