Many moons ago — well, one moon ago, anyway — if you wanted a healthful, low-calorie meal, you’d order some sushi and a Diet Coke, then sit down to eat it with your pudgy friend.

Now that’s a recipe for an early, plus-size grave.

The tuna sushi is a mound of mercury, the no-cal Coke is priming you for a heart attack, and your pudgy pal’s flab is plotting its leap to your love handles. Or so it seems, if you’re taking the latest health warnings and headlines a little too much to heart (and stomach).

Don’t. Even at the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which issued the sushi warning last week, officials fear the public may be overreacting. “We aren’t really trying to discourage people from eating fish,” a spokeswoman for the department, Sara Markt, said. “Fish is important.”

The department just wanted to warn pregnant, almost pregnant, and breastfeeding women about the high mercury levels in some fish, particularly sushi-grade tuna, because too much mercury can damage a developing neurological system, Ms. Markt said. That’s why children under age 6 shouldn’t eat too much tuna, either — or swordfish, shark, tile fish, or king mackerel, the fish with the highest mercury counts. To find out which fish are safe in what amounts, just go to gotmercury.org and plug your weight into the “mercury calculator.” It’s so easy, an eel could do it. It also shows you that unless you’re scarfing down more seafood than Shamu, you’re probably safe.

So relax. Even though last week was also filled with warnings that diet soda drinkers are 48% more likely to have conditions that lead to heart disease, and that simply having fat friends is likely to make you fatter, too, the point is: One hundred percent of people who eat only whole-grain spelt dogs on barley bagels are going to die, too. (And will anyone miss them? No.)

Happily, the sushi restaurants yesterday were filled with just such fatalists.

“I’m not afraid of sushi,” a risk management model maker, Trever Evans, declared as he ordered just that at Shinjuku II on Church Street.

Still, Mr. Evans admitted, he was afraid at first. “I grew up in Kansas, and nobody really knew what sushi was,” he said. Then he moved to apparently super-wild Tulsa, Okla., where some friends dared him to try it.

“I was as scared as you could be to eat anything raw, let alone fish,” he said. “But after a six-pack, I decided to try a couple pieces of tuna.” Now? He’s a Nobu guy.

A Manhattanite who works in justice reform, Megan Golden, also met the fish of her dreams in a sushi joint. “I’m always just an adventurous eater,” she said, listing memorable meals of duck heart (“not bad”) and turtle (“pretty good, but bony”). She was eating a sushi lunch yesterday, too.

For his part, newspaper vendor Omar El Sadany still remembers moving to New York from Egypt in 1981 and instantly falling for Japanese cuisine. But this was not his first experience with raw food. Back in Alexandria, he said, “They take the fish out of the Red Sea and just cut it when it’s alive and you eat it with lemon,” he said. Same thing with snake: “When you cut it and peel it, it is melting in your mouth! It’s warm, it’s delicious.”

It’s … the sushi of the Middle East, I guess, and if we moved there, we’d probably be ordering snake platters with diet mint tea for lunch.

And then the health department would tell us not to.

And then we’d do it anyway, because it beats a barley bagel.