This isn’t splitting hairs. When you’re looking to get the most out of a diet, whether that’s better performance or fat loss, it’s worth making sure you’re picking from nutritional powerhouses. Choosing meat is already a step in the right direction, but we can delve deeper.
As much as I love some sizzling bacon fat, it’s not quite on the nutritional level of beef. It’s more of a luxury food. You can absolutely have it without shame, you just don’t want it comprising a huge portion of your diet. That’s because you are ultimately what your food eats.
What Nutrition You’re Getting From Pork
- Pigs only have one stomach, much like us. There’s no fancy digestion going on.
- They’ve also lost the ability to produce their own fat, through selective breeding
- Therefore the meat now resembles whatever they’ve been fed
- Which is often the cheapest option, corn, a vegetable oil with high amounts of Omega 6 fats
- Omega 6 is a big driver of inflammation, and can cause fat storage and insulin resistance. It often is the result of processing, exactly the case with corn oil. It’s also heat unstable and prone to oxidative damage.
- Processing itself can result in overeating, due to a lack of satiety signaling after eating.
Pork’s higher ratios of unstable Omega 6 fats makes it a poorer quality fat source, potentially driving up the Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio and contributing to systemic inflammation, which drags everything down. So it might need to be moderated, unless you’re able to find pork made from grass-fed sources.
The Nutrition In Beef
- As a ruminant animal, cows have four stomachs to the pig’s one
- This enables the cow to digest and blunt the harmful toxins, such as Omega 6, while keeping the good stuff.
- Bacteria in the cow’s stomach can ferment and convert incoming food to make its own fat and protein stores.
- This enables the cow to build up great ratios of saturated and monounsaturated fats, with less Omega 6.
- Eating saturated fat causes your fat cells to send out appetite-suppressing signals, while Omega 6 doesn’t have any effect on satiety.
- Beef itself is also an all-in-one package that checks off all your nutritional requirements, such as B12 and zinc.
Wrapping Up – Beef Beats Pork
There’s always going to a place for a slice of bacon in a carnivore fry-up, but if you make it the main source of meat in a diet, you might start seeing drawbacks. One of the major benefits you’d expect on a carnivore diet, is the reduced inflammation and digestive distress brought on in the plant package. Since pork meat still includes the likes of corn, you’re still essentially getting a dose of seed oil. You’re probably going to be absolutely fine while moderating pork intake, just don’t go crazy with it.
Hey, I’m Sama, a natural bodybuilder who’s bought into the perks of keto and intermittent fasting. Why? When combined, the boosting effect on mental energy is unrivalled on any other diet. And the fat loss isn’t bad either.
I’ve got a ton of recipes, guides and insights covering both diets, and you check them all out on my blog.
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