Recently, I saw a reporter ask the question, “Can you eat bacon and still be healthy?” If you’ve read anything I’ve been writing over the past 3 years, you’ll realize that my answer is a resounding YES! As a certified nutritionist who believes in following the wisdom of the ancients and traditional eating when it comes to eating food, I whole-heartedly believe in the virtues of eating bacon and all pork products. Why? Because it works! The American establishment of processed foods has rewritten history books and health to suit their own pursuits. Let me explain.
We are told to eat a Mediterranean diet to be healthy, right? Well guess what they eat in the Mediterranean? Pork! Go to any traditional Italian home and you will find plenty of pork on the menu. In fact, northern Italy celebrates a lardo festival every fall where producers or lardo — the fattiest and tastiest bacon around — show up to share what they have been making all year.
The French? Oh yes, they eat loads of pork fat, dairy and other foods that we here in the states are taught to fear. Do you really think it’s a glass of wine that’s bringing it all together? No! It’s the entire diet. Including the bacon/pork fat. In fact, when I lived in France some 20 years ago before they heard that pork was supposed to be bad for you, I remember my elderly neighbor coming over to the house one day telling me and my roommates about how healthy and LIGHT pork fat was. In my arrogant American 18 year old mind, I looked at her like she was insane. Pork? Light? Well, it turns out when you don’t wrap it in a bleached white flour bun of sorts, it’s really light. It’s also the perfect non-stick surface. Do you realize how much teflon (which is a neurotoxin) has been sold to avoid nature’s perfect non-stick solution???? Pork fat also doesn’t absorb very readily into fried foods. Try frying a batch of chicken in it. Then do the same with vegetable oil (another poison) and you’ll see that you constantly need to replenish vegetable oil, whereas a good dollop of lard will last for the entire batch!
I was just in Berlin where everybody eats a diet of pork breaded and fried in lard! And you know what? People are way slimmer there than they are here. But on the whole they are also thinner than people in Spain, Southern France and Italy — where I’ve also recently been. They also don’t seem to age as poorly.
The Japanese. Again, pork fat. In fact, a Japanese family that used to live near me in Princeton kept asking me where they could get nice fresh lard like I source from my farmers in Pennsylvania. Sure they eat fish and miso, but pork fat is equally prominent (at least until they read American politically correct books that shame them into rewriting their own culinary history).
In Chinese medicine, pork is revered as the perfect balancing food. Right in between yin and yang. Bacon is a much revered delicacy that is used in many Schezuan dishes and even in a wedding dessert! Bacon and pork fat are used to ease constipation — not fiber (but this is another story. Let’s just say, doesn’t it make sense to promote a bowel movement by easing it out than pushing it out by force????).
I could go on and on from my own personal experiences with pork and healing people’s bodies or reducing their weight, but that could be an entire book.
So not only is it possible to eat pork and be healthy. I’d say that pork is darn near necessary to maintain excellent health. Sometimes I laugh when so-called health enthusiasts make themselves literally sick and allergic to multiple foods by avoiding real foods like pork in favor of synthetic taste alike which do nothing but damage their guts and put big money into the hands of food processing companies. In the meantime, I who used to be highly allergic and sick since early childhood, healed myself with pork (including loads of bacon) and other REAL FOODS. Let’s face it, if what you’re doing to be healthy isn’t making you healthy, you’ve got to try the opposite of what you believe in — even if it’s as off the wall as eating bacon.
