Comparison of fat from Fire in a Bottle's pork versus store-bought pork


(Bob M) #1

Fire in a Bottle is selling pork that is designed to be low PUFA. I cooked some ground pork, drained, and this is what I got:

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With infrared thermometer:

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Note that the bottle is upside down, and the “liquid” (fat) is completely solid at 74.4F

Compare with the same test (cooked ground pork and drained) but with store-bought pork:

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That “white” stuff on top was still NOT solid at 73.5F. It was still goopy. We live on a well, so I have to throw oil into a container. When I did this, the (still soft) white stuff came off, leading to gelatinous yellowish liquid that “glooped” out. Was this oil? Or some combination of oil and “water”?

Also, I compared his pork’s bacon with store-bought. His bacon’s fat is completely solid at room temperature. I had some store-bought bacon in the fridge, and the fat was NOT solid at fridge temp. EEK!

It is hard to say how much PUFA is involved, though, as it could also be MUFA.

But, after this test, I’m going to have a hard time buying pork from the store.


#2

Great tests and report Bob. I just cooked some lamb from the farmer down the hill. I take the baking dish out of the oven to allow it to cool. This tallow is solid at summer evening room temperature. I use it to cook eggs rather than bacon fat (lard). Will the keto bacon brigade come after us?


(Bob M) #3

That looks good. Do you pass it through a filter? Or just leave it like that?

My original plan was to use my sous vide, putting bottles of, say, tallow from suet, lard from store, the fat I got from his ground pork, and the fat from store-bought pork, into the sous vide. I’d then start at 80F and increase by 10F ever so often, until I found the melting point of the fat. Since saturated fat (I think) has a higher melting point, this could tell me how much saturated fat is in there.

But when I saw the fat from the store-bought pork, I knew this would be a useless test.


#4

I hate store-bought lard as it has an awful taste. My lard comes from a very nice nearby farm.
Both aren’t solid at fridge temperature. I never saw lard that was solid at room temperature.


#5

found this interesting for sure

I was a hog farmer for a ton of years.
125 hogs in rotation for sales of sausage and meat products
That is all I ate. Now since closing the farm I do store bought.
While I can get meat from our friend Kevin who owns the custom slaughterhouse I just opted for easy buy from the store now.
But you got me thinking…hmm…huh

@FrankoBear, nope, no keto bacon brigade gonna get ya. that tallow is sweet and needs to be used :slight_smile: we all know that :wink:


(Bob M) #6

Well, I started looking into this for multiple reasons. One is that more evidence keeps coming out that PUFAs are bad. Another is that Siobhan Huggins did a test where she went from pork to beef, and her lipoprotein (a) (an LDL particle that’s supposedly atherogenic) went down by quite a bit (1/3). This implied high PUFA = higher Lp(a). Looking through my own records, I’ve seen higher and lower Lp(a), and never knew why.

Also, there was this article by Brad:

And I knew Brad (from Fire in a Bottle) was a pig farmer and was trying to raise pigs on a low PUFA diet. He began selling his low PUFA meat to people, so I bought two “shares”.

But when I made some of his ground pork and drained the fat, I was stunned. I cooked this in the early morning, drained the liquid into that glass jar, took a shower, came back, and the “liquid” was completely solid! Amazing.

And if you look at something like this:

See: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301246133_Differentiation_of_partial_acylglycerols_derived_from_different_animal_fats_by_EA-IRMS_and_GCMS_techniques
(Note: this study was comparing two different techniques for determining fatty acid content, MAG and DAG, but this is not critical.)

It makes you realize that lard (LD, from pork) and CF (chicken fat, usually called schmaltz) is high PUFA and MUFA. In this table, the “:0” are saturated fats; the “:1” are MUFAs; the “:2” are PUFAs. The SFA = saturated fatty acids; the USFA is unsaturated fatty acids (both MUFA and PUFA).

You can see how low SFAs are for lard (LD) and chicken fat (CF) as compared to beef fat (BF) and mutton fat (MF).

So, for Brad to feed pigs whatever he’s feeding them, and to get that solid fat, well, that’s amazing.


(Laurie) #7

I was buying thick-sliced bacon for about CAD 10 per kilogram. Some brands were better than others, but I always got about a cup of liquidy fat with some debris in it.

One time I bought a brand that was CAD 20 per kilo. It rendered about 1/2 cup of solid white fat with no debris.

Since my main reason for buying bacon is to have grease for cooking, I’m not sure what do do now. That’s some expensive bacon grease.


(Bob M) #8

That is true. I don’t think it has to be true, as I think Brad’s idea is to pass his techniques to others. But PUFAs do appear to make chickens and pork fatter, quicker. And, many times, these feeds can be cheaper, particularly in the US, where we have too much corn.

It will be a while (maybe never?) before these ideas can trickle down so normal folk can partake.

It wasn’t always this way, though. The grains used in Europe, for instance, are relatively inexpensive and have lower PUFA. I also read a study where they looked at diets of a certain island people (can’t remember which). They ate wild boar/pigs, and the pork fat was highly saturated. But they also looked at locally raised chickens, and the chicken fat was over 80% saturated!

It’s possible to get pork and chickens with higher saturated fat content, for not much if any more money. But we have to change farming practices and potentially feed manufacturers. Not sure whether that will happen.


#9

He feeds them barley.


#10

I just scrape it out as is to use. No filter.


(Bob M) #11

Where did you see that?


(Bob M) #12

So, I took the drained, store bought pork, then added the left-over bacon fat and fat from draining ground pork from Brad. The bacon fat is slightly softer, coming from the fridge. Both are hard, though.

I found doing this does seem to curb hunger.

Will try to do a sous vide test this weekend: (1) tallow from suet; (2) fat from ground pork from Brad; (3) store-bought lard; (4) Brad’s stearic acid. Will see what the (approximate) melting points are.


(Anthony) #13

Fantastic. I’m both excited and disappointed to hear the review. It all makes sense, not too different than the eagles and DDT. Simply concentrating the toxins—and passing them on to us, ruminants just naturally filter them out. So it’s not that beef is better for us, it’s that the pork and chicken is grade D meat barely fit for human consumption.


#14

Some podcast he was on fairly recently to talk about SCD1. He said he fattens them on barley instead of corn like they used to do in Europe. He talked about how the french used to not like American pork because the fat was so soft (from being corn fed instead of barley fed.) That’s pretty much all there is to it.


#15

Monogastrics concentrate bad fats in their diet, but they also concentrate the good stuff like vitamins. If you get properly fed monogastric fat and compare it to properly fed ruminant fat, the monogastrics will have much higher levels of the oil soluble vitamins like A, D, E and K2.

GIGO


(Bob M) #16

@SporkyDonkey I posted on Twitter and he said this was the first go, and he thought it could even be better with tweaking what the pigs eat. So, I think it’s more than barley (don’t they also need protein?), but since I’ve never raised pigs, I have no idea.

@Selllow I’ve thought for a while that “red meat” from ruminants is probably the healthiest meat. Grass fed if you can afford it. If not, the “regular” stuff is fine.

(Pork is sometimes considered to be “red meat”.)

To everyone, I do think that we COULD be perfectly healthy on chicken and pork, if they were fed the right feed.

I’ve been getting chickens from the farm, and they taste better than store-bought. But what about PUFA content? I asked the farmer what the chickens ate and got no response. So, I might have to render the fat from two chickens (one farm, one store-bought) and see if I can determine anything from that.


(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #17

@ctviggen


#18

I think that if and only if they are given the right feed, pork and especially poultry, can be even healthier than beef, and I’m a man who loves his beef.