Praise the Lard : Good News About Lard

Lard has gotten a bad rap. Nowadays the nutritionally conscious will recoil in horror from a dollop of lard as they would from sin itself and then blithely turn and add butter that, truth to tell, isn’t a bit better and may even be a lot worse. Here’s why.

The story starts with one simple and unfortunate fact. Americans generally get too many of their calories from fats--fats of all varieties. At the start of this century--supposedly the bad old days of nutrition--Americans got about 32% of their calories from fats. Today, in the supposed age of enlightenment, that figure is up to 37%! In 1990, Americans ate an average of 63 pounds of fats each--up 10 pounds over 1970. Hence the single recommendation of just about every authority: Eat less fat.

That’s not the same as eliminating fat, not that anyone really could. Fats provide oils the body needs but doesn’t make on its own. But you can--and should--try to reduce your intake of saturated fats because your body does make all of them that you need. (Saturated fatty oils generally come from animals. You can tell them because they are thick when chilled.) So eat less saturated fats and more unsaturated fats. But you’ve heard this before.

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Lard is an animal fat associated with the pig and it’s been around a long time, so it gets shoved into the “bad fat” group along with oils such as coconut and palm. It’s not yellow and sweet like good butter, so it seems to come out first on everybody’s fat hit list.

But in reality, butter is higher in the bad saturated fats than lard. According to Dr. Jacob Exler of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service Human Nutritional Information Service, butter has about 50% saturated fat while lard has only 39%. Butter is twice as high in cholesterol. Lard is higher in calcium, a good mineral. And, he points out, the butter we generally mean when we reach for the spreader is salted, which means that butter is noticeably higher in sodium than lard.

Butter does have more Vitamin E and also is slightly lower in calories--chiefly because the standard stick of butter is 60% moisture.

Much the same is also true of other rendered fats. Duck and goose fat are only marginally higher in cholesterol than lard (but still well under half as much as butter) and rendered chicken fat is even lower than lard.

Of course, remember Rule No. 1: Eat less fat. But if you have your fat intake under control, when you yearn for the texture and taste that only lard can deliver, it’s OK to indulge. In moderation.