Eating Pork: Safe or Not?

Here is a recent post by Paul over at Perfect Health Diet:

Pork: Did Leviticus 11:7 Have It Right?

While not a bad article, it did make me consider my pork, and even alcohol, consumption, but I did have some real problems with it.

First, it followed a trend I have been seeing a lot of the past few months in the paleo blogosphere of what I would say amount to almost fear-mongering. What is the real point of this article? To make all of those people who eat a good deal of pork freak out? I would think most people in this community don't eat too much pork as it is, but I suppose it always good to take another look at things.

If we take a look at some of the figures he has we can see some pork consumptions/yr/capita. While it does show the correlations between those who eat more pork than average and certain liver diseases, I found myself wondering how much of their total meat/calorie intake pork is. Let's just look at some of the higher ranked countries on the pork consumption list.

For Germany, which the table has as the highest pork consumption/yr/capita, they consume 46.2kg of pork per year. When we look to see how much meat they consume annually it comes in around 87.88 kg/ year, which means that 52.6% of the meat they consume is pork! The same is true for some of the other high pork eating countries (Austria=44%, Poland= 56.8%).

Now I don't think that I eat anywhere near that much pork as my meat. Now, his article did make me consider how much seafood/shellfish I am eating (In the comments someone mentions they are/were on Chris Kresser's 14 Healthiest Foods List) because he lists them at the top of his meat hierarchy. I would think most people following this lifestyle aren't eating that much pork, nor is it advocated. People do like their bacon every now then, and, let's be honest, who doesn't love some bacon!, but it is in no way a staple of my diet. I would say most of my meat is ruminant meat, with chicken at second.

So, I may not agree with the thought behind this post but I do think it helps to get you to think about what you're eating. While most of us are probably not eating sausage for breakfast, lunch and dinner like our lederhosen-clad brethren, it is probably all right to include it in your diet. When you feel like something different, because beef may be what's for dinner, but that gets boring every once in a while, so I think it's alright to include some pork!