Eating Meat Consciously for Heart Health and Weight Control

I've been meaning to write about this for a while, and since I noticed that Canadian Beef is offering to pay the entry fee to Eat, Write, Retreat in Washington this coming May on behalf of a certain number of food bloggers who write about beef, I thought I'd take the bull by the horns (or, more likely, by the short ribs) and write something about the food reflections I've been having over this past year.

You see, I now weigh just about 40 pounds less than my top-recorded weight, 30 of which have come off over the past year (while I was cooking 100 pots of jam, attending numerous wine tastings and eating out at a lot of restaurants!) I've also reduced my LDL ("bad") cholesterol by about 15%. The big secret? I started to see a nutritionist regularly, and to really pay attention to the nutritional value of whatever I put in my mouth. I certainly haven't stopped eating fatty meats, baked treats and sugary sweets, but I have been paying a lot more attention to the proportion of them in my diet.

I would have said I knew quite a lot about nutrition, but I have been finding there's more to know, and it can get complicated. In order to make it easier, besides teaching me more about things like glycemic index, the risks of skipping meals, and the roles of calcium and fibre in lowering cholesterol, the wonderful Julia pointed me to a very useful chart at BeefInfo.org (which is coincidentally the site of Canadian Beef). It gives the nutrition breakdown for 100-gram portions of numerous beef cuts. The really salient ones for me are fat content and calorie count.

The page lets you check from among a wide number of choices, but you can only display four nutrition labels at a time. The interface does, however, allow you to toggle between raw and cooked nutrition figures; it's amazing how many calories some cuts gain in the pan! On another page, there's also a handy comparison of beef with chicken and fish.

Pork Marketing Canada's site, PutPorkOnYourFork.com, has a similar chart showing the nutritional value of various 100-gram pork cuts, which is handy to compare with the beef information. It's all available at a glance, but doesn't give raw versus cooked figures.

The Canadian Sheep Federation's site, FreshCanadianLamb.ca, doesn't package their data so neatly, but does post clickable nutrition labelling of 100-gram lamb cuts as PDFs.

The Chicken Farmers of Canada's newly revamped Chicken.ca offers lots of recipes and quite a wealth of health information, but – unless it's so hard to find that I actually couldn't spot it – they don't seem to have the same type of basic nutrition facts for chicken cuts. (There is a comparison of white and dark meat, but you have to do some arithmatic to match the 100-gram figures on the other sites.)

In these days of nose-to-tail eating, it's too bad that none of these sites even mentions liver, let alone any of the more obscure parts of the various beasts under discussion.

As I enjoy the wafting aroma of two slabs of pork belly roasting themselves into bacon that I'll be sampling for dinner tonight as part of my Charcutepalooza February challenge, it seems like a good moment to share some of the nutritional information that can be learned from these sites. You'll notice that, whereas chicken is generally a good choice, there's quite a difference between white and dark meat. Meanwhile, although you may have thought of beef and pork as fatty meats, some of the leaner cuts, grilled or roasted, come in at 5 to 6 grams of fat or less per serving, which is pretty good.

The luxurious cuts like tenderloin are generally pretty lean. The big red flag goes up for ground meats, though; even the leaner ones are high in fat, and when you're cooking it into chili or spaghetti sauce it's very hard to control how much fat you're getting (unless you chill it for serving the next day, when much of the fat will rise to the surface and can be lifted off).

Fat and Calorie Content of Various Meats

The sites above give these figures for a standard 100-gram serving (roughly the size of the palm of your hand), cooked as lean as possible. Please be sure to double-check the numbers I give here against the sites mentioned above in case I've introduced an error in retyping them!

Beef

• Eye of round: 2.8 g of fat, 204 calories
• Sirloin tip: 5.1 g of fat, 209 calories
• Top sirloin roast: 5.9 g of fat, 178 calories
• Rib: 10.9 g of fat, 244 calories
• T-bone steak: 12.3 g of fat, 247 calories
• Medium ground beef: 15.1 g of fat, 257 calories

Chicken

• White meat: Skinless chicken breast (raw?): 2.3 g of fat, 148 calories (my calculation; the CFC gives figures for a 130 g serving)
• Dark meat: Baked or grilled leg: 5.4 g of fat, ??? calories

Lamb

• Whole leg of lamb: 3.5 g fat, 120 calories
• Ground lamb: 17 g of fat, 230 calories

Pork

• Roasted pork tenderloin: 2.5 g of fat, 144 calories
• Lean deli ham: 2.9 g of fat, 110 calories
• Grilled centre loin chop: 3.8 g of fat, 174 calories
• Lean roasted ham: 5.4 g of fat, 125 calories
• Pan-fried back bacon: 16 g of fat, 182 calories
• Medium ground pork, pan fried: 22 g of fat, 299 calories
• Roasted back ribs: 27 g of fat, 365 calories

Unfortunately, making good food choices is not as simple as reading a nutrition comparison chart. One must remember, for instance, that fat content is not the only determining criterion; fresh meat is generally better for you than meat preserved by any method (sadly, including charcuterie). The fats in fish are "healthy" fats, so a higher fat content can actually be desirable if the calorie count's not too high.

However, it's also useful to bear in mind that so far the naturally occurring trans fats found in meats and dairy products have not been shown to have the same bad effects on heart health as synthetic commercial trans fats. So as I work my way through the Charcutepalooza Year of Meat, I will continue to indulge in everything I salt, smoke and cure. I just won't be having it at every meal.