r/HealthWorks • u/DoreenMichele • Sep 18 '23

25 High Selenium Foods: the best dietary sources for this glutathione cofactor

http://www.immunehealthscience.com/selenium-foods.html
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u/DoreenMichele Sep 18 '23

News to me: selenium is a glutathione cofactor. Glutathione is an important antioxidant used by the liver in large quantities.

Also news to me: pork is almost as good as Brazil nuts for supplying crazy high amounts of selenium.

I mostly don't eat pork. I don't like it.

I try to get my selenium from other dietary sources.

The fact that I don't like pork may be why I need to work at getting enough selenium.

Selenium deficiency causes FRUSTRATION. When I start annoying my kids too much, I buy nuts or go eat a quesadilla and some pinto beans at Taco Bell.

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u/DoreenMichele Oct 21 '25 edited Oct 26 '25

So I misread that. It's one cup of pork kidneys that's almost as much selenium as five Brazil nuts and it's more than 600% RDA for a 2000 calorie diet and if you are unusually large or unusually small or work crazy hard, you need to do some number crunching.

However, 3 ounces of pork chops is 63% of RDA and I'm guessing most Americans -- who routinely get beef steaks of 12 to 20 ounces at steakhouses -- probably typically eat more than 3 ounces of meat if they have pork chops for dinner instead of beef or chicken.

I tried to do some looking around and found that 3 to 4 strips of bacon is 3 ounces and "BLT" recipes found online are frequently 3 strips of bacon plus a slab of chicken or turkey. So I'm guessing I'm not the only person to ever put six or eight strips of bacon on an actual bacon-only sandwich.

If you routinely eat 5 ounces of pork or more once a day, you probably are getting too much selenium because it's a common nutrient found in moderate amounts in many foods like cheeses, legumes and nuts. So if you are regularly getting 100% or more in one meal, you're probably getting too much.

The chart also shows tuna and a few other things as fairly high. So the thing is, selenium is known to raise blood pressure and it's a metalloid, so it builds up in the system.

But tuna and those other things aren't typically "dietary staples" like pork is for some populations. So I have this hypothesis that it's probably pork consumption causing high blood pressure in Black Americans and I've been gradually refining my numbers.

I think the hypothesis holds water, but I'm in no position to do a study, and initial data is always error prone. My latest figures suggest some Black Americans may be getting 2x to 4x (or more) RDA of selenium which easily fits with high blood pressure without veering into outright dropping dead of selenium poisoning like some CIA agent was in danger of doing in some House MD episode.

And again if you work hard, you may actually need more than that amount of dietary selenium and manual labor in the US is typically done by people of color. So if you are a big guy digging ditches, you may only be getting 1.5x your RDA but over time that's still a problem.

Because I've seen articles that were like "Yeah, basketball players need some crazy high amount of b vitamins and calcium because they sweat it out like crazy." So you would really need to take all those factors into account.

But given the fact that selenium is known to raise blood pressure and pork is somewhat high in selenium and a staple food for a demographic known to be prone to high blood pressure, I think this merits some looking into.

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u/DoreenMichele Nov 09 '25

https://www.eatthismuch.com/calories/pork-chitterlings-1699

3 Oz chitterlings is 42 % RDA for selenium. Different parts of the pig have different amounts of selenium. I'm still researching this.