Despite the finer points of fish, we still don't devour enough of it. Just one in four women eats two 4-ounce servings a week, the absolute minimum the American Heart Association recommends. Why isn't seafood on the menu more often? Aside from its hefty price tag (which you can beat by buying the frozen stuff), recent news reports about "toxic seafood" are enough to make tuna sound like a swimming bullet.

But don't believe the scary headlines. Many respected health experts agree that seafood is one of the best things you can put down your gullet. "The benefits of fish are well established, while the risks are overblown," says Dariush Mozaffarian, M.D., assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at Harvard MEdical School. One positive finding" Adding just 3 to 6 ounces of fish to your diet every week, especially those high in two key omega-3 fatty acids - EPA and DHA - reduces the risk of death from a heart attack by a staggering 36 percent.

Omega-3s seep into the cell membranes of heart and blood vessels and help protect them against irregular heartbeats, blood clotting, and other disturbances that can cause heart attacks. And since fatty acids from fish are also crucial to an infant's developing brain - including vision, memory, and language comprehension - women considering kids should eat no less than four 3-ounce servings of seafood a week.

On teh flip side, many types of seafood do contain mercury - and at very high levels, mercury kills brain cells. Megadoses of mercury can remain in your bloodstream for over a year. Still, getting mercury poisoning isn't easy - your body removes most of it naturally via the filtering action of your kidneys and other metabolic pathways. In order to rack up a dangerous amount of the toxin, you'd have to consume the most mercury-laden fish several times a month. Since large bodies soak up more chemicals than small ones, the victims include king mackerel, sharks, swordfish, tilefish, and whales.

The other dark spot on seafood's shining reputation comes from polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). These industrial chemicals were banned 30 years ago but hang out around in the environment for decades. While animal studies have linked PCBs to cancer, it's unclear whether they cause the disease in humans. But Dr. Mozaffarian hold firm that PCB levels in fish - which are considerably lower than in poultry or beef - are so minuscule that the cardiovascular benefits of seafood surpass the potential cancer risks several times over. All that said, since brain damage and cancer are at stake here, it's still better to err on the side of caution.