ottawa foodies

is pork considered red or white meat? i thought it was white meat, though obviously not the same as poultry. i'm curious after reading that bacon & hot dogs will cause diabetes, and then in the article the facts state that:

Eating 50 grams of processed red meat every day increased a person's diabetes risk by 51 per cent, while eating 100 grams of unprocessed red meat each day, about the size of a deck of cards, boosted the risk by 19 per cent.

www.ottawacitizen.com

Wouldn't be surprised if "the other other white meat" slogan is another another advertising lie.

Well, it's content of heme iron is (much) closer to chicken than beef.

www.mckinley.illinois.edu

(don't be mislead by the high iron content of kidney beans and lentils, in this form, bound to plant proteins, it's not highly absorbable. From red meat, it is.)

Excess iron is correlated with diabetes. There are many papers establishing this. Here is one:

diabetes.diabetesjournals.org

Iron is required for growth, but past age 20, men generally have no way of getting rid of excess iron. And iron is highly reactive.

Tidbits:

People with iron overload have shortened lifespans. A study in Norway found men who had donated blood within the last two years, had a 60% lower all cause mortality. Also a lot of habits that are beneficial to men's health risks also cause some iron loss.

I'd say pork is "pink meat"

I think "red meat" vs "white meat" is not very useful as a dietary guideline. Which is healthier? Grilled elk steak (clearly red meat) or chicken wings (clearly white meat)? Between eating equal quantities of pork tenderloin and of bacon, there are huge differences too.

As for those medical studies Francis :

- The one on diabetes is about a specific subgroup of people with diabetes, "patients who have type 2 diabetes with increased serum ferritin concentrations", they are not really saying that excessive iron causes diabetes in randomly selected individuals. Intriguing study though, I didn't know there were still people advocating bloodletting as a treatment (at least, they are not using it for anemia anymore...)

- Many medical conditions will prevent you from donating blood. You are also likely to be prevented from donating blood if you are taking medication. So I find it not surprising at all that people who had recently donated blood were in better health than those who didn't. People who are in good health are more likely to donate blood... As is often the case, correlation does not equal cause and effect.

thanks all. i really have no idea how pork fits into that scale and googling didn't answer my question either. maybe it should really be how much fat is in the meat?

yessi - i always love your added commentary! :)

@isabelle,

Well there are many more . . . hundreds in fact, and you don't have to dig far to find them.

www.clinchem.org

"Our findings support the hypothesis that decreased iron storage through blood donation leads to increased insulin sensitivity, even in healthy individuals. Although those blood donors may be more health-conscious, in this study they were carefully matched for metabolic and cardiovascular risk factors with nondonors."

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

aje.oxfordjournals.org

journals.tums.ac.ir

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Pop-Sci articles for those prefer:

On heart attack risk: www.sciencedaily.com

And here is that Finnish study (heart attack, not diabetes - however both heart attack and diabetes are part of the "metabolic syndrome" bundle)

aje.oxfordjournals.org

They specifically address the issue you mention:

"The present study confirms our preliminary finding
of an association between blood donations and a reduced
risk of acute myocardial infarction (27). The
association is strong and statistically significant in
spite of the small number of blood donors in the study
cohort. The association weakened but remained significant
after statistical adjustment for the major risk
factors for coronary disease as well as all other risk
factors that were predictive in our study cohort. Because
blood donors were generally more health conscious
and more healthy than those who had not
donated blood, we carried out thorough data analyses
in order to estimate the magnitude of this self-selection
bias. A part of the observed association was explained
by the confounding, but the residual association was
still strong. On the basis of our data, we do not believe
that confounding could have introduced the observed
association."

wow, that's a whole bunch of information!

As for the 'red or white' question, my thought is I think it would depend on where the pork came from, or rather how it was raised.

Factory raised pork is generally 'white' because of how it's raised: Indoors, no soil, no plants, no sunlight, etc, etc., so the pigs tend to be anemic and are given iron shots to survive. Would stand to reason that the meat would be 'anemic' or low in iron as well, thus looking more pale.

People raising pigs the old fashioned way (outdoors in forest or on pasture) will provide a much darker meat. Breed factors into this a bit of course, but exercise and diet much more, in my opinion, as I've had the pleasure of eating many varieties of pig that were all raised outdoors, and all their meat was far darker than store pork.

I also noticed in the first comment by HFF, the quote mentions 'processed' red meat. To me, that's a big factor. Processed how? With what? It may not be the meat that's the issue, but the processing.

However, I did no google searching for this, so have no articles or studies to back up any of these ideas and opinions I have. ;-)

The most obvious thing about red meat is it's red. It's red because of blood. Blood contains heme iron, which is iron in it's most readily absorbed form.
(I wonder if kosher and halal meat are healthier, as they bleed the animals before slaughter?)

Giving blood is pretty safe. (1) they test your iron before they take your blood, and if your're too low they won't take it. (2) lots of pre-menopausal women donate blood and if it's safe for them it has to be safe for men, who by contrast have a lot of excess iron. (3) A unit of blood saves three lives. (4) You get a mini-checkup every time you donate.

There is another thing I've noticed, just anecdotally. (No research to back this up.) I rarely see bald men donating blood. The older men will have white hair, but they usually have a full head of it. Perhaps it's just a coincidence.

Here is a blog post that discusses the article as well as a PDF link to the full study to make conclusions yourself.

www.marksdailyapple.com

organicgirl - thanks! my take away from this discussion is that if your pork isn't pink, don't eat it ;-)

thinking of organicgirl's proposal and the pork is "the other white meat" slogan, my guess is it started with factory farmer's as a way to get people to eat their poor, anemic pigs.

note: that is purely my own theory with no scientific study or research, based entirely on the discussion in this thread.

Pork gets a lot darker with age of the animal too. You could really see this in the old sows at work - mother pigs who were breeders. The older they were, the darker the meat. Sometimes close to as dark as beef.

A lot of the pork was pretty dark there in fact, but I cannot believe the animals were roaming free. I am quite certain it is standard factory pork so not sure why it was always so dark.

@primalfood,

I see from your link, and the attached pdf (thank you), they have pooled data from the physicians health study and the nurses health study. The nurses are mainly, though not exclusively female, and the opposite is true of the physicians. Note: the study sample group had nearly five times as many female nurses as male physicians (actually, from the numbers given below, 22% were male).

Since the "iron hypothesis" effect mainly happens with males (who are usually iron overloaded), but mainly not with females (who are not iron overloaded and sometimes anemic) the design of this study dilutes the strength of the association between red meat consumption and Type 2 diabetes. However the association between red meat consumption and diabetes is still there, even with the dilution, and it's statistically significant.

----------------------------------

Quoting:

Design: We followed 37,083 men in the Health Professionals FollowUp Study (1986–2006), 79,570 women in the Nurses’ Health Study I
(1980–2008), and 87,504 women in the Nurses’ Health Study II
(1991–2005).

Conclusion: Our results suggest that red meat consumption, particularly processed red meat, is associated with an increased risk of
T2D. Am J Clin Nutr 2011;94:1–9

----------------------------------

p.s. from the above study and others I've posted the effect is very significant, comparable to the correlation between smoking and lung cancer by way of comparison. If this discussion saves one person from Type 2 diabetes, it will have been worthwhile.

pp.s. it is worthwhile to also consider, not only the iron content of foods, but iron absorption. For example, Vitamin C increases iron aborption. So if you eat liver and drink orange juice at the same sitting, you will absorb much more iron than if you did each separately.

@zym,

Since you worked as a butcher, is meat from male pigs, and male cows darker than meat from their female counterparts? For the same reasons as for other mammals, the males should be retaining more iron in their bodies.

@Francis

I hate to point this out since you have already travelled so far down this road, but meat colour has *nothing whatsoever* to do with the presence of blood. The classification of the "colour" of a meat is based on the concentration of mygolobin (a protein) in said meat. Myoglobin *is* structurally similar to haemoglobin (the protein that transports oxygen in your circulatory system), and it does contain iron. While muscles are supplied with oxygen, nutrients etc. from blood, blood doesn't tend to leave the circulatory system (unless something has gone very wrong) and your muscles aren't bathed in blood. As for myglobin, I think its role in the body is still a bit of a mystery. Maybe it exists to give us diabetes? You seem to be well and truly on top of that question with your copious googling.

In sum, if you are a cow, your muscles have a lot of myglobin and your meat is red. If you are a chicken, not so much. Interestingly, if you are a pig or a veal calf (young animals have less myoglobin in their muscles as Zymurgist pointed out) you have an intermediate amount of myglobin in your muscles, so I suppose those would be pink meats.

Francis - there are very few male pigs (boars) in the industry, but we usually had 1 a week or so (and kept it separate). Did not notice any difference in colour. For beef we never kept males and females separate and never really knew the difference so I cannot say.

@urban,

Well weather it's haemoglobin or myoglobin after it leaves the circulatory system isn't important. It's the iron, in excess, that is the problem. Of course we need iron for growth and simply to live, such as for oxygen transport. But just because some iron is essential doesn't mean lots of iron isn't dangerous, or that iron in myglobin is there to give us diabetes. Perhaps the body doesn't have good mechanisms for getting rid of excess iron because throughout most of our evolution we mainly had the opposite problem - getting enough. Meat was not as readily available as now and most humans, like most mammals, carried a load of internal parasites, like hookworms, that cause bleeding and iron loss.

But I can see I'm not convincing anyone, so rather than expose myself to further ridicule, I will bow out and leave all to enjoy their red meats in peace.

Iron also helps with energy levels. If you are an athlete,exercise regulularily have a physically demanding job the iron from red meat is great and does not build up in the blood. I tried cutting back on meats had a hard time at work. Blood tests revealed a drop in iron levels.

Completely different tangent now . . . :-)

en.wikipedia.org

Why would processed meats be as bad as red meats? Pork normally has an iron content similar to chicken. But from the myoglobin wiki above:

"If meat has been exposed to nitrites, it will remain pink because the iron atom is bound to NO, nitric oxide (true of, e.g., corned beef or cured hams)."

So processing meats with nitrites involves changes to the iron binding in the meat, perhaps making the iron more readily absorbed. I'll have to dig into that and see . . .

Re: nitrites

Low levels of nitrites in meat reduce iron absorption, but high levels increase it.

jn.nutrition.org

"The efficiency of converting meat iron to hemoglobin iron tended to increase at sodium nitrite levels above 50 ppm."

There might be another reason to keep your iron almost too low, rather than too high. Your body will tell you immediately if it's too low, but won't warn you at all if it's too high.

Usually when I give blood I'm tired that night, and maybe the next day (I still bike to work though), and then I'm back to normal. But earlier this year I felt kind of run down going on a week after donating. So I had a steak at the Clock Tower, and the next day I was 100% back to normal. I haven't needed to do it again and I've given blood twice since. But when you are too high, short of a blood test, you will not know it.

www.ctv.ca