pork fat and solidity at room temperature

Steffi

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Hi!

I have read the bad opinion Ray has about industrial pork fat - and it makes sense. What I wonder though: All the pork fat I have seen is very solid at room temperature, just like coconut and butter fat.
The rule is that harder fats are healthier because more saturated.

So why is pork fat bad even if it is solid at room temp?
 

johns74

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Look at the nutrition labels and see the percentage of PUFAs. I think it could have enough PUFA to do harm but not enough to make it liquid at room temperature.
 

tara

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I sometimes find beef fat that is liquid at lower temperatures than chicken fat, too, so I assume it's high PUFA (from knuckles, tail, etc).

I don't think nutrition labels are based on the specific instance of the food they are slapped on. I think there are tables based on measurements of samples of ingredients, and these table are consulted to create nutrition labels. Specific instances can vary quite a lot around those values. This applies to pork, chicken, beef and mutton fat, which can depend on the conditions they live in (diet and temperature). It can also apply to minerals, vitamins and sugars etc in fruit and vegetables, also depending on the conditions they are grown, ripened and stored in.
 

barbwirehouse

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Lard is 39% saturated, 45% monounsaturated and 11% PUFA.

11% is pretty high when compared to other choices: butter (4%), coconut oil (2%), tallow (4%), macadamia oil (very low), sheep/lamb fat (probably similar to tallow).

Olive oil is also ...moderately high (11%) in pufa which is why Peat says to only eat small amounts. Olive oil's Vitamin E and Vitamin K helps to offset the small amount of PUFA though.

In general, lard is similar to tallow in its composition.[3] Pigs that have been fed different diets will have lard with a significantly different fatty acid content and iodine value. Peanut-fed hogs or the acorn-fed pigs raised for Jamón ibérico therefore produce a somewhat different kind of lard compared to pigs raised in North American farms that are fed corn

In general, I prefer beef over pork due to it being a ruminant and honestly, it tastes better.
 

SQu

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I just looked up macadamia nuts and found 1.2g per 100g of nuts and 5g per 100 ml oil or 1g per tablespoon. Less than olive oil? I wasn't expecting that.
 

tara

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barbwirehouse said:
Lard is 39% saturated, 45% monounsaturated and 11% PUFA.

11% is pretty high when compared to other choices: butter (4%), coconut oil (2%), tallow (4%), macadamia oil (very low), sheep/lamb fat (probably similar to tallow).

Olive oil is also ...moderately high (11%) in pufa which is why Peat says to only eat small amounts. Olive oil's Vitamin E and Vitamin K helps to offset the small amount of PUFA though.

In general, lard is similar to tallow in its composition.[3] Pigs that have been fed different diets will have lard with a significantly different fatty acid content and iodine value. Peanut-fed hogs or the acorn-fed pigs raised for Jamón ibérico therefore produce a somewhat different kind of lard compared to pigs raised in North American farms that are fed corn

In general, I prefer beef over pork due to it being a ruminant and honestly, it tastes better.

As the quote (from who? Peat?) says, the PUFA/MUFA/SFA proportions of lard vary according to what fats the pig eat. Also, low temps can produce more PUFA in superficial areas in multiple species. I don't think you can't count on a single specification applying to all pig fat.
 

barbwirehouse

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tara said:
As the quote (from who? Peat?) says, the PUFA/MUFA/SFA proportions of lard vary according to what fats the pig eat. Also, low temps can produce more PUFA in superficial areas in multiple species. I don't think you can't count on a single specification applying to all pig fat.

From wikipedia lol
Even if pork fat lipid profile does change from pig to pig, I still prefer beef or lamb fat over pork any day. IMO: It tastes better, I can get it and store it just as easily and confirmed 100% grass-fed.

Or I can buy cheaper lard, usually grain-fed or finished, of an animal that doesn't chew the cud.

And the pig, though it has a divided hoof, does not chew the cud; it is unclean for you.

No matter how you think about it, pigs are a rather dirty animal. They are considered the scavengers of the farm (created to eliminate any waste on the farm), often eating anything they can find. This includes not only bugs, insects, and whatever leftover scraps they find laying around, but also their own feces, as well as the dead carcasses of sick animals, including their own young.
A pig digests whatever it eats rather quickly, in up to about four hours. On the other hand a cow takes a good twenty-four hours to digest what it’s eaten. During the digestive process, animals (including humans) get rid of excess toxins as well as other components of the food eaten that could be dangerous to health.

Since the pig’s digestive system operates rather basically, many of these toxins remain in their system to be stored in their more than adequate fatty tissues ready for our consumption.

Another issue with the pig is that it doesn’t have any sweat glands. Sweat glands are a tool the body uses to be rid of toxins. This leaves more toxins in the pig’s body.

http://draxe.com/why-you-should-avoid-pork/

If you subscribe to the whole o3:eek:6 thingo and think that you should have a 1:1-1:4 o3/o6 ratio, beef is a better choice over pork again. 1:2 ratio in beef and 1:10 in pork, ouch. But that's "average of retail cuts" which could include a lot of grain-fed stuff.

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Here's a study on lipid profile of pork cuts. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?pid ... ci_arttext

First with commerical pigs - 13-18% PUFA across cuts
Then with laboratory pigs - 24-34% PUFA across cuts (MORE)
Then with wild pigs - 32% PUFA

Laboratory animals are fed a more balanced, and usually more varied, spectrum of foods, whereas animals under intensive stock-farming are given high carbohydrate and possibly high fat diets. This diet may pro vide more saturated fat, which is less inclined to go rancid and thus has a longer shelf life. Moreover, excess carbohydrate has a tendency for con version to saturated fat by the animal's liver. This surplus fat is stored around abdominal organs, subcutaneously and as adipose tissue that in filtrates muscle fibres (marbling).

The fatty acid profiles reported above indicate that domesticated pig meat is not naturally high in saturates. The high levels, found by us and others,19 are a consequence of the intensive stock-farming practices used to accelerate animal growth to slaughter-weight. The trend is paralleled by lower proportions of polyunsaturates.

Article on pork pufa levels

And pork can be a major source of omega-6 fats. Nutritiondata.com lists the omega-6 fraction of lard at 11%. But the omega-6 fraction can be highly variable, depending on the pig’s diet. Chris Masterjohn recently reported that the lard used in the “high-fat” research diet was 32% polyunsaturated, nearly all of it omega-6:

So the omega-6 content can cover a 10-fold range, 3% to 32%, with the highest omega-6 content in corn- and wheat-fed pigs who have been caged for fattening. Corn oil and wheat germ oil are 90% PUFA, and caging prevents exercise and thus inhibits the disposal of excess PUFA. Caging is a common practice in industrial food production; here is a picture of sows in gestation crates:

How much omega-6 are people actually getting from pork? In the Bridges database, the range in pork consumption across countries was 2 to 80 kg/yr, or 5 to 200 g/day. If this is from industrially raised pigs whose fat is 30% omega-6, then this works out to 0.25% to 10% of energy as omega-6 fats from pork. In most countries, pork is either the primary source of omega-6 fats or the second source after vegetable oils.

http://perfecthealthdiet.com/2012/02/th ... rk-part-2/

Second biggest source of PUFAs after vegetable oil! Wow!
 

tara

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Hi barbwirehouse,
I didn't mean to imply that I favour eating lots of pork - I used to, but have largely stopped since reading Peat (and RBTI). I take it seriously as an unnecessary PUFA load.
I eat quite a bit of beef and mutton, because I like the taste, I usually feel good after eating it, I'm having trouble with milk, and as Peat has pointed out, the rumens can help convert a significant part of ruminants' feed into SFA.
My point was more to take standard pork nutrient tables with a grain of salt; as your subsequent post points out, PUFA may be significantly higher than the standard tables suggest. Interesting that wild pigs had higher PUFA than commercial ones.
But also, that beef and mutton fat can sometimes be higher PUFA than the standard tables suggest too, for instance when they have lived in cold conditions.

The argument about pigs' accumulation of toxins could as well be applied to shellfish. Possibly that has something to do with why people of the Book traditionally stuck with ruminants and scaly fish. Personally, I'm currently going with Peat's view that oysters and other shellfish provide valuable minerals (and I like the taste of them).
 

tara

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Surprised that the table doesn't show more difference in PUFA proportion of calories between chicken with and without skin. I had thought removing the skin reduced the PUFA more significantly. I don't eat chicken often, but my kids like drumsticks, so I cook them occasionally, with skin.
 

barbwirehouse

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tara said:
Hi barbwirehouse,
I didn't mean to imply that I favour eating lots of pork - I used to, but have largely stopped since reading Peat (and RBTI). I take it seriously as an unnecessary PUFA load.
I eat quite a bit of beef and mutton, because I like the taste, I usually feel good after eating it, I'm having trouble with milk, and as Peat has pointed out, the rumens can help convert a significant part of ruminants' feed into SFA.
My point was more to take standard pork nutrient tables with a grain of salt; as your subsequent post points out, PUFA may be significantly higher than the standard tables suggest. Interesting that wild pigs had higher PUFA than commercial ones.
But also, that beef and mutton fat can sometimes be higher PUFA than the standard tables suggest too, for instance when they have lived in cold conditions.

The argument about pigs' accumulation of toxins could as well be applied to shellfish. Possibly that has something to do with why people of the Book traditionally stuck with ruminants and scaly fish. Personally, I'm currently going with Peat's view that oysters and other shellfish provide valuable minerals (and I like the taste of them).

Yea pork does seem to have some PUFA but not that bad if you're just eating a small amount.

Oysters are way too nutritious to give up... just get them from a clean source and you're all good.
 
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I think room temperature allows even highly unsaturated animal fats to stay more or less solid. Some of them even have some nerve or cartilage tissue that seems to help that. I've seen duck salami (70% unsaturated) which looks no different from normal salami.
 

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