Pork and Omega-3

Filed in archive Food for Thought , News on April 8, 2006

More fat in pork, the better? Omega-3 concentrated in pork fat? Omega-3 fatty acids have been linked to a lower incidence of heart disease and found in abundance in oily fish such as tuna, now apparently in pigs. For a while I got disoriented especially after reading that this has nothing to do with the genetically modified pigs that have recently been in the papers and on blogs.

The report refers to naturally grown pigs, fed with omega-3 rich flax and a secret blend of vitamins and minerals, their meat later sold as pork roasts, ribs, chops and bacon by Prairie Orchard Farms in Manitoba, Canada. From their website:

Hogs in our Omega-3 program are fed a stringent diet enriched with vitamins and organic minerals, supplemented with a plant-source of essential fatty acids. We chose these ingredients for two reasons: they improve the flavour and texture of the meat and they are rich in alpha-linoleic acid, an essential Omega-3 fatty acid shown to have beneficial effects on human health. Prairie Orchard Farms is currently the only federally certified Omega-3 enhanced pork.

I am not a regular pork eater but this definitely makes much more sense than GMO pigs. Pork products per se are not what I'd encourage people to eat everyday but if I had to choose between animals that had their genes tinkered with and those grown traditionally, I'd rather have the latter. Make no mistake, I am not against GMO as a technology for it has other useful purposes such as in environmental clean-up but I'd rather not ingest it. Who knows how that reacts with human metabolism?

For more details, check out the Reuters report Canadian company sells pork containing omega-3 and the Prairie Orchard Farms website.